July 2024
Hi everyone,
In early May, I travelled to the Phillipines for a variety shows and gigs. I started off in Manila, where I caught Miss Saigon (the second time I’d seen after Adelaide this year), before heading to Ilo Ilo (a provincial city on Panay Island), to accompany Seann Miley Moore, currently playing The Engineer in Miss Saigon, for a benefit concert launching Novy M Bereber’s new charity, Bereber Sayaw PD, raising awareness about Parkinson’s Disease in the Phillipines.
One of the days there was spent on an island cruise of Guimaras, celebrating the life of Novy’s husband, Ignatius Jones, alongside Novy, Iggy’s sister Monica Trapaga, and other dear friends immersed in an incredible feast on our boat, crystalline waters and exquisite beaches.
The following day, we performed at Dinner For A Cause as Bistro Mezcla, alongside Monica and dancers from Novy’s dance school.
In mid-May, we travelled to Balesin Island Club, a private island resort west of Manila featuring seven location-themed villages (Balesin, Phuket, Bali, Toscana, St Tropez, Costa Del Sol and Mykonos) replete with appropriate-themed restaurants, beach-side pools and exquisite coast lines – very White Lotus energy. Here, joined by fellow Miss Saigon performers Abigail Adriano (playing Kim), Kiara Dario (playing Gigi) and Lawrence Mossman (playing Thuy) a subsequent concert, The Heat Is On, with me accompanying on piuano through the concert. Around 400 people attended, making it a great night to end my first experience of Pinoy culture. Salamat po!
Flying back to Australia on May 19, the following I performed with fellow composers/sound artist Kiera Simmons in a new duo, Audio Lost and Found, for Creative Original Music Adelaide (COMA)’s Autumn season. Affectionately called ALF for short, the project conjures immersive ambient and electronic dance soundscapes from environmental field recordings, exploratory vocals and transcendent instrumentals.
You can watch the full performance below, with sound contributions from the audience.
In mid-June, I joined the creative team as musical director for ‘A Transgender Woman On The Internet, Crying’ (ATWOTIC for short), which was receiving a creative development treatment and showing as part of the 2024 Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Working with writer-performer Cassie Hamilton, director Brittanie Shipway, sound designer Beau Esposito and performers Adam Noviello, Mo Lovegood and Issy Coomber, we spent six days running and refining this new musical describe as “a hyper-pop rave war that colourfully collides love, identity, furries, and the power of the trans community”.
Multiple five-star reviews came in from InReview, Glam Adelaide and The Clothesline – here’s to the next stage whenever it may come!
Mo, Cassie, Adam, Issy and Beau on-stage for the showing of ATWOTIC, with me side-profile lit in the bottom RH corner. Image: Claudio Raschella
Not long after, on 21 June, I flew to the Yugambeh Country / Gold Coast, QLD for the opening night of Big City Lights, an audiovisual festival now in its second year.
Alongside a diverse array of outdoor installations and exhibitions across the city, Channelling Dulcie’s Piano was exhibited in a three-projection, four-channel sound format, with Vanessa Tomlinson and myself project in 10m tall strips on the side of a carpark in downtown Southport.
From the Gold Coast, I went to Meanjin/Brisbane for International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) 2024, for multiple academic and creatations presentations of Channelling Dulcie’s Piano.
Held from 21-29 June, the sympsoium’s theme, ‘Everywhen’ is beautifully articulated on the ISEA2024 website:
“ISEA2024 sets out to explore human perception of timescales and challenge our understanding of past, present and future in the days of singularity and climate change – the Everywhen.
The Everywhen is the concept of all time simultaneously present in a place and describes the notion that past, present and future are co-habiting any given location. Where many western cultures believe time is the constant and travels in a linear progression from now to then, First Nations Australians describe the before then, then, now and the future then existing in the constant presence of place: The Everywhen.
In this concept the creative act is not a process of unconnected inspiration, solo achievement or act of individual hubris but rather the process of timely connection to the landscape, accessing the already laid out ‘creation’ and relaying this to others. The role of the artist is to be the interlocutor between past, present and future through their deep relationship to place.
Art is an act of memory.”
Our short paper, ‘Channelling Dulcie’s Piano: How the River Taught the Piano to Sing’ was presented alongside acoustic ecology colleague Leah Barclay’s ‘Beeyali: Visualising Ecological Interconnection and Acoustic Ecology on Kabi Kabi Country’ and Keira Simmons’ ‘Listen, and Imagine: Speculative Soundwalking’.
An audiovisual installation of CPD’s Wilcannia performance also featured in the symposium at Queensland College of the Arts and Design in Southbank, immersively rendered through multiple projectors and speakers in the space (photos below).
Our final ISEA outing was a 20-minute version of Channelling Dulcie’s Piano, performed at KEPK Gallery on June 27th, with visuals by Greg Harm.
Vanessa and I performing a 20 minute improv on Channelling Dulcie's Piano at KEPK Gallery on July 27.
Back at home in Tarndanya/Adelaide, I had the privilege of facilitating a MUD workshop July 4 at the Ern Malley Bar in Magill, South Australia, as part of our Composer-in-Residence Pilot Program.
The workshop featured an engaging discussion with composer-in-residence, Joseph Franklin, where we delved into the importance of working-class composition in today’s music landscape. Joe shared on his compositional practice and his current collaboration with cellist David Moran, presenting excerpts of a new work that was presented in an ensuing concert on July 6th.
Ahead of my overseas travels, I had the immense pleasure to present three works of mine at Chamber Music Adelaide’s Three Bridges Festival in my home town of Murray Bridge on 20 July.
Alongside a stellar array of South Australian performers including Thea Martin, Nathan May, Adelaide Baroque, Inkling Trio, Katie Aspel, and Kegelstatt Ensemble, Keira Simmons and I started the day with an an immersive surround sound set by Audio Lost and Found. Later, the South Australian premiere of ‘sanctuary x mill’ resounded through the auditorium, giving audiences an kaleidoscopic experience of the nearby Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary. To round out the day, an octophonic version of ‘Mandala’, which features multiple South Australian soundscape recordings, offered a restorative afternoon soundbath experience.
A overview of the weekend can be found on the Murray Bridge News website.
