Organ subversion.

Probably the best advice James could have given me was "subvert the form". I don't even know what I was doing. I think lately I struggle with form more than anything. I'm moving more and more towards an openness, a freedom that makes committing to any particular trajectory really problematic, or at least, really depressing.

Jettisoning the first idea and moving into this new one was a good choice. I wanted to avoid making as droney piece, but after trying a bunch of things, I guess it's going to be just that. The growing in steps of 4 was really just a a rough idea of putting things together. The form now is much more organic. I don't know if it's very me, but I like it.

Some of the advice James had given over the course of last weeks class really took a relevant hold on me. Words in particular that I've focused on are "subversion", "abstraction", "undulate". 

I began by simply recording the guitar part, and then I played in each manual of organ music, in an improvised type sense, and then adjusted the midi afterwards. The result is much less linear and more organic, shifting perspective often.

While it still has a way to come (I'm still working out a middle chunk), I feel like I'll have a great piece to perform. The addition of some handmade instruments will add some colour to the drones, my lazyglock, and waterphone are definitely going to be used in there, but also probably some cymbals and my musical amplified BMX i've just made might make it in.

looking forward to more feedback today.

Organs, scores, and arguments.

I gotta admit I'm blocked on this organ piece. I'm really struggling to find something I like. I don't like notes anymore. I'm getting really bored of music. I'm going to spend all day tomorrow developing my existing ideas into something, but I don't have much, and I don't know how or where it's going to go at this point.
The organ music we listened to in class was cool. The Ligeti piece in particular, although we can't get access to the pipes to do the weird stuff he was doing there. I did really like the way he uses the organ as one big mass of sound, rather than separating the voices and playing various melodies/counterpoint etc. I have composed a lot of disparate ideas so far, and I'm thinking of just taking one of them and approaching it the Ligeti way. The thing I liked the most about the Ligeti pieces was the way he blends the colours together, the way he sculpts the volume and timbre to create a gorgeous sound painting. I'd realy like to try to do something like this. So far my piece uses 3 different polyrhythms, and segues from being a kind of ambient piece/ballad into a progressive, Zappaesque jam. I think I can do without the prog bit, it's starting to bore me.
Like the Cargle piece, my organ piece has additional sounds. I've been up to the engine room with Ariel, and I recorded the sound of the motors running. It's pretty much just noise, but it's a particularly interesting noise, with a direct relationship to the sound hear at idle in the auditorium. I want to slowly fade the engine sound up through the sound system before the organ plays, and I've set up some processing, rhythmically panning and filtering the noise, eventually cutting it up into a "musical" texture to accompany the piece as it progresses.
I'll also be using drums, baritone guitar, and vocals.

I've started working on my score for Ash. I hope I wasn't misunderstood in class. I think that an image can be music. I think that non traditional scores are awesome. I merely wanted to express that it bugs me when people make a visual/graphic score out of context, that doesn't communicate anything. I think that a graphic score, or a painting, or whatever can communicate music. I think that composing with loose musical instructions that depend on the performers interpretation is totally the way to go. I was merely commenting that there's a lot of shit scores and I hate them when they don't come with instructions. I think the debate got a little out of hand. Part of the problem is that many graphic scores have been composed for specific performers/ensembles, and workshopped with the composer, so the performers understand the parameters. Someone picking up a score like that after the fact would need to do their research on the context of the piece before just diving into it and playing whatever. It bugs me when someone just throws some ink on a page and says that's my piece, when they've no idea who's going to play it, and therefore no idea of what they're doing. I think maybe I haven't existed in the composer/score area for so long, I don't really know what I like or hate about it anymore. I pretty much chose this course over others, like VCA composition, because I didn't want to study music composition in a score writing way. I don't know if I'm really interested in doing it. I prefer to play the music myself, or to communicate it through a score if I need other players, but I don't think of my work being written down for someone else to play without my involvement. That sort of thing doesn't really interest me at the moment. Maybe this project will develop that interest.

My piece for Ash is called Blue, and is a tone row based piece, building in 5ths from E-Bb. There is instruction for how to integrate the pitch material. I'm debating whether or not to include the pitch on the score, or not, but ultimately, the navigation of the form is totally interpretive. The scores are a series of watercolour paintings I've been making, abstract shapes that fade and morph together. There are instructions for how to use the colour, tone, hue, density etc as metaphor for register and dynamic and gesture. All these things are up to the performer to navigate through the shapes. I want my notes to be brief, but informative. I don't want to write an essay, and kill the improvised nature of the music, I want to give the necessary information to get Ash to perform the music I'm hearing in my ears. I think that any guitarist could play this music, regardless of fx, or electric/acoustic sounds. The sparseness of the score opens itself to options. I've been playing it myself to make sure the ideas work, and I get a lot out of it so far. I think I'll probably record it at some stage, perhaps with Ash, as a duo. I like the idea of it being a piece for any number of instruments (as long as those instruments are guitars, dammit).

I've been trying to find a copy of the Alvin Lucier Still Lives music. I loved that stuff. I really want to listen to it over and over again. It's just such a beautiful and simply idea, and it works on such an intuitive human level. Maybe it's the piano too, I love piano. I don't really know what to say about the piece other than I loved it. The simplicity is really what gets me. The meditative nature of it too. I've been writing a kind of Still Life piece recently. It's a sort of serenade at the same time. Mine is pretty different, obviously this has a unique idea at play, but the piece I'm working on does evoke a similar mood, just with different sounds. I've been trying to avoid the use of drums in it until absolutely the end of the piece. I think I'll use the Lucier music as a reference to how "still" my piece is..

Finally I wanted to comment on how much I responded to the article Explaining My Music by Tom Johnson. I really liked his style. "The truth isn't always beautiful, but beautiful things can't be untrue". I love his ideas. Not being autobiographical is hard. It was weird, because that morning Alice and I had been talking about atheism and logic, and the logical absolutes that form the universe, and how these absolutes form a beautiful system. To some people, logic and science take all the "magic" out of living, to some people, the spiritual is what gives beauty to life. But to that I think blah. The truth is much more interesting and beautiful. I think there's more magic in understanding the truth than there is in any form of "spirituality".

Ding Dang Dong.

I regret missing class this week. But I've been planning to make my bells performance KICK ASS for months, and I think I did it. So rather than blog about the themes of the class, I thought I'd write a brief annotation to the performance just to keep the blogs up to date.

I'm really glad I gave myself HEAPS of time to set up. Like a fool, I left a power supply at home, the power supply for the drummer, James', headphone mixer. Luckily Alice managed to drive home and back to get it while I set everything else up, and I don't think anyone noticed the mistake.

Overall, I was pretty nervous about the performance. I was really happy with it, but because of the power supply mishap, I didn't get a run through/sound check before everyone arrived, which made me nervous. I think we pulled it off beautifully. Some of the notes seemed to trigger wrong, and I think that was just a case of the midi cable being too long (10 feet is the recommended distance for midi, and this was 25 feet).

My piece is still untitled. I had begun the whole thing influenced by the Higgs Boson discovery, and wanted to write a sort of secular hymn. As the process continued, I was almost writing it about something else. One idea that got in the way was this idea of Spring time (the weather had been influencing me), and the story of Persephone. I tried to make the song about the temptation of Persephone from the pomegranate's perspective, but as I researched the story and wrote my lyrics, I found it increasingly difficult, kind of like write a song about rape from the rohypnol's perspective. I wanted the song to be joyous and full of energy, but with a longing that can't be placed. Then I  decided not to set anything in stone with lyrics, and instead worked with some glossolalic syllables. That's something I want to explore further. Using my voice, without words, but with specific sounds in place of the words. Like a made up language, like Sigur Ros or Dead Can Dance or similar. In future, I will make a whole record like that, and see what happens.

I feel like the piece is still about spring, and about the potency of science. I like the pomegranate as the imagery for the piece, and will probably expand on it further. Maybe lyrics will come, maybe not. who knows right now.

Sonically, the sounds in the piece are: the Federation Bells, sleigh bells, 3 dancers with 200 tiny bells each, sampled sleigh bells cut up and "glitched" and panned around the 4 channel surround system, reversed samples of the Federation bells drenched in reverb and also panned around the space. Voice, put through 4 different tempo delays, 1 for each speaker, drums, a filtered beatbox response to the kick drum pattern that plays a 3 on 2 poly rhythm it one pair of speakers and the same pattern reversed in the other pair. A synth bass drone that has been tuned to the just tuning of the bells and panned slowly around the space, and a dirty synth bass line that plays out of all 4 channels at once over the end rocking out section.

I do have plans to expand on the music. It began as one of my daily loop pieces from before semester started.



I'd like to eventually have lyrics and perhaps vocoder/guitar in the piece. Maybe replace some of the bells with rhodes or celeste, and sample/record the bells live in the space to add to the recording. Over the summer I think I'll try to work on some more "sections" by expanding on the musical phrases.

There's essentially 3 "sections" in the work so far. There's the intro part with the straight 8th notes, which also returns at the end, and overlaps in the middle a bit. The "verse" with the bass drone progression and the vocals. The elastic break down section that has no bass, and eventually becomes the bass line at the end of the song. All these sections have potential to grow further, so who knows where it will end.

Since it's kinda become about spring, i'd like to pursue it as the nocturnal mirror to Gyokuro. If that doesn't work, I'll save it for down the line when I make my glossolalia record.

I think I've rambled on long enough about this.

Semester 2. Get back to work!

The first half of semester 2 has been a big change from the first half of the year. Different teachers with different teaching styles. It has been a hard adjustment, but I feel so invigorated from the experience. Byron Scullin in Audio Tech is like the audio guru Chuck Palahniuk would write, part Bill Hicks, part Robert McKee, all ninja. It's a great class. Having Darrin take us for the bells, and for the first half of I&P (formerly known as T&P) was a really intense and different experience to James' teaching. Darrin's focus is definitely on concepts of neurology and perception, and quite separate from "musical" techniques. I liked exploring the sound/compositional process from outside the confines of music, because as this course goes on, I am starting to see music as a dead weight that holds my work back. That said, the compositional techniques we explore with James are really helpful, but I prefer talking about these things that impact more on the "what" and "why" of the process rather than just on the "how". This first week back with James was a densely packed mix of hows and whys, and a challenging task of listening indeed.

First up was this concept of "Material" vs "Materia". What really interested me about this brief discussion was that nobody brought up the parallel to generative music (which Bryon had spent a whole class on the week prior). The idea that the material is the formed music, the themes, the musical clay, so to speak, with which you are forming the piece with. The Materia, is I guess, that clay before it's dug up. It's the idea of the clay, and the possibilities it presents. I find when I create a work, I know I have to realise it with sounds, and notes, and rhythms, and certain other materials that pertain to the eventual outcome that is my personality, manifest through song. However, I spend ages working these concepts through in my mind before I even have a note, or a riff, or a field recording. I think at times I'm dealing with this "materia". I like to let this stew for ages sometimes, and then one day, the material evolves from it so quickly, and I have a brand new piece. I'm not sure if I've fully understood this concept yet, but that's what I got from it. The reason I mentioned generative music is that I see that as a direct way of working with the materia. By allowing the music to create itself with minimal direct input. Perhaps though, the tools in this case (the note generators, randomisers, delay chains) become the materials. I'm not sure which way this works and look forward to unpacking it further.

Phill Niblock's The Movement Of People Working, a film that juxtaposes imagery of manual labor with sounds of long layered drones. we watched it for a short time, comparatively, considering the work goes for 6 hours, but long enough to get the gist of the film. To begin with it feels uncomfortable. That the pace of the imagery is too fast for the drones that we hear. but over time, the music takes over, and the visual pacing becomes textural, and unimportant. The people in the film are from developing nations, and we never see their faces. This sparked an almost political idea, but I think it was a way of avoiding any emotional narrative being read into. The human face draws attention to it, and would distract from the movement of the work. This intense droning of sound was at first quite brash and harsh, and I was waiting for something to resolve. There were times when others in the class felt that it resolved. I never found that. Even when the drones became a major triad or a unison, the tension was always held in the drone through the juxtaposed imagery. After a while I felt my mind clear, and being so influenced by zen as I am, I found this parallel to meditation. The meditation through practice, through labor. The way a zen monk would tend the garden, using a mundane action to clear his mind. I don't think the point of the film was to comment in anyway on the political or philosophical situations of the workers. I feel like it was just a process of juxtaposing movement and long drones in a way that constantly makes the audience readjust their eyes and ears, constantly readjusting their perception. Unlike the Qatsi films that have a progression of ideas, and something closer to narrative, this film explores one relationship extensively, and was much more intense, a much more draining experience.

Raymond Queneau's Exercises In Style. OMG. I loved this. Such wit. It reminded me of something Monty Python would do. I got home and showed Alice right away, I'm looking for the whole book now. The writing style reminded me a bit of John Bath's short stories. How this relates to sound/music is obvious. I use some techniques all the time. I think because I begin everything so conceptually, and I boil everything down musically to it's bare essentials, and then i get stuck developing, and building it back up. So I employ some pretty standard compositional techniques that I learned in high school of all places. Things like reversing a melodic or rhythmic idea, inverting or transposing a phrase, doubling or halving, quite simple techniques that I guess I don't even think about anymore. This book has 99 examples of compositional methods and I think I want to try them all. I thought I'd start with a simple loop based idea, and take it through each step in order. Some of them seem ridiculous and unmusical, but I'm sure it'll work. Queneau is an interesting fellow. I'd really like to find and read some of his novels. I wiki'd him, and found he spent a short time with the surrealists (whom I adore) but fell out with Breton eventually (as they all did, since he was a jerk). The Oulipo movement is also an interesting bunch. I'm big into mathematics (although I suck at actual number problems, I just love the purity of it) and I really admire the way these writers and mathematicians teamed up to explore the beauty and potential of permutation and theory through expressive art. I'll need to spend some time in Collected Works, or the library, looking for some books this week, but it'll be worth it.
Critically, I guess the understanding of Exercises In Style that I gathered was this: that the materials don't have to dictate the form or the genre. These are things that can be applied to materials, and there are many forms to consider. I obviously haven't tried half of them (an exaggeration, I've probably only worked with about 3).

To explore the last paragraph further, we ca talk about Laura, and the idea of the cover version. A song, reworked by different artists, and applying different genre characteristics and formalities to an existing composition can lead to a completely different sounding piece, but where does one draw the line and say, well, that's not the same tune anymore. Jazz has set the precedent that nothing is sacred, and as long as the artist can show/justify any link to the original work then the version is "valid" (footnote, Darrin laughed at me for using this term "valid" and ever since, I feel stupid when I say it. The "validity" of the idea is irrelevant, it exists, therefore it doesn't need validity). I've questioned some artists interpretations. Marc Hannaford for example has released some records where he claims that the piece is a Thelonious Monk tune, but the resulting piece is so esoteric, you'd have a hard time hearing the original materials at play. I'm not saying that he hasn't worked with the material, and I'm sure he has developed the music from that, but to me it sounds so removed, I couldn't care less where the music came from. I guess the rest of the class' reaction to Derek Bailey was a similar response to my responses to Hannaford. I've known Bailey's work, and have been into his approach for nearly 15 years. I think his guitar playing is incredibly sophisticated. I hate hearing people say that "it sounds like someone who can't play the guitar". His rendition of Laura had the entire head, and he follows the harmony beautifully. The way he approaches these materials is unique and does take some getting used to. I can understand that the first time hearing it might be hard to follow, but most people hear a guitar being tuned, and then turn their ears off to what is actually being played (ooh, stopping there before I get too ranty). There are a few other tunes that I thought of while we were listening to the versions of Laura. Black Coffee is one. The first version of that I heard was by Tricky off the album Nearly God. I loved that track. Then I heard the original and it had all these chords and changes and I thought, what? That's so jazz and lame. My friend Adam hates the Tricky version because essentially it's just the lyrics sung over a one chord loop, that has nothing to do with the original changes. But I never hear anyone else bag that track. Maybe if Derek Bailey's version had have had a singer, and the lyrics were intact the response would have been different. Lyrics can play a big part in a cover. Personally, I love hearing people mess with a tune. I love to do it too. Nothing bugs me more than hearing someone cover a song exactly as it was originally made. A great album I own somewhere (hmmm, lets see if it's on the shelf... yep, phew) is Hal Wilner's tribute to Charles Mingus called Weird Nightmare. The title track is sung by Elvis Costello, and musically performed entirely on Harry Partch cloud chamber bowls. In fact, there is all the tunes covered on this record have deviated drastically from the original version, and use strange (mostly Partch built) instruments. This is a very different approach to say, Joni Mitchel's Mingus tribute, where she not only sticks to the harmony and melody of the works, but has transcribed and set lyrics to the improvised solos from the original recordings. Again, leaving a bad taste in my mouth, all of these approaches are valid, personal taste is going to decide whether one likes it or not, and maybe even over time and exposure a guitarist like Ash may grow to like Derek Bailey, or not, it doesn't matter. I think what's really interesting, beside the surface of "genre" or the eventuating sound of the version, is to comprehend the process that has created the version. Even if one hates Bailey's playing, he is pretty transparent about how he has approached the material. And his deconstruction of the jazz language creates a universe of possibilities to draw from and apply to any guitarists vocabulary.

Thinking on these different techniques explored in Queneau's work, and across the various cover arrangements we've looked at, brings us to the end of class, with the piece by Francis Plagne. A quaint 60's sounding instrumental tune. I'm glad we listened to it so many times. As I said earlier, I've desensitised to these techniques because I take them for granted, and can't really just hear them anymore. I could hear that things were going on. My mind went straight the Queneau reading, and I started trying to figure out what specific techniques were being employed, but I think in such an analysis, I missed the finer points. My ears need focus, need tuning. This was a great exercise though (the listening and the class in general), because I realised that some of things that I've been so blocked on in my own work, is form. I have so much to explore, and I get stuck on such tiny problems and haven't found any new ways to progress. Some of these things I've overlooked are so simple. It's already helped me with my current project.

To close, I'd like to spew out a few words about the projects for this semester in I&P. Firstly the Federation Bells piece. I had a real struggle finding my voice for this instrument. I felt creatively constipated. I'm really happy with where the piece ended up though. My original inspiration was the Higgs Boson discovery. Not that I wanted to make some intellectual, science piece. I'm actually not into that "pure data" composition style, it all ends up sounding the same. Although I thought about it, and looked things up on the CERN website to see if I could find something to play with. In the end, it was more important to respond to the discovery emotionally. I should add that it really freed me from my agnosticism. I delved into understanding particle physics (thanks to Brian Cox, I can grasp it pretty well now), and I feel like I can exist in the universe connected to it all, without any need for a soul or higher spiritual construct. The fact that the numbers in Higgs' standard model add up so elegantly, and that we used that mathematical proof as the template to find the particle, coming full circle to prove the purity and beauty of numbers, and prove the model of the universe as accurate is an amazing achievement for humankind. I've been writing lyrics for my bell piece, that are sort of a secular hymn, a celebration of this freedom from faith and dogma, that shows that the universe, without a creator, without a soul, is still a beautiful and significant thing. I think the bells, on a sonic level, really express that joy, and due to the tuning based around the natural harmonic series, they fit to the universe better than the western equal tempered tuning could express. The dance and drone elements I've added represent the vastness of space and also the connected nature of everything. The movement is energy and joy, the sleigh bells sewn to the costumes are a rhythmic texture, somewhat representative of the particles of nature, perhaps the smaller, quantum particles, with the Federation Bells being more atomic level particles, or the Higgs field itself. Everything is moving around the space. It's a quiet and simple metaphor for the universe, but that's ultimately what I do, create analogies for things that are massive and boil them down to simple, translatable experiences.

For the Organ, I have few ideas. I still want to make the piece with vocals and drums and electronics. I am not sure what it will be about yet, but I have a starting point for note in mind, and a method of performance, that will help guide the way the piece gets constructed. I'm pretty excited that we get to do this.

For our "compose for a classmate" project, I got Ash. I love Ash's guitar playing, and he's a great guy, full of potential. So young and eager to make music. I want to put him through something similar to what I went through as a young player, straight out of high school, discovering new music for the first time. Since we both play guitar, I think it'll be an easy task to communicate. It's the creative side of things I want to challenge. Ash is a way better guitarist than I am. Technically, i have no technique and he has heaps. Musically however, I have more experience and hopefully can give him something to apply his great chops to, whilst challenging his concepts and approach to the instrument. My favourite guitarists are Derek Bailey and Robert Fripp. I know Ash likes to play with delay and ambient sounds, and so do I. My plan is to create something of an evolving ambient guitar piece that explores the guitar as a sound device, and rather than focusing on standard guitar playing techniques and understandings of guitar music, forcing a deconstruction of technique to perform. Musically, the piece will probably develop in a serial nature, and become atonal. But i want the gestures to be sparse and interpretive, and the form to be open and improvisational to a certain degree. I want to use this as an opportunity to create a working template for further ambient guitar compositions that can overlap and be played simultaneously with any number of guitarists. Something I've wanted to do for a long time, creating works that can become intuitive surround sound pieces, by positioning the performers around the space, and giving them different scores that call for listening and interaction as a part of following the directions on the page. Perhaps each piece becomes a stand alone work for soloist, but is also an overlapping part of an ongoing group work. Oh the times and places you'll go...

Reflections/experience. Completing Semester 1.

What a ride it has been. I made the analogy the other week that being at art school is like being Doctor Who's companion. You know you want to go and experience something new, but it's like a whirlwind trip of all time and space, and leaves you baffled in the end.

I think I've really come out the other end with some new skills. I feel like I've been thorough. Some things really challenged me, but I feel like I've risen to the challenges set. The Volume piece was hard work, but I think I made that one happen. the sound Object piece was great fun, and I felt like I got to put a lot of skills from Audio Tech into that piece. I was pretty happy with my mix. As for the development of my techniques, this class has really helped me integrate new things into the work I've been making. It's made me much more aware of the flaws in my compositional process, and given me new things to try I'd never thought of. It's been an influence on me finishing some old, almost but not quite completed pieces, giving me the final kick they needed, completing the picture, or just supplying me with the tools to see what what missing. In particular, I'm going to finally finish the Absinthe music recording.

I have made plans to spend the majority of the break (besides working on the federation bells piece, which I will do as well) returning to my track a day process. This time with few restrictions. I'll probably set different parameters each morning. I have some ideas for cover songs, sound improvisations, experiments with new equipment, and I want to make some new field recordings and see what happens. I wont be setting duration or instrumentation restrictions on the pieces this time around, but I will try to start something new each day, rather than working over something. this way I can try a whole bunch of different things and just see where they end up. This will also mean I will still have time to work on the bells, other band related stuff, and my "analogies/black comedy" remixes.

The "analogies" remix (a remix version of the track at the top of this blog) is more or less complete. I've mixed it, and sent it off to Lerms in Cancun to make the animated video clip for it. Lerms is a genius. We've collaborated a few times already. When he had a monthly art jam project going on, I did two short animation sound tracks for him. One was an instrumental edit of my song Green, the other was an original track. I'm glad to be working with someone like him. His style is amazing. Between him and Nathan J (who did the Glasfrosch jellyfish art) I have found the two best visual artists for my sounds.







For my Bells piece (and probably for my piece for the town hall organ) I'm planning to use the members of my band to help perform the work. I plan to controll the bells via midi pads, and triggers attached to the drums, and then to use microphones to process the bells in real time. I also want to examine the tonal colour of the bells and play around with modulating the frequencies via some kind of FM synthesis. I'll probably make a song, with words, since what I do is essentially Pop. I'm trying to envision my work as beyond pop music, but with the spirit of pop as an art. I'm not sure where the line is anymore. I used to think I was making experimental music into pop, but I think that definition is too shallow now. I certainly want to get away from the rock band scene. I'd love to play very few regular band shows and just focus on making really complex pieces for one off performances (or close to one off/rare). The Bells will be the first one of those.

My work as Glasfrosch has been tied down to the Melbourne progressive scene for a time, and I want to take it back. I don't like the expectations of that audience. They like guitars and distortion and riffs. I want to play more with static and stillness. Still mix in the guitars and stuff, but I think for too long now I've been trying to please a scene rather than my self. I had a plan. It started with my lullaby project, to strip everything back and develop the sounds from nothing, and slowly add more pop/rock elements over time until I had developed a unique band sound. I think that's happened, and now it's time to start puling things out and trying to find new things with in that to rebuild onto.

The aubades/nocturnes project wont suffer from that, I think by the time that's all finished I'll have dug deep enough alongside them to be able to combine the two perspectives. The recording of Aubades will begin soon, and I'll be mixing it at school in protools my self. The live versions of those tracks have their function, and the recordings will have their own, but in the long term, i guess what I'm trying to say here is, I want to explore some new live functions for the future of my music to exist with. Something that isn't in every corner of Melbourne already.

A Thermodynamic Miracle/A Clock Without A Craftsman.

lyrics...

I struggle with lyrics. I struggle because I'm super picky about cliches, and I despise when people try to pass off other people's sentiments, or indeed, some kind of rubbish cliche sentiment, as there own idea. It's a waste of time and space, and what's the point? But no one can write 100% original ideas in words, and so sincerity takes precedence over originality. I can deal with that compromise.
I have a few different approaches to lyrics. Sometimes they com easy, and that's when I'm most satisfied. Like the perfect haiku, short and ever present perfection, sometimes they just come out like that, and you know it's a winner. Sometimes the idea just out ways the vocabulary. Sometimes someone else has already said what I want to say, and rather than regurgitate some half arsed version of it, I've found that adaption is a better way to approach the song. I first tried this with a song I called Requiem. Some friends of mine died in a car accident, and I wanted to write about it. But I just had no idea how to express what I felt. I read through a book I had call Japanese Death Poems, to kind of focus my direction, and found a couple of haiku that really summed it up perfectly. So I chose to just turn those into the lyrics, and give the credit where it's due. Easy. Not really. I've done this since with a few other pieces. Gyokuro was a harder one. I adapted a number of passages from Kakuzo Okakura's The Book Of Tea. That was a long process, but it was less about using the poetry because it made my point better than I could, and more that it inspired me so much when I read it, and became such a part of my world that I had to assimilate it into my own expression. It's not that I don't ever write my own lyrics, I do. The Sound Object piece I'm working on for class has lyrics. In this case I'm adapting Alan Moore's Watchmen into a song. Specifically the narration and dialogue from the character Dr. Manhattan. The title is A Thermodynamic Miracle - Or, A Clock Without A Craftsman. I've wanted to do this since I first read the book. Alan Moore has a few moments (Swamp Thing is another one that comes to mind) of absolute poetic brilliance in his comic books. Especially in the chapters where Dr. Manhattan is on Mars and talking about time and seeing the universe all simultaneously, they're sweetly nostalgic and melancholic.
I wanted to write a blog about this after Rohan was showing us his scores based on other peoples instructional pieces. I think it's a great way to work. When things touch you and make you envision something new from them, I think it's only normal to take it into your practice and work it into your own work. I remember something a friend said once a few year back, and I'm paraphrasing, but, "there's no new ideas, but there is always a new context for ideas". Without getting into a debate about ideas, I think if you take anything from that advice, it's not to worry about originality of ideas, but to be aware of the context you're placing them in.
I wanted to use the Watchmen lyrics in the Sound Object project for two reasons. The first was just because when I first started playing around with the sound object I made a sound happen that brought it to mind and suited the theme, bringing a science fictiony vibe with it. Secondarily, I figured that since the project is kind of about appropriating a sound object into something new and original, doing it with the lyrics seemed like a good idea. Basically the process this time was different from Requiem and Gyokuro, where in those two works I used the text consciously and with a narrative structure that I picked to serve a particular purpose. In the new piece, I started by writing down all the bubbles I wanted to use, and then cutting them up and placing things at random to see what happens, and what new narrative could come from it. The challenge now is making the lyrical passages that have come from the text work musically and work in with the form of the sound. I'm about halfway there. Needless to say, I have a big week ahead.

blogging from work.

I love working in a computer store sometimes. Today I am blogging in the quiet times, playing on tumblr and finding cool stuff.

I found this artists work on tumblr today. Instantly I though of My Bloody Valentine. This is exactly what I saw in my mind the first time we listened to them in class. This is the "rainbow static" that I was referring to.

The artist's name is Tchmo, from Montreal.

Catching up.

I feel pretty behind on stuff. So much to do, both at school and outside it. It'd be ok, except being in a band means having to wrangle other people for rehearsal, and other bands for gigs. I'm broke too, and have a bunch of band stuff to pay for (promo and mastering,etc). None the less, I'm managing to put it all together. I felt like last week I went through a billion different emotional states. I had a great day last Thursday, I feel like I really succeeded at things. I had a terrible weekend. I was totally blocked and didn't really make anything or do any work, and my ipod died forever.

I've started making some new remixes of two of my older tracks, Analogies for the Universe, and Black Comedy. I love remixes, and I love remixing. Doing remixes of your own work is hard, because all your original ideas are there already. But since these tracks are old, I can bring new approaches to the sounds, and so far I'm getting some really different stuff happening. I'm launching the first Glasfrosch remix collection on June 3rd, remixes of the song Green. The cut I did of that is really fun and different.



Later in the year I'll put out the new collection, and then focus all my energy on releasing the Aubades Ep.

So now that the whinging is out of the way...

I've been enjoying the explorations of perception and listening that we've been doing in class. The sound walk concept was interesting. It was a tiring exercise, but it had a real impact of my perception. I found that after the break, I felt sharper than earlier in the day, even though I felt drained from the walk initially. Heading home I felt really open and connected to the sounds around me. Usually I have the ipod on and isolate myself from the world, but since it died on Saturday, I don't have that option anymore. Jess was an ace person. Her concepts and work were really cool. I love Twin Peaks too. I particularly love Badelamenti, and the little video she played us was awesome. I loved the way Angelo does Lynch's voice. They've worked on so much together, he really knows him, and their connection must be so strong to have worked in the way he describes. I love those themes, they're exactly what he says they are. And iconic too. The Where We're From project seems pretty cool. I've followed the blog and will follow up on it a bit more this week to find out more about it. The questions that it poses are challenging and thought provoking, and could be good to answer for my own benefit.

The Milton Babbit reading was a curious experience. When I read it initially, I both agreed and disagreed equally. I think I disagree more strongly with certain things now, but agree with, or perhaps accept, his ideas more after having discussed it in class. What I don't like about this article is his disconnection from audience. I think audience is a powerful and important component of art. I don't like the way he refers to the layman. I think there are problems with people's acceptance of music that is challenging to listen to, but you're a jerk and a fool to put yourself and your art above other people. People will always be behind the times with music., His analogy to physics, well, their are plenty of people out their who don't understand scientific theories who claim to know better than learned experts. Religious people/"christian science", conservatives/climate change deniers. There are people out there who claim the universe is 10,000 years old and because science can't prove there's no God that they're right (although science can prove the universe is over 14,000,000,000 years. So while I appreciate Babbit's analogy, it's pretty arrogant and flimsy. I think that it's important that people like him were doing that sort of thing back then, but that attitude just doesn't fit into the contemporary world. Music for music sake as research is cool, but as art, it needs to connect with the world somehow. I don't mean the whole world, but a place in it. I guess I just prefer expressive forms over academic. I may be paraphrasing, but I think it was Basquiat said about minimalist painting, there's only so far you can take it before it's exhausted, it becomes pure academia. Expression is personal and can reach people in different ways and is therefore an evolving process that relies on audience connection. I know Babbit isn't "minimalism", but the principal is the same. Serialism is the same sort of thing.
Another thing I'm reminded of is from a Bjork documentary from around 1997. She was complaining about people's attitude to electronic music, about the perception that electronics have "no soul". Her perspective was that all music has the potential to be soul less, if the composer fails to imbue it with any soul. Truely, an instrumental performance can be stale and soul less if the performer doesn't feel the music and express it in their playing. The same can be said of electronic composition. If the composer doesn't put a piece of their life into the music and composes it purely with interlect, then it's not going to be "felt" at the other end. Then the piece becomes an analytical exercise. I'm not opposed to a bit of this, but I don't think it's a thorough way to compose. Perhaps a starting method. I want more human condition in my music/art. I want play, I want love, I want loss, I want thought and challenge too, but I want it in a way that makes me feel at the same time.
Eliane Radigue's Jetsun Mila was a great example of music imbued with life. That piece was exceptional. I got lost in it, and didn't want it to stop. Her sounds were amazing, and the process was just gorgeous. I want an ARP so much.

So I thought I'd just comment on the week prior's topics quickly as I hadn't blogged last week.

We spent a lot of time discussing Morton Feldman and memory. Looking at Feldman's different scoring techniques and listening to the evolution of his work over his career we got a sense of a man who began quite un-precious and non-specific about things, but grew to become much more specific about his work. Admittedly, his earlier graph score work didn't really impress me as much as the later stuff, not that I didn't like, but I liked the later work with it's micro variation and more mellowed out feel. I found the earlier graph piece felt to (inserts a series of hand gestures here for lack of words coming to mind) bland, perhaps, or because there are things left to the performers, there's almost a lack of commitment to the piece, or should I say, conviction. The performers, not having been given exact pitch material, play with less conviction. The rigid geometric time structure also made it feel bland, or perhaps I mean, lazily assembled. Which I guess on paper the piece is solid, but the resulting music lacks a certain completeness. The music from the later piece, fully and specifically scored, sounded much more committed. I also loved the meditation of it. I've played around at home improvisationally with this single chord concept a bit since and tried to explore the memory of it. It's a fascinating process, and something I think would be challenging to develop.
I think long pieces are really hard to pull off. I composed a piece a few years ago, I was calling it Absinthe Music. It was for synths, tuned percussion, electric piano, electric guitar and bowed acoustic guitar. The total score length was different for each instrument, and resulted in an approximate duration of a bout an hour. The instrumentation and form are split into 3 independent time frames. The first is the main synth sound, which is a long, slow, and noisy high pad sound. follows a blues chord progression with an extended turn-around that creates a 15 bar cycle. But these chords are then deconstructed and extended at such a slow pace as they become unrecognisable from the blues progression. The second tier to the form is in the bass drone and guitars. At specifically determined intervals (unto themselves but in no relation to the previously mentioned synth part) a bass drone based on the chord root notes in a jumbled sequence (and to be honest, I forget what that sequence/process behind it was) fades in for a time and then out again. In conjunction with this drone, the acoustic guitar, which is tuned to an open chord for ease of fitting in with each of the bass notes, is bowed with a cello bow and simultaneously the electric guitar sustains another note from the same corresponding chord. This section tends to cycle in half the time to the high pad section, and thus is potentially played twice through. the Third element to the form is in the percussion and rhodes parts. the percussion has 15 frames of material to work through, and is mostly the feature of the piece. Each page, or cell, or frame, is grouped in a similar way and represents a bar in the form of the blues progression. The gestures are grouped over three lines and consist of vibraphone grace note runs, alien disc washes, glockenspiel hits, bowed cymbal and bowed vibraphones. The ordering of each page is similar and figured out in such a way that as they're played slowly and quitely so the piece develops without you noticing the changes. The rhodes piano part is simply chords from the same progression, that synchronise with particular cymbal washes in the percussion part. The chord performance instructions are simply to voice the chord anyway you wish, and play express it with a slight arpegiation, how slight is at your, the performer's, discretion. I was reminded of this piece greatly by the Feldman. It seems I was on his level without knowing it. I did make a recording of the piece, but the guitars were never finished. Perhaps I could finish it eventually.

Nocturnes part 1.

Thought I'd share this on here. So I've talked about my "Aubade" project on here a fair bit. I've been pretty happy with it so far, and we've nearly put the whole thing together (we being Glasfrosch), and will try to commit it to tape(bits) mid year. I've started working on the mirror image to this project now. Nocturnes will be 5 tracks and follow (more or less) a similar form to Aubades, but in the mood of the night. I've really started to think about how to make this record stand out and be different, not just to the Aubade music, but in general, to how I usually approach sound/composition entirely. I realised this week (while watching the Monroe film of the same name) that I'm having a musical 7 year itch - it's been about 7 years since I embarked on the journey that has become Glasfrosch, and I'm totally wiping the slate clean and flirting with ideas, sounds, and processes that I haven't before tried. In a way, Nocturnes brings me full circle, back to the new music to fall asleep to... days. But in the same sense, it's also a digression to new territory. I'll be approaching the night in a new way. A lyric I'm playing with sums it up, "the world is not the same place that you woke up in", which will probably be the subtitle of the first piece (mirroring the title format of "Aubade/after each sentence, another beautiful mystery"). Sonically, I thought I'd try some things that stem from things I've been exposed to since starting art school, and just play with new sounds, and try to find my voice in them. This little track is basically drums, two layers of a synth arpeggiator (one bass register, one higher), and a baritone guitar progression, drenched in reverb and tremolo, two types of delay and some distortion. In fact, everything is pretty heavily drenched in reverb. I can honestly admit that two things that have sunk into me from school have been My Bloody Valentine and HTRK. Obviously, this doesn't really develop any sense of form, but it's early days. I need to explore it over a month or so to really figure out where it's going to end up. I have lots of riffs and things that fit in the same/ related keys/close tempos, but I want to steer away from using existing ideas for this tune, and writing it all from scratch. Not that my existing ideas wont make there way into a tune in the end, but I need this challenge to fulfill some kind of progression in my art. That's all for now.

Volume (a dream of a thousand cats)

I originally came up with the main musical motif for this piece about 6/7 years ago. It was originally just an acoustic guitar loop, one that I had named something like "cat prints in wet cement" or something. Anyway, I never used it for anything, never did anything more than just sit and play it hypnotically in around the house on my guitar. When the volume assignment came around, I knew deep down that this was the music I'd work from. Even though I tried a few other things, I still came back to it. The title is from the Sandman short story of the same name. I wanted to keep the cat vibe going, and since we haven't had Sashimi around for a while and I was missing her so much, I thought this was a nice way to keep the original theme, but take it somewhere new (actually, until the writing of this post, I had forgotten the former title, all this is upon further reflection, just post script justification).
So even though two days ago I was bitter and depressed and totally uninterested in this project, and also felt like it what I was making had failed/was worthless, after spending a little more time with the idea (and getting my Sashimi back) I feel like I've done something great.

I'd still like to develop the music further. Maybe make the volume/dynamic extremes less polar, and change around the sounds a little to make it a bit dreamier. I'd like to find a way to combine the main piano figure with some other sounds, morphing it and switching between it and a synth or something, giving that slow looped phrase a melting, surreal quality. Also, underplaying the dirt and noise a little more, mixing in more variations in the "clean" sounds, and making the whole thing a bit shorter.

I'll probably rework this a number of times. I think it has potential to make both a really fun structured improvisation, and eventually a B side for a future Glasfrosch single.

Here it is as submitted for assessment.




*nb: Sashimi is my cat <3

Week 7 t&p, things.

Strange things, strange feelings, a bit depressed this week. I'm not sure how I felt about the class. I guess so much work is piling up, and it's all getting a bit weird and full in my head. It was nice to listen to, and recap on the improvisation topic. There was some really interesting things going on, some beautiful music happening. I've really fallen for Mamoru Fujieda. Gorgeous work. I've been trying to find his work, but nowhere stocks it. I'll be glad when I finally get my unlimited broadband connected and can start downloading music from home (uni internet is SLOOOOOOOW). The Burundi music was great too. I'm totally way more into hearing music from non western cultures than hearing shit like The Necks. The Necks kinda bore me. All my friends get off on that shit, but I feel like it's a bit of a farce. I don't mean to say that they're bad improvisers, or bad players, just their music isn't interesting to me. In fact, it's tiring and self indulgent, and I think they know it. Their music just feels arrogant. I'd much rather be in the audience for that Fujieda work. That was really engaging and there's a modesty in his work that connects with me. It feels inviting. It has a surface element of self indulgence, but it allows you to find space to enjoy it, rather than just pushing along without care or context. The Burundi music was just fun. Felt like being part of a ritual, or party, or party ritual. That elasticity is something I've always wanted to achieve in my old Glasfrosch tune Requiem. That, in the recorded sense was always really metronomical (like all our stuff) and structured, but I'd love to be able to do that piece with more elasticity, and just build it organically. The organic/elastic debate, and the reference to scale has a real impact on what I'm making right now. I'm trying to make sense of it all, there's so much I've absorbed and trying to be aware of, but I'm still really struggling with these new pieces. So I'm trying to focus all my energy on the Volume project for T&P, and Ableton project in Audio tech, and hoping that if I use these as "study works" then maybe all these things I'm pouring into them consciously with reveal themselves in my process.

Something that has happened this week that has really helped me to make sense of where I'm at at the moment, is a fresh perspective on the band and making music for/in a band. I've realised that I've been trying to see the music as the "work", and the band as the "artist", but really, the band is part of the work too. In fact, really, the band, Glasfrosch, is the art, and the music is just the smaller elements of that. When I think of it like this, it makes more sense. In the way I conduct the group, the collaborative process with visual artists, the imagery of the band, what it stands for etc. It's an ongoing, multifaceted, multimedia artwork unto itself. Then, if I am the artist, and the band is my creation, this view helps me see a context for different sounding work outside of that work. These things can still inform each other, but suddenly don't clash in the way i had been prioritizing them in my mind. I'm still figuring out how this all works/fits together. I've been writing in my vocabulary journal a lot about sounds and actions and things that are "Glasfrosch" things, and have made some great discoverie/revelations and such from the process. Hopefully this will help push me through to the next level, and I can get out of this slump that I've been in this week. We're finally moving our cat into our apartment, and that'll help cheer me up.

So I've become pretty dissolutioned with the Volume project. I've made some stuff that i really liked. Then I hated it for a while. I made some more, liked it, hated it, liked it again. Today I hate it. I'm just not interested in making music like this. It feels like a waste. Like I have to make a piece that ignores everything I value in music. Similarly with Audio Tech's Ableton project, I'm just not enjoying it. I want to focus more energy on making something that's me. So far I've made one piece this year that I value, and it's all happened completely outside the course. I understand that these projects are here to help us in our larger work, but if we're just making study pieces in every class, I'm gonna get real bored real quick. I've been talking to the students in some of the other studio areas, and they make so much and share it all the time. Their practical workload and folio requirements are huge and sound really inspiring. I've got 4 subjects worth of reading and writing to do every week, and a couple of tiny little practical assignments. It feels like my practice more or less dried up and died in the first half of the semester.
This dissolution is totally a phase though, probably part of my depression, because I didn't feel this way last week. Last week I was super positive about it all. I know these are the challenges of art school, and hope that i'll be in a better place soon emotionally.

So now that that's all out of my system, I can talk about the interdisciplinary music we looked at. There was some really cool examples of film music and other stuff played in class. Let's start with the reading: Tarkovsky. I liked the reading. It was easy to digest. I don't really agree with him, but at least he's clear. He seems to think that music in film is unnatural, and hence unnecessary. I think film, like all art, shouldn't try to be a perfect representation of life/the real world, and style - for example, the choice of sound/music/etc in film - is what makes the film's impact on the world/audience. I think it's a totally valid and valuable approach to film, to only use diegetic sound, but perhaps not the only way. I loved seeing how he uses sound in his work (The Mirror), but I don't think this is a universally relevant approach. Example, the shmultz of Badelamenti's love theme in the scene from Wild At Heart that we watched. I love the way Badelamenti scores. He's a master of creeping in out of nowhere and drawing you into a particular moment. Like Tarkovsky says, his music isn't there to always push the feeling down your throat. Much of his work in Lynch's movies is there to sustain the suspense and confusion. What could possibly be happening? Twin Peaks is a great example of that. Often long drones accompany scenes that are quite quirky, or light jazz themes play around the characters, creating relationships that may or may not become relevant/apparent for ages, but the speculation becomes open. In this scene from Wild At Heart, the music is an obvious emoticon, but I refuse to accept that as bad thing (what's with me today? I'm in such a mood of extremes).
I was really into the Altered States title sequence. Gotta track down that film. My local video store is shit and doesn't have anything. It's good to be thinking about film/visually accompanied music. It's really where I see myself headed (outside the band pursuits). I've been trying to befriend as many visual and film artists this year as I can. So I can build some new relationships and make interesting new work. I feel like there's a wall up around me with signs on it saying avoid this guy, he's no good. I mean, is that stupid or what?!? I need therapy.

Daisies. Well, weird film. We can all agree on that. I would have loved this 10 years ago. The sound was amazing. I'm definitely going to track this one down for my collection. I want to get back into doing improvised film soundtracks again. I used to do it regularly. I'd love to approach this kind of sound score with a improvised band, live on stage. It's a wanky art school word, but the juxtaposition of sound on narrative is a really interesting thing. Approaching it in music (non film music) is an interesting idea. Something like the work David Shea does, like in Hsi Yu Chi or Satyricon, sample collage/narrative. I used to be so in touch with this stuff, but it feels like all I'm in touch with now is pop. I'm interested in trying this out in something, but what it is I don't know. I reckon this week would have been a great week to have a semester break. felt like we had it way too early, but now I really need it.

I don't know if this blog is really anything worth reading, but it's been cathartic to spew it out today. My plans for the week are to finish some projects and make some new Glasfrosch demos, get our remix EP mastered, and book some gigs. Booking performances is a depressing process. Hopefully by next week I'll be a little more positive.

Improvisation. Week 6 T&P

I feel like I had it easy this week. I come from a massively improvised background, and although it's been ages since I got to participate in a large group improv, it's still definitely a subject I'm comfortable with. I'm trying to get my greasy mitts on the Derek Bailey Improvisation book, because that was a most inspired read. I was totally stoked that James picked some North Indian Classical music to listen to. I've been a big lover of Indian music for years now. I fell in love with it from reading about ragas in Bailey's book back in the late 90's, and then through the Indian/jazz/dance/electronic fusion musics I was discovering from studying at Monash and Box Hill tafe's jazz course, from Shakti to Tabla Beat Science. The latter got me interested in tabla music, and I learned tabla for several years which deepened my connection to improvisation (as a side note, I've maintained my love for Indian classical music, and have several works old and new that exploit these sounds and forms. In particular, the new aubade/nocturne series I'm working on, as mentioned in last week's blog, the ambient segues that I'm composing to join the pieces together are based on morning and evening raga forms, and will be improvised).
The other track that I loved was the Beta Erko. I loved it. I love the Vulk's hip hop style. I was really impressed with how it sounded, but even more impressed when I found out the process behind it. That sort of live processing thing is really hard to pull off well, especially when it's a group improvisation. Great sounds.
So I'm reading through my notes from class, and there's a lot of names this week, and not much else. Things that I really liked and need to check out more of. Particularly Sonic Youth/ Jim O'rourke (both of whom, I love, but only know small amounts of their work - I am in love with Jim O'rourke's project Gastr del Sol).
I loved the Guitar/bird installation piece by Celeste Bourgier-Mougernot (animal cruelty aside), although I make a distinction between chance music and improvisation, in fact, I see a massive difference between them. What I mean is, the sound being created by chance by the birds constitutes more of a chance composition than an improvisation. I think improvisation needs to be more active.

The group improvisation we performed together was great fun. I'm really glad I recorded it (will upload/post links soon). I listened back and found it really interesting (although the sound mix/levels etc wasn't flattering or evenly spread for coverage of everyone in the room). I made the choice to use my voice and a megaphone over bringing in an instrument. I considered bringing my guitar or a bunch of stuff like theremin/waterphone/melodica, but i figured that with voice I could express and experiment more, and since I don't really have a "main instrument" anymore, and consider myself "multi-instrumental/vocalist", it seemed only natural to sing. I tried to avoid standing out as sounding like a "frontman" in the music, although there are times when I did, and it worked, and I tried to experiment with a few different approaches to voice. I avoided actual words, and went for nonsensical syllables, reverse sounding stuff, etc. Another reason I chose to use voice is that it's an incredibly physical expression of sound, and I like to get really physical when I improvise, really make the sound part of my body.
There are a couple of particularly emotional moments that stand out in my memory. One was a soft moment, when I started singing melodic phrases unamplified, and the music built up around me. The other was a much more violent moment that became intensely physical and emotional for me. James had stood up near me, bowing a cardboard box, and i was convulsively attacking the megaphone, playing it like a saxophone (I had a flash of seeing Zorn live as I was squealing and squarking and muting the end of the megaphone against my leg - something Zorn does with the bell of his sax), as things started to calm down, I was making a quite gross, guttural, sick/vomit sound, and started to (in some kind of method acting way) increase the realness of these convulsions to a point where I was actually almost puking. Which hurt, and started making me really emtional. Listening back to this section is really powerful, especially when the tears and sobs and coughing start. It being real and not mock sound effects, being really in the moment with the music, and being so viscerally connected to the sound at the moment, listening back makes me kind of squeemish. In the moment, I really felt part of the music. The room and everyone had disappeared completely. All the was left was the sound.

Motive - Week 5 T&P reflection.

I think it really took me the whole 4 hour class to figure out and absorb what the hell motive even meant. I felt pretty stuck in my ways after it all. I have definitely had plenty to focus on during the break as a result. The unfortunate thing is that I was still moving in to my new apartment during the week and we still don't have the internet on. I feel so disconnected. I've pretty much used the time to be distraction free and just focus on making stuff and using my notes from class as reference/points of focus. We've definitely listened to plenty of cool stuff again. Chion's Requiem has been massively in mind as I've been working on new pieces. I've been really thinking about the motivic development of my own work. I have put the big list of motif things we made in class next to my work space to give me something think about. It's helped a bit.

I am working on a series of pieces at the moment, 10 pieces in fact, 5 morning and 5 evening pieces. These will be 2 separate Glasfrosch EPs. Aubades and Nocturnes. The Aubades are nearly finished. and the Nocturnes are still in early development. The means of releasing them into the world will be via BandCamp, and then eventually as a double CD. Each track is around 10 mintues long and serves to capture some kind of early morning ambiguity/romance. The main motifs outside of the concept of the works are the use of polyrhythms, the reverse glockenspiel and toy piano textures that colour much of my work. Dynamics and colour are big focuses in this work, as always for me. There's an aquatic vibe about it all too, which is another common motif of my work. I tend to work with concepts of dreams and sleep, the sea, other nostalgic things. As I put each individual piece together, and focusing on each as a stand alone, live performable song, it's becoming increasingly pertinent to find ways to keep them tied together. Two tracks in particular have a lot in common musically - track 3 Water Tricks, and 5 Still Life (standing on the beach) are both built on similar musical foundations and stem from some really old ideas that have developed over about 10 years. the first track, Aubade/after each sentence another beautiful mystery connects to these other pieces less directly, but still uses some similar sounds and harmonic characteristics. Amphibian and Gyokuro are the even number tracks in the series and they stand out as the most different. Amphibian is a more forceful track with momentum to spare, it represents the monotony of the day and the double life we all tend to live to get through it. Gyokuro is probably the most diverse and is the Zen like alternative to Amphibian, focusing on the sweeter details of life, and nature, and finding a connection to it all. Between each track I'm composing little ambient segues, pieces that can be improvised live to join the music together. These segues will be another motif that repeats and serve to encapsulate the themes of the music.
When and as the Nocturnes form, the same process of connecting the music will occur, but this time I will be more conscious of how it all happens, and can compose the tracks to specifically mirror the Aubades, extending the same motives into new moods.

Volume, and other musings.

Volume. Dynamics. Space. All these things have been really penetrating my process over the easter break. I've been working on some music for Alice's dance class, and some more Glasfrosch stuff for our new EP. The piece I'm working on for Alice's dance class is also something I'm submitting for Spacial Practice. The piece explores specifically space and physicality, but it's also a exploration of colour, volume, process, and rhythm. The jist of it is this: I spend a few hours in the dance studio woth the girls during their class, and recorded the sounds they made in the space during their warm ups and improvisations. then I found the parts that had a good natural musicality to them and made little phrases from them as the foundation for the rhythm. Then I cut up some individual hits and assigned them to an impulse kit in Ableton Live, and set about programming the beats. I used minimal fx, filters and EQ mostly, let the natural reverb of the space be the only reverb sound, I reversed some parts and panned them around the space and then set about using volume - dynamics - to sculpt the form. I'm going to go back to the space with y toy piano later this week, and record a little passage in the space to add some extra tonal colour to the end of the piece. The whole thing is sounding like a total Autechre rip off, but I don't mind. So what does this have to do with Volume/Techniques and Processes?
I guess this Spacial Pracitce piece is kind of serving as a precursor to the volume piece we've been set to compose for T&P. I've started paying particular attention to the dynamics and relationship to space in my process, and thinking about "volume" as we did in class last week (the jug analogy) I feel like approaching a volume piece needs to involve these two parameters. Volume isn't just about dynamics alone. Or at least, since last weeks class, I can't see it that way anymore. Volume = the dynamic relationship to the space it is in. So things like loud and soft aren't absolutes, but particular to perception within this contextual relationship. On Good Friday I went to the Gasometer to see some friend's bands play, the space upstairs there is tiny and the speakers/pa system is massive. The sound was so loud, I stayed downstairs for most of the show. It could have sounded so good and still loud at half the volume, and would have been more enjoyable, but this was painful. That same system at the same setting would have sounded tiny in a bigger space, but the room size made the whole thing seem louder.
The piece I've started for the volume experiment uses three main parts. A little repetitive plinky loop that will stay soft for the whole piece, but change tone ever so slightly across the piece to change the ways in which it stands out from the rest of the sounds.  a deeper less frequent part that will expand and grow in volume each time it arrives, and a third, long, growing layer that will take the entire length of the piece to reach it's peak. It is my aim to reach a point of absolute engulfing sound before the end, which will be very difficult to do.

Studio Piece 1 (work in progress) by Glasfrosch_Justin

Colour - Week 4 class response, T&P.

Listening to the colour of music. We started with an analysis exercise this week, for a track called Lera by Autechre. A disjointed piece of glitchy beats, noise, detuned blips and drones. Listening to the piece critically in terms of colour and form, we draw a pretty strange picture, as the rhythmic shapes and lines - lets say, the geometry - of the piece don't form any solid shape. By this I mean the piece doesn't connect structurally the way a dance/popular music piece is expected to. There's no loops, no repeated pattern or groove. Autechre pretty much establish something and deconstruct it immediately. The colours that fill the spaces in amongst the lines are off hues, almost like watered down ink blots, seeping into paper, or oil dropped in water. The use of static/noise elements in place of harmonic instrumentation adds a feeling of rearrangement, like shuffling the pages of a newspaper around.

We followed it up with Run The World by Beyonce. To begin with, lets comment on that soaking wet snare drum in the intro: WOW. The piece is mostly build with vocal and percussion layers, with elements of noise (similarly to Autechre) shuffling/colouring in the geometry of the vox/snare drums. I totally rate Beyonce.

The track by My Bloody Valentine that we listened too (I missed the title) seems atypical of what I could find online of their work. Everything I found seemed to be pretty conventional rock. The track we heard in class was like rainbow static, distortion with hints of pitch. I really responded to this piece visually. Like something by Fennesz, I loved the use of noise, but felt that this music needed something cleaner in amongst the dirt to really sound complete. I think I prefer things mixed up like that, for example, when Fennesz works with David Sylvian, The clean, perfection of the vocals over the "noise", connects the music with the listener more directly. Maybe. I don't know. Just writing that leaves a dirty taste in my (fingers) mouth. Like I said, I responded to My Bloody Valentine positively and with - a mass of colour in mind - strong visual connections.

I'd like to talk about Scott Walker and Einsturende Neubauten together. Mostly because they both did  similar things for me. I don't really aspire to this kind of thing, but I like what they're about. There's a complete disregard for what's considered as "right" in music production. I really respect that. With regard to Scott Walker, It's Raining Today, beautiful orchestrations, I loved that. It's totally something I do. That suspended dissonance, colouring in the sound. I didn't enjoy the gospel piece as much, but where he's coming from is still really interesting. Comparatively, the Einsturende Neubauten was kind of annoying, and off-putting, but in really interesting ways. The vocals were a particularly clever technique. I felt the whole piece to be a bit contrived. In retrospect it reminds me of Anthony Coleman's version of Gainsbourg's Ce Mortel Ennui (can't find a link as yet), the way the vocals are right up in your face, and the noisy colours of instruments punctuate it, but everything is about soft/gentle themes. I think the literal use of silence was what blocked me to really enjoying the piece.


Klagfarbenmelodie. Continuing a melody across different voices. Jumping from sound to sound, seems erratic and blotchy at first, until the colours blend together, and the really cleverness of the piece takes form. I like it a lot. I'm going to explore it in my own work. In a way this music sounds a bit Looney Tunes. It's likely that Carl Starling was probably influenced by this music. It's incredibly rich with colour. Lots of sounds are happening, and what's really going on, our perception of what we're refering to as "colour" is really just contrast. The tonal contrast gives the sounds a sense of hue against other sounds. These colours wouldn't be vivid on their own, but their relationship within the piece causes vibrations that generate hue. I'm not saying monophony = monochromatic. But in essence, sound needs context before it has colour. Just like a C on it's own doesn't tell us what key we're in until we hear it in context with the rest of the harmony, a pizzicato string on it's own doesn't represent any specific colour until we hear it unfold in context with the rest of an ensemble. I'm not going to try and argue about what colours correspond to what sounds or notes, because that kind of synaesthetic experience is subjective. My point is the vibrations, the tones and hues are generated in a context, and the same sound can colour two pieces differently.


As a final reflection on the class, specifically on the in class task of analysing the synchresis of sound and vision, I must say I loved the piece we looked at, and felt that the 3 of us did a great job of describing it. Mothlight was the title of the film, and the noisy, screechy piece James selected to play with it was a gorgeous accompaniment. The relationship reflected insect nature, and the television static like flashes of imagery with the almost static noise of the track was a great combination. As the colour revealed itself in the video, I found myself hearing new things in the sound. The vision really influenced the listening experience. I liked the film a lot. It reminded me of some Man Ray films, but the fragile beauty of the moth wings on the film gave the otherwise dissonant, or perhaps "ugly", surface nature of the work a natural world connection that made it more pleasant as piece went on.

Pre-class response to set readings/listening - Spectral Music - week 4 T&P

I've never heard this term before, "Spectral Music". The description in the introductory chapter certainly makes it sound interesting. Such a great way to think about tonality/harmonic movement, and by adding timbrel development to the mix, and playing with colour in a way that is usually reserved for melody/harmony, well that's very interesting to think about.

The first of the listening pieces is Lux Aeterna by Gyorgy Ligeti. This piece is probably best known for it's use in 2001: A Space Odyssey, during the "trip" scene. An amazing piece. I've always been fascinated with the vocal timbre, and I've never been able to relate it to anything else. Listening to it in context with spectral music I notice that the timbrel variations in each register resonate, or vibrate, at different relative speeds, which I guess could be due to a serial harmonic relationship. I was aware of Ligeti's concepts of micropolyphony, and his use of cluster chords, and I always related that to colour effect of this piece, and it's relationship to the colourful visuals from Kubrick's film, that I so obviously associate with the piece.

I don't know anything about Gerard Grisey. but I love this music. The harmonic/timbrel interplay, and all the weird overtones make for a sharp, electric kaleidoscope of sound colours. I'm particularly fond of the violin passage towards the middle/end. Some really interesting phrases and timbrel expressions coming from the instrument. It's interesting to me, after the first part of the reading, that the listening excerpts are acoustic chamber music. I was expecting synthesizers, or more electronic sounds. The tones and colours emanated  from these two works are a staggering display of what good instrumental players are capable of generating from their strings, or brass, etc. It's like being trapped in the future sometimes, always thinking in terms of today, and the tools we use now. When really, the electronic tools of now are merely digital representations of the great things about the tangible side of music making history.

Scelsi is another composer who's name I'm unfamiliar with. The piece in the listening has way more going on than the reading excerpt would suggest. The use of varied dynamics and timbre are obvious characteristics, the micro tonal movement and micro-harmonic layering is ear bending, and really messes with the tone of the notes. Probably one of the best things I've heard in ages actually. This is something I tried to play with a lot on my new music to fall asleep to... record. sustaining long notes or clusters on an analogue synth, and slowly moving one of the oscillators tiny bits out of tune, varying little elements of filters on parts of the sound. The idea there being something with a dreamlike, forgettable, yet totally affecting quality. Scelsi's music also reminds me of some Xenakis music for cello and clarinet I saw performed, that uses a similar idea of out of tune unisons to create micro rhythms in the beating of frequencies. That piece also contained a timbrel exploration that occurred through the sustained, detuned notes.

Of Form & Function 2: Relfections on in class listening. Week 3 T&P Part 3

It was great to begin the set of pieces for listening/analysis with Fennesz. As a big fan of Christian Fennesz's work, it helped contextualize the whole focus of the class right away. Being asked to listen to music in a critical way is made easier when you begin with something familiar. The piece we heard was Before I Leave from Fennesz's album Endless Summer, a record that has such an incredible effect on me, an influence on the way I approach sound, guitar playing, remixing, pretty much everything. In fact, I can say that about his entire body of work, his solo work, the collaborative stuff with Ryuichi Sakamoto, and with David Sylvian especially. I've never really looked into his process, in terms of gear or software etc, but his approach to sound, in particular his approach to noise, and it's place/context within the world of music has been something I've, let's say, ripped off in my own music. What I like about his music is that he makes static and distortion and other "noise", and makes you hear them in a soothing, melodic context. The world is full of noise, and it is full of beauty, and Fennesz makes us aware of them as equal, connected parts of the same world. Before I Leave stands out on Endless Summer insofar as it is the more rhythmic piece from the record. When I say rhythmic, it is because the essence of the piece involves micro loops of different content, that create an almost skipping cd effect, or similar to a plug-in with Ableton Live called Beat Repeat. It's as if there is a sweet ambient  sound piece going on, but we're hearing it in tiny looped chunks. The form of the work is simple, there's a chord progression, with lots of variation in the timbre, and each looped chunk plays for roughly the same amout of time. Sometimes the loops feel longer or shorter, but it's an illusion created by the loop points being off center with the sound fragments.  So the function of the repetition in this work is to make something static into pulse, and then to use the inaccuracy of the loop points to create variations within the pulse, and thus create a natural, human effect/emotion/narrative in/of the piece.

It's interesting and difficult to discuss form when speaking of loop based music. When you look at say, Beethoven, it's easy as there's movements and modulation and lots of phrases that can be grouped in certain ways. Or when you look at jazz, and early pop music, there's verses and choruses and bridges, middle eights. Looking at music like Before I Leave makes you turn on you sonic microscope (oh, the Doctor Who imagery that implies), and you have to listen for form in other places. At least with Fennesz there's a sense of harmonic/melodic progression that can be followed, and repeats recognised, but that brings me to the next piece we listened to in class, by the group Pan Sonic. A minimal synth piece, it follows a predictable pattern of building and layering, with a new sound coming in every 8 counts, there's long sounds and short sounds, long bass drones that cycle through their pitch material half the time to the rumbling sound that opens the piece. A high VCF sprinkler effect that acts as a faster, almost hi-hat part. Everything is pulsating, and when things get dense enough, parts drop out, then come back, the variation of layers becomes the form of the piece. But Pan Sonic are much more elegant and complex than just that. Where the function of the repetitive layers develops the piece through variation of dynamics and textural layers, there's a slowly building layer of sustain rising up beneath the piece. The tension it develops as it coincides with the progression of layering, pushes the music up and over the top. It's a much more interesting sound than simpler minimal (techno) music that uses only the add and subtract process. In this piece by Pan Sonic, the form is articulated differently to Fennesz, but it's use of repetition is the same. Both use the repetition as the pulse/rhythmic function, but where Fennesz has a form built on a progression of tonal material that has it's own development and repeats, and is texturally (more or less) monophonic (although there are complex elements like the different frequencies of static within each sound fragment, the layers cut from one to the next, not overlapping like the latter piece), the Pan Sonic music is built from polyphonic textual density, and a dynamic build across the whole piece which gives it a single form, from start to end without a repeat.

When I think of form, and what it means, it's really hard to break away from the classic definition, as described in the week 1 reading chapter by Schoenberg. I don't know why. I guess I'm a structuralist at heart. I like to have my beginning and middle and end, I like to have narrative, I like things to be clear. I'm also a bit of a surrealist (or let's say, fan of surrealism), and so the music I make is more of an imagined structuralism. Maybe it's because I'm a product of too much fantasy and scifi escapism. I want a story, but I want to escape reality at the same time. I want to be able to follow the form, but I want to get lost in it too. Like lucid dreaming. To use one of my own pieces as an example of what I mean, Girl In The Grip Of The Octopus, which I played to the class last week. The piece has definite sections, and their relationship is apparent across all the musical elements, but the way they connect is amorphous, until the end when the rhythm has built up and solidified itself. While the narrative of the form isn't following and predictable convention, it's still there and easy to follow. Like looking at a Magritte, or Dali painting, where all the elements are what they are, but the context is unusual. It's interesting to add, that this piece is also a good example of my "ripping off" of Fennesz, in the melodic-noise style of the opening soundscape.

So can we apply the notion of organicism to the music discussed above? It's pretty easy to surmise each piece. In fact playing a brief excerpt of either would be enough to give you the full idea, but is it fair to reduce music like this? It may be a functional way to analyze, but does it give true representation of the music's journey. I don't know if organicism can represent a piece's emotional content. In the case of Fennesz, if we were to just hear a 5 second fragment, we'd probably only take it as a CD skipping. The emotional journey is lost. Like waking up and only remembering a few images of your dream, you can remember how it felt, but when you try to describe it, these tiny fragments of  images do little to help convey the same feeling. I implied in my last post that I saw organicism as a subconscious element of a compositional process. Perhaps by doing things consciously the music could lose it's dream-like quality. This could be how process music, and minimalism differ from my more dreamlike structures. I had a chat with a friend at school (Tash from my art history tutorial) who said she liked my intros the most. She said she didn't like surrealism (unprompted, which was cool, because she obviously got what I was about) and would have liked it better if the intros just kept going, admitting she prefers minimalism as a process. I'm not sure how I feel about this yet. I'm not upset about it, in fact that's not what I mean. What I mean is, I'm not sure how I feel about the music having to function as one or the other. In the process of composition for something like Girl... there was lots of minimalist techniques and things that could be called process music. I generally use those as experiments to find interesting new sounds or parts that I can then apply to the form more consciously to paint the picture. I don't think the parts, or indeed the processes on their own are enough, and I like to think of my own music as more thoroughly constructed. Sure there's the methods in which I distill everything down, as I mentioned earlier, but that distillation isn't the music, it's merely how I refine the themes and connect the dots. I certainly am not interested in making music like the violin piece by Peter Arblinger we listened to. I loved the concept, and the analogy of the samurai drawing his sword was a really amazing idea, that someone would create this as a performance piece is cool enough, but I'm totally uninterested in making or listening to music like this. Process music, and indeed minimalism is so academic. It comes across as a study, not an expression. Perhaps it's that paradoxical notion of loving the concept but not loving the result that brings up all the headachey thinking, and like I said, I'm still not sure how it all makes me feel. I don't know if it's even worth over-contemplating. Hang the sense of it and proceed.

The next two pieces I will talk about and compare are by Bernhard Lang, and 3/4 Had Been Eliminated. Bernhard Lang's piece is a (supposedly 3 hour long) opera (I didn't catch the title). I honestly thought for the first minute that the piece was a sample collage. Such a dense assembly of parts, and the use of micro-repetition made the piece almost completely indescribable. Looking up his work to refresh my memory hasn't helped. A piece of his called I Hate Mozart was similar to what we heard in class, but I can't tell. While the whole of the work could be described, or illustrated by a mere fragment of the piece, it's hard to tell if we're still listening to the same piece or not since the phrases and repetitions don't function regularly. That is, they repeat in irregular fashion, and create a jolting from reality. I had to look up more of Lang's work to get any kind of perspective, as we commented in class, it's so dense that it becomes forgettable. The effect of the repetition serves it's purpose, but the music itself doesn't retain any conscious tangibility. I'm Youtubing Das Theater der Wiederholungen, and even as it plays I can't follow it. I'm definitely not saying this as a bad thing. I mean, I listen to heaps of music like this, but Lang takes it to a whole new level to what I'm used to. If I was to compare it to Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, or Ruins, Boredoms, Zappa, or even Naked City and Fantomas, all of those acts have parts and songs that instantly got me hooked. I say hooked in a pop sense. Passages of music that stick in your mind, riffs or melodies that you hum along to or rock out to even after you've turned it off. This is takes that idea of collage, and overloads you with it. I love it. I've been trying to put something like this together for ages. A collection of tiny pieces that have so much going on you explode. I call the project KUNGFUEPILEPSY named after the dance moves you see metalcore kids doing at gigs nowdays (seriously, what happened to the mosh pit?) The plan has always been to construct a heap of less than a minute pieces that have so much going on they feel like an eternity. How this is going to work has been a troubling process, and originally I wanted it to be a band. Lately I've felt it'd work better as an electronic process. Pretty soon it'll be at a point where I can start putting it together, but mapping it out and figuring out the sounds is really challenging. Challenging like the experience listening to Lang's work.

On the flipside to this, we have 3/4 Had been Eliminated, a piece called Widower. An awesome post rock piece, reminiscent of stuff by Set Fire To Flames or 7 Year Rabbit Cycle. In this piece the repetition was over a much longer scale than with Lang. In fact one could stretch a similar comparison between 3/4 and Lang as Fennesz and Pan Sonic. Where Lang is looping tiny parts and cut/pasting it all together (for lack of a better description) 3/4 Had Been Eliminated develop there repetition over the whole piece, adding and subtracting parts in really interesting ways. The piece maintains it's mood and form across the whole arc, but lots still happens. It's way less dense than Lang. It a great piece in fact to compare because they're both long, and both use an element of collage in their process, but 3/4 sparseness makes it a much more enjoyable - or more so, an easier to enjoy - listening experience. The journey is followable. The shapes and colours stand out. I feel a close relationship to my piece described above. I guess the post rock genre which is often very obvious about it's long repetitive, droney sections, has kind of spawned a new spin off in the sense that bands like 3/4 are deconstructing it. I definitely (if and when I'm forced to) see my music as stemming from the post rock genre. In a literal sense of post = coming after, and taking the elements of rock music into new territory. Most of the time when the term is bandied around it's describing something like Mogwai, instrumental rock that's built on repetition and dynamic build, but I think that may have been where the description merely begins, not the extent of it's scope. There's lots of bullshit talk about genre and sub-genre, post progressive rock and whatever, and all that is totally irrelevant to me. Anyway, I loved this music and am hunting it down to add to my collection.

To summarize this analysis of form and the function of repetition, it's worth noting that while i've said above that I find it hard to break free from the classic definitions of form, listening to music, and thinking about form in process, reducing things down and how that reveals things particular to the piece has been a really challenging and enlightening experience. Things we do when we create sometimes happen without knowing or thinking of the relationship to the history of our art form. This delving in and out of the macro/micro repetitions has deepened my understanding of perhaps where my place amongst all this is headed.

As a post script, I just wanted to comment on something we only briefly touched on in class, to do with composing for live/recorded contexts, and how they might be approached differently. Where with some recorded music, and the 3/4HBE track is a clear example of this, the production is what makes it interesting, and how that kind of music can be translate to the stage. Also, with something like Lang's work, does it translate better as a performance piece, and is the meaning lost when heard on record? Most musicians are conscious that the stage and the studio are very different entities. There are things that you can't do live, just as there are things that you can't capture to tape. So does an artist today have to work in both media. As a class we're all very studio focused. I am too I guess. I have been focusing a lot of attention on writing for the live band. Where if you go far enough into the sky you'll come out underwater was mostly written in the studio, I did take performance into account, and while some things aren't performable live with the band, and other are perfectly performable, there's also an element of adjustment to some piece to get them to work across both platforms. I came to this action from a concept record I put together over 2005-7 called new music to fall asleep to (lullabies by Justin Ashworth). The idea was that people were always describing things I had been making as "beautiful" and "soothing" and "relaxing" etc, and lots of people were described listening to it when they went to sleep. So I thought I'd prompt them, and in a way pull the piss, by making an ironically titled album of ambient music. People, particularly those who reviewed it often didn't get it. Didn't get the irony, didn't listen beyond the title of the record. It's dreamy and soft, but it's not meant to be soothing. I was attacking that notion by exhausting it. However, I wanted to create some kind of live context for the project (which was really hard to do in Melbourne's noisey bogan pub world) and I quickly realised two things: 1) It's near impossible to get people to a show when you call it music to fall asleep to. 2) People tune out if there isn't something to engage them, and the most obvious things to engage a live band audience are drums and vocals. And so some of the music had to change to make it work live, and in doing so, a band, the band I later called Glasfrosch, grew from the process of change, which has developed my music to where it is now. The current direction with Glasfrosch is working on two sets of contrasting yet complimentary thematic music. One set for morning, and one set for night. The process of composition is focused dually on making the material performable live, but also on how to produce the recording s so they give something the audience wont get from a show. Since it's hard with recorded music to engulf the listener in the energy that a live show creates, it's important to create some extended experience to compensate. Or in reverse, where certain production techniques aren't possible to convey with the same clarity from the stage, it is that performance energy that connects with the audience. I think it's probably a moot point, but most of us experience this revelation early on, from seeing our favourite recording artists perform live.