filling up - improvisational songwriting

finally a stretch of time for some sound-making but what it was to be i didn't know....turned out to be another sketch-song. seems to be a bit of a project of mine - to create short songs as improvisationally as i can - as few recording takes as possible. the idea is to come up with something and to record without working out structure or nailing down the part.

this song ended up being just under two minutes long with three guitar parts and three vocals.

i am still sometimes a bit at odds with myself as to why i do these sketches. am i not brave enough or disciplined enough or clever enough to develop a 'piece of substance' ever again? at times i feel torn between music-making, song-writing and, now, sonic art or sound-making...so much to do so little time. if left to their own devices, these pulling thoughts can create havoc with the self esteem.

but there are other reasons to do these sketch-songs that are more about running towards than running away from something. they bring out a type of play which allows for synchronicities and for the working of subconscious which, i guess is what i need when feeling back at the beginnings of making.

Ross Bolleter

whilst out one day catching up with myself and wandering through the tributaries of the internet, i happened upon Ross Bolleter and his ruined pianos. Marvellous!

I discovered Ross and the ruined pianos from the video post below (thanks to Everyday Listening):



the excerpt about Ross occurs at 3'30". once again it caught my eye because of the interplay between sound, music-making and site - the 'landscape' of the music-making object and its subjectiveness to time and environment. how this music-making is truly linked to the physical context it appears in - the extent and possibilities provided by nature's tunings and the responsiveness of the improviser to this. unique music-making from unique materials.

Each Ruined Piano is utterly unique with respect to action and tuning (if we can talk of tuning at all). An F# one and a half octaves above middle C on a West Australian Ruined Piano in a semi-desert environment differs radically from the same note on a flooded piano in a studio four floors below pavement level in Prague.

A Ruined Piano has its frame and cabinet more or less intact, (even though the soundboard is cracked wide open, with the blue sky shining through) so that it can be played in the ordinary way. By contrast, a Devastated Piano is usually played in a crouched or lying position.

A piano judiciously left in the open and exposed to all weathers will ruin. All that fine nineteenth-century European craftmanship, all the damp and unrequited loves of Schumann, Brahms and Chopin dry out, degrading to a heap of rotten wood and rusting wire. The piano returns to aboriginality, goes back to the earth where the chirrup of its loose wires blown about by the desert Easterly is almost indistinguishable from the cicadas’ long electric blurt.

However, it’s not necessary (or desirable) to burn, drown or bury a piano in order to ruin it. A Ruined Piano should ideally be an object trouvé – and be played as found.

ROSS BOLLETER from The Well Weathered Piano (WARPS Publications, 2005) as cited on Modisti

an excerpt from the album is found on the above link - i am getting this album! beautiful sounds.

long time no hear...

well, it has been such an incredibly long time since i have appeared here - it was getting more difficult to do so - but here i am - if only to say hi and start again.

i moved house about a month ago which took me out of routine for a few weeks, but for some reason, this feeling of displacement, busyness-with-nothing-really-to-show-for-it, a feeling of over-emphasis on house/domestic/practical matters etc etc has just continued to elongate! i finally need to stomp it on the head and try and find some semblance of interest in the things i were interested in and involved with - if only to regain sanity!

and - so it seems - combining strange sounds and making little non-consequential movies still seems to reign. the movie below was the culmination of an improvised sound-play session combined with an attempt at small movie-making which combines my love of origami with my budget/material capabilities. hopefully this play and more like it will give formation to a larger piece - but for now this is it.

crude awakening

this piece crude awakening was performed by chris black and myself in 2008 as part of our sonic arts studies at victoria university. the piece utilised radio static and a speaker chain whereby contact mics attached to speakers picked up sounds from speaker boxes and transmitted them to other set of speakers - this altered the sound as it traveled through the chain.

we also utilised contact mics picking up the sounds of guitar strings and wires being shaken and then further processed. we also placed a speaker against a shower bath, picking up this altered sound using additional contact mics on the bath. there was also an old operation game used.

a high point of the performance occured when chris sawed into a speaker - wot fun!

both chris and i loved the raw sounds generated using these materials. this was probably one of my favourite performances throughout the study period. i also thoroughly love working with chris. we did a larger version of this idea using the fixtures and fittings of the adam art gallery which i will post at some stage.

i wanna go home

this is another intuitive composition by my guitar student Vaitoa. i continue to enjoy this process of immediate composition - and who better to explore this with than Vaitoa. Vaitoa had a play with slide guitar and recorded two parts one after the other. he then sang freestyle over the guitar parts - the resulting song was i wanna go home.

we then made a home movie separate from the song and then placed the song with the visuals. the video begins with an improvised dialogue which beautifully leads into the theme of the song.

sound of the day - blind wanderings

well, i was sitting here listening to the backyard compositions of tristan and sebastian when i heard a backyard sound of my own - a kind of knocking and scraping that sounded like it was coming from the backdoor. it was a little unnerving actually as my mind went through all the possible known sounds of the house and tried to ascertain what it might be. the cat doesn't usually knock or scrape at the back door - no it's not him as he is right now staring at me through the front window. the only thing left was to investigate. upon opening the backdoor this is what i found

landscape as musical score - playing the backyard

a fantastic project in line with my house study beginnings - this live improvisation by tristan louth-robins and sebastian tomczak using field recordings from their backyards. the material was processed in real-time using ableton live/plogue bidule.

more information about the work can be found on disquiet and tristan's blog. sebastian also has a blog here