Name: Christopher Hale
Occupation: Bassist, composer
Nationality: Australian
Current release: Christopher Hale's Ritual Diamonds is out March 3rd 2023 via Earshift. It features an ensemble comprising of Minyoung Woo, Jamie Oehlers,  Andrea Keller, Simon Barker, Chloe Kim, and Nadje Noordhuis
Recommendations: View the late work of Meeyakba Shane Pickett, the great Nyoongar painter from Western Australia. His deep cultural knowledge and individual language of gestural abstraction is dynamic and thrilling.
Listen to Australian singer Gian Slater’s monumental synth-pop album Grey is Ground. Slater creates a world of swirling rhythmic complexity and groove with poignant, earnest songcraft. A genius album.



Over the course of his career, Christopher Hale has worked with a wide range of artists, including Peter Knight of the Australian Art Orchestra.

[Read our Peter Knight interview]
[Read our Peter Knight interview about his creative process]



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

I started playing music around age 12, and was soon fortunate to have a wonderful teacher, a Brazilian percussionist who introduced me to an enormous musical world of music. I spent my teens playing Brazilian choro and Afro-Cuban music, but it was a family of flamenco musicians who became my most formative influence.

I joined the acclaimed dance company Arte Kanela and stayed involved with those artists for 15 years. Flamenco music revealed possibilities of rhythmic complexity, groove, drama, and emotional power that are still my main concerns today, far away from flamenco music.

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects, and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?

Like everyone, my body moves to music, and this movement in turn influences my perception of the music.

Synaesthesia remains a little understood area it seems, but I do have colour associations with numbers and harmonic keys. I remember jazz standards by the sequence of their colours as they go through kea areas, for example. This makes changing keys easier too. (I imagined this was purely subjective, but in a surprising coincidence I once saw a YouTube video offering a harmonic analysis of a famous John Coltrane tune. In the accompanying graphics, the key areas appeared in the same colours that I associate with them!).

The relationship between body movement and rhythm has been a central theme of my music for the last ten years or so. Realising the potential for specific body movement to unlock rhythm can achieve beautiful, sustained complexity without complex thinking.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

The bass guitar is a contested instrument in a sense – there are opinions about what it is before any music has started.

I have no allegiances to any style of playing or moral duties concerning what the bass should be, and via my influences and upbringing I have created a way of playing that is personal. My voice developed by following my body’s natural movements, creating materials from this starting point, and growing those materials on their own terms into a language that can be flexible.

I have never set out to copy someone else’s style, even in my youth.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

I would say that contemplation of my own feelings about myself is not central to my relationship with music.

If I listen to music only insofar as it reflects some idea that I have invented about myself, then my world will be soon become too small. Narcissus saw beauty only in his own reflection, and he never left the poolside. If I produce music to project some idea of myself, then before long I will have to manipulate a listener into thinking that idea also.

Music to me is an invitation to surrender already unreliable and illusory ideas of self.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

In my music I feel that I am chiefly concerned with what might be called the dramaturgy of musical events, how sounds influence each other as they progress through time. How to weave a spell and evolve it over the course of a piece of music. How to create a world and fulfil an emotional arc within the atmosphere of that world.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

Over time, some musical styles deepen their emotional and conceptual dimensions, while appearing to remain similar in their sonic characteristics. Other styles change sonic characteristics rapidly, but without much progression of thought. Still others change rapidly, as result of rapidly expanded understanding.

The formulation of originality / innovation versus perfection / timelessness suggests a dichotomy which is misleading. What constitutes the relationship between innovation and tradition is complex and requires deep listening and attention. It takes intimate familiarity with a traditional musical practice to recognise a performer’s originality in that context, for example. Likewise, it takes insightful listening to hear the throughlines that connect disparate musical styles.

Apprehending only the outward appearance of novelty (as if this constitutes innovation) can mute this kind of listening and keep our understanding shallow.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

The bass guitar is the instrument to which I am closest, and often the most flexible expressive tool I have.

A breakthrough for my bass practice followed a period of around 8 years of study in Korean drumming and rhythm, especially the breathing-based body movement system for rhythm called hohŭp. I identified hohŭp concepts that had the potential to change the way I deal with the relationship between body movement and rhythm on the bass.

The resulting systems I created represent a major development for my music.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

I balance my time between family life, music, teaching and writing.

Could you describe your creative process based on a piece, live performance, or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

I return to a particular structure in my music often, which represents a classic form in its way. In this form, the meaning of the piece is realised in its last section, often a repeated coda section. The preceding sections of the composition are designed to build to this moment.

An example of this from my recent album Ritual Diamonds can be heard in the song “Minor Diamonds”, where a gentle song form builds to an epic, thunderous expansion.



This form is meaningful to me, it requires patience of the listener but fulfils a dynamic and emotional destiny for the piece which I hope rewards this patience. In my mind, it’s “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush, Stravinsky’s Firebird, or “La Tarde es Caramelo” by Vicente Amigo.



A surging of sustained emotional energy that is a uniquely musical experience.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

The balance of both is important to me. Sincere collaboration requires patient listening and attention, becoming intimate with your partners’ musical world. Then, beneath the surface, there will be some common ground, a meeting place to build something new together.

But to be fully present for this new moment, I need to practice. To develop my craft to the best of my ability, so I can be free of my past and answer whatever the music asks, without any technical or instrumental hindrances. This work is done alone.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

My work and creativity relate to the world because they come from the world. Music does not play a role in society as though separate from it; it grows from society. It blooms from human life, emerging from human complexity like an apple emerges from a tree, or buzzing emerges from a beehive.

It does not have a role in society, it is an expression of society itself, the collective sound of society in action.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

I can recall a period of great disappointment and loss, when I felt the values upon which I had built a part of my life were being erased. At this time, I listened to the same album every day, returning to it again and again.

I remember that I imagined in the music a sense that another way of thought was possible. And waiting for me.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?

Of course, music is vast and mysterious - it is nature expressing itself, like everything else, so it can be difficult to understand. A curious musician, like a scientist, can pay attention to its mysteries and seek to reveal them, while at the same time being at peace with inevitable ignorance.

To me, the more we understand music the more beautiful it becomes, partly because we are growing our own capacity to apprehend beauty through the effort of the search.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

It is true that mastery of one discipline can reveal universal principles that may be recognised in other domains. I think of Miyamoto Musashi: “If you know the Way broadly, you will see it in all things.”

Making coffee, for example, can be a forum for careful attention, and there are some analogous aspects to music making: honing concrete skills and techniques in the pursuit of a sensation; the potential to refine, grasp subtlety, restraint, detail. When words fail in discussions of music it is common to resort to these types of analogies. But the analogies always strain, and ultimately do disservice to music, because they diminish the variety of experience, rhetorically treating all sensation as the same.

Ultimately, what you express through music that you can’t with “mundane” tasks (no matter how attentive you are to them) is musical feeling. Music expresses musical feeling, which is unique among human experiences.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

Our inner lives are complex, and music reaches our ears with its complexity intact – it does not come to us parsed and broken down, to be digested in small, rational pieces. The sounds are combined and flood us all at once.

We create the meaning of this complexity in the churn of our inner complexity. And we are diverse, and potentially deep.