Part 2
Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?
My creative process is iterative. If I’m writing scored music for an ensemble such as in a piece like The Plains https://australianartorchestra.bandcamp.com/album/crossed-recrossed I use improvisation to develop material, then I transcribe the interesting moments.
Often I also to get together with some of the musicians I am writing for and set up a little experiments. I record as we go then edit assemble that material in a DAW and play with combinations of sounds etc. Again, if I find some interesting possibilities I transcribe them then I bring the scored results of those experiments to the full ensemble to play. I record them then draft again and so on. Unfortunately, I don’t always have the luxury of that kind of time but that’s the ideal.
The works in Shadow Phase were also developed iteratively and each started with an improvisation that was then cut up and refined and edited and added to. The development of these solo works is a little more intuitive process I think than the larger ensemble works. I just push musical materials around until I like the sound of them and until they create a particular resonance in me.
Lawrence English was also very involved in the development of Shadow Phase as producer and we spent a lot of time bouncing ideas back and forth. He really helped me to focus the large amount of material I generated into a journey over the course of two sides and 45 mins duration.
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?
I mostly like to listen to music in concert and I try to go to lots of live music. I like the social aspect of music and I go through long periods where I listen to very little recorded music. If I’m working on music, often the last thing I want do is to put on more music when I finished my work. So I listen to a lot of podcasts and if I want to hear music I go out.
So generally I think I prefer listening communally. With regards creating music, I like both the social aspect of working with other musicians as well as the solitary process of composing or working in the studio. I think for me they balance one another.
We musicians are lucky to be able to make our work with other people, it’s really a great joy for me. I get my ideas and energy for the solitary creative work from the time spent playing and interacting musically with others.
How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?
Music has many roles in society and I like to think that my work does have a social function, that it provides some kind of ‘nourishment’.
It seems clear that on some level human beings need music, even though there doesn’t appear to be an evolutionary reason for this, and I do always think of the audience for my music and what kind of gesture I am putting into the world.
I care if you listen! But I’m not just trying to entertain. I want my music to be asking questions and hopefully making the listener think.
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?
Shadow Phase is actually partly the product of me dealing with the death of a close friend, poet, Ania Walwicz. I wrote this at the time:
“Most of this record was created in the shadow of COVID and deep in the maw of Melbourne’s 2020 long winter lockdown. It is a meditation on the nature of connection. Restricted to a 5km zone, one of the only people I saw outside my family during this time was my old friend and teacher, Ania Walwicz. We met in the overlap between our zones on the waterfront near Docklands to walk and talk on bright, cool winter afternoons.
Those conversations became large in my thoughts when Ania suddenly passed away in September. Her voice was in my head as I worked on this music, trawling through threads of ideas, recordings made on my phone, and thoughts jotted down in notebooks.
Ania’s practice as a writer relied on ‘automatic’ processes. Her work was informed by everything she had read (a lot) but it was created in the manner of dreams. In a state where the subconscious might bubble up and the words arrange themselves into meaning bearing forms that resonate more than represent.
I thought a lot about that as I made this music. I recorded everyday using the trumpet, my old Revox reel-to- reel, a couple of synths, a harmonium I lent from a friend, and whatever else was around. I worked mostly on just diving a little deeper each time I sat down to it.
Through the simple process of exhalation, I explored my relationship with the trumpet, which has been through so many twists and turns. I let the tones produced by my breath unfurl on long tape loops and degrade be- yond recognition through pedal and plugin chains, until the only imprint of the initial gesture remained.
My process also involved long bike rides during which I’d listen to the work of previous days on ear buds, gliding through familiar streets made slightly strange by the absence of people and movement. Often my rides took me along Footscray Rd next to the port, and as I washed down towards Docklands past the old boat moorings I stopped pedalling to coast. The sounds from my darkened studio mingled with the low rush of air past my helmet, the click and whirr of my bike gears, a squalling bird, a whooshing car. And I remembered my last conversation with Ania. Sitting in the late afternoon sun, squinting against the light that raked across the water, she was telling me about all the different words for they have for blue in Polish and Russian, and how words don’t just change our perception of things, but also actually change the thing being perceived.
As I rode home that afternoon, I felt like anything was possible.”
How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?
I alluded in an earlier question to the fact that as artists we have to be prepared for ‘unproductivity’. I think artists and scientists have this in common.
In science failure is a crucial part of the process of working towards new knowledge. Sometimes hundreds of experiments might be inconclusive before a result points to something promising and this is kind of similar to art. The other similarity is that when we do find that our work is moving a productive direction, the discoveries we make can often be surprising.
Some of the greatest discoveries in science are made by researchers working on seemingly unrelated problems. I think that’s true in art as well.
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?
Creativity and art are different though related. This is not an easy question to answer without writing lots of words, but I think performing or writing a piece of music can be very much like making a great cup of coffee, or it can be ‘art’. It is about intention.
If an ‘artist’ declares that a gesture or an object is ‘art’ then it is, indeed, ‘art’. There follows a collective response as to whether it is an effective or resonate work of art and that’s kind of separate in a sense.
In 1917 Marcel Duchamp (or perhaps Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven) offered a urinal as a work of ‘art’ by declaring it so, signing it ‘R Mutt’, and exhibiting it in a gallery. This work called, Fountain, was certainly effective as well as controversial and shifted our ideas about art and creativity. In 1952 Cage contextualised silence as ‘art’ and profoundly influenced our entire discourse about music, sound, and performance.
I’m not presuming for a moment to compare myself to either of these giants but I like to think of my work as part of an ‘artistic’ discourse rather than a creative ‘craft’ such as making a great cup of coffee. And that’s not to say one is somehow ‘better’ or more important than the other, they are just different.
The art that I get excited by offers some insight into the human condition, or makes us see / hear things in a different way. Or perhaps it holds up a mirror and reveals things about society that would be hard to otherwise understand. So I offer my music as part of this discourse and I think maybe it’s up to others to fathom what it expresses!
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?
I don’t think anyone has an explanation for this and I’m not going to attempt one! And perhaps the fact that it’s so unfathomable is one of the reasons we are so drawn to music.
T S Eliot said, ‘Poetry can communicate before it is understood.’ That notion has always fascinated me and I think it relates to ‘musicality’, except that the difference between words and music is that words do have an explicit meaning, whereas notes, rhythms, chords, and the other elements of music have no meaning at all.
