sonic sketchbooks

release date: 02 march 2021

This program is an interview with mesotonal composers and musicians Kraig Grady and Terumi Narushima who together as the duet Clocks and Clouds.

I travelled to their home in Unanderra south of Sydney to speak with them about the insrtuments that Kraig designs and builds, their compositional strategies and the ways that each space they play in modulates the sonic production and experiential affect of their music.

You can find out a lot more about Kraig and Terumi’s activities at the website anaphoria.com

This week's program is a live recording of rehearsals I did in preparation for an experimental music night on 24 August 2018 at Servo in the steel city of Port Kembla south of Sydney.

Mesotonal composer and colleague Kraig Grady [anaphoria.com] invited me to make a performance in the evening program that also included music students from Wollongong University, and the headline act Whirlpool, a duo of Kraig playing his mesotonally tuned vibraphone and renowned keyboardist Chris Abrahams playing drones on a small harmonium.

My performance titled ‘sonic event for found voice and electronics’ involved setting up five wifi speakers on the stage which were fed sounds from ipods, iphones, littlebits electronics and a Koma FieldKit effects mixer all of which I manipulated live on stage.

The inputs included CV generated electronics, excerpts from my field recording library and voice fragments of biologists talking to their tape recorders while field recording animal sounds - the found voices.

It was an experiment in mixing together disparate sound modalities to create a poetic sonic event existing somewhere on the margins of music but well inside the territory of sound art.

This program presents three soundscapes I generated to accompany the exhibition of an 8m long drawing work that I made during a residency at Stacks Projects - an artist-run gallery space in Potts Point, Sydney.

The soundscapes are constructed from recordings of simple autonomous kinetic drawing apparatus that were set up and left to operate for extended periods of time without intervention. Each apparatus is a unique combination of modified turntable, found objects, rods, cables, and pens, in an assemblage suspended from a camera tripod. Over the week-long residency, 50 independent drawings were generated on a long roll of heavyweight drawing paper gradually unfurled on the floor.

The making of each drawing generated rhythmic patterns of sound that I captured with a digital audio recorder placed near each developing drawing at floor level. The sounds were manipulated by layering, time shifting, EQ and other simple effects, to produce three collections of six minute tracks that were replayed in the gallery from three spatially separated speakers. Each sequence had varying periods of silence between tracks - a compositional strategy to ensure modulation of the soundscape dynamics in the exhibition space.

These sounds derived from production of the drawings, infuse the exhibition space with an unusual musicality intended to inflect the viewers reception of the exhibited ‘ecology of aleatoric drawings’ - the 8m long sheet having been lifted from the floor and hung on the wall.

This program is a one-hour composition of evolving sonic construction shaped from my library of field recordings and other inquisitive recordings made in my studio and bush hut.

I work by selecting a collection of tracks of interest, randomly dropping them together on a digital timeline, then intuitively shaping the sounds by time-shifting, re-arranging, layering and effecting, listening and re-listening until a certain enigmatic register emerges.

I consider this practice to be a form of immaterial sculpture, locating and shaping sounds in aural and poetic space, setting up open-ended allusive and abstract relationships between disparately collected sounds gathered from my direct lived experience and from my formal experimentation in the studio.

These compositions can provide an interesting alternative soundscape experience - that is, an alternative to broadcast or streaming media services - for artists, writers, or anyone engaged in creative flow activity

sonic sketchbooks podcast - episode 05

release date: 02 february 2021

installation – ‘dreamfield 48/15’

This episode is a recording of my 2015 installation ‘dreamfield 48/15’, an homage to John Milton Cage Jr, the American 20th-century avant-garde sound artist, composer, writer, philosopher, provocateur, mushroom expert and visual artist, who has been a lifelong inspiration.

The work comprises a large drawing on paper hanging on a wall, and, opposite this, a few meters away, a bench seat with two sets of headphones. 

The pencil and ink drawing is a hand enlarged version of the sheet music for John Cage’s 1948 composition Dream. I replaced the scored notes with painted orange dots to create a visual representation of Dream’s pattern of sound.  

At the bench seat headphones, two separate sound sources combine into a single stereo stream. One is a piano recital of Dream played by artist colleague Barbara Campbell. The other is excerpts from my field recordings made in Kyoto in 2015. 

The two sources play continuously and are not synchronised. The field recordings play in random order, and the piano recital loops, creating an autonomous cinematically suggestive mix that varies all the time. 

While the field recordings evoke minds-eye images, the listener looks at the real-world drawing and perhaps tries to match the drifting lyrical piano notes with their corresponding orange dots.

dream field 48/15

ink on paper – 2250w x 1500h mm, electronics (2 x iPods, custom cable, 2 x stereo headphones),

audio media, bench seat

release date: 26 January 2021


Guest Episode - Jon McCormack ‘Eden’

This week's program is the first of two episodes with digital media artist, musician, programmer and Director of the innovative Sensilab project at Melbournes Monash University, Professor Jon McCormack. 

Jon and I have been colleagues, collaborators and friends since the mid 1980s. He has a remarkable oeuvre of work, more well known and acknowledged internationally than here in Australia. Before the advent of COVID19, he was always on his way to or from somewhere in the world to install his works, present papers and lectures or undertake an artist-in-residency project.

This episode is a conversation about his digital media installation project Eden. In a second episode we discuss his digital music software Nodal.

Xi'an, Shaanxi province, China, is the site of ongoing work of archaeology, conservation and exhibition of the extraordinary relics of first emperor Qin Shihuang (259–210 BCE). This episode presents excerpts from a soundscape I developed for "The First Emperor - China's Entombed Warriors", a significant exhibition staged in 2010 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. 

Then-director Edmund Capon invited me to develop and create the exhibition's multimedia elements. In addition to video projections and screens, we envisaged an atmospheric soundscape for the main exhibition hall where the two-thousand-year-old life-size terracotta warrior figures were to be displayed.

The soundscape uses two distinct types of sound - ambient compositions by artist and musician Ian Hamilton who I invited to collaborate on the project, and short, suggestive field recordings I made from source material provided by a China-based cinematographer. 

These two sets of stereo tracks played simultaneously and unsynchronised from four speakers high in the corners of the two-storey space, ensuring always unpredictable combinations of music and field recordings.

Ian developed his contributions from recordings of traditional Chinese instruments, ancient bronze bells, and a Taoist ceremony in a remote mountain village. He manipulated and transformed these found sounds to shape slowly evolving musical sequences, alternating quieter openness and louder complexity. And his sounds move spatially through the stereo field, drifting around the listener.

To accompany and complement Ian's music, I prepared excerpts from field recordings representing the elemental forces of fire, water, air and earth - rustling bamboo, forests at night, wind over sand, rainfall, insects and native birds. 

In combination, the sounds provide a subtle cinematic register to the listening and viewing experience. 

The original soundscape tracks were close to an hour's duration. The episode’s 20-minute example includes two of Ian's ambient tracks in full, accompanied by a randomised selection of my field atmospheres.

In late 2018, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, commissioned me to create new large scale video projections for the entrance to their exhibition Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality. And our multi-speaker soundscape was again used in the main exhibition hall.



Roles: 
Gary Warner – concept, implementation, atmospheres 
Ian Hamilton – musical arrangement, manipulations


Episode 02 track list:
timings rounded to closest 5 second interval

02:55 - 26:15
soundscape for main exhibition hall ‘The First Emperor: China’s Entombed Warriors’ - excerpt
END

I’ve been experimenting with sound derived from everyday things for decades. In 1981 friends gave me John Cage’s book Empty Words because of my predilection for musicality over music. Musicality arising from the use of non-instruments and coalescences of chance, autonomy, simplicity, chaotic systems and bpm-less open-endedness.

My ‘aleatoric ensemble’ continues this fascination. It comprises a growing number of similar units, based on a small USB turntable modified to allow variable rotation speed. Combinations of trays, boxes and tins with balls, quandong nuts, marbles and other small objects inside are assembled in ad-hoc fashion on each turntable.

Set in motion, the constructions turn, the objects move, balls roll, and surfaces are struck, generating a strangely captivating, repetitive but always slightly variant musicality. They’re a type of crude analogue sequencer varied by rotational speed and selection of objects.

Multiple turntables with various combinations of prepared objects are set in motion simultaneously to create complex soundscapes. Each instrument/device can be played by slight variations in RPM and addition or subtraction of different objects.

Ideally, the ensemble is used in performance and installation contexts because I want the audience to experience the sounds made by the system in real space and time, preferably over an extended duration. But I also make many compositions using my recordings of different aleatoric ensemble combinations.

aleatoric particles

‘aleatoric particles’ is a suite of 45 compositions, each of two minutes duration, created for a public art soundscape commissioned by Adelaide City Council, South Australia. Primary recordings made using the aleatoric ensemble were manipulated and mixed with excerpts from my field recordings to produce this unique collection of experimental sonic sketches. 

Seven examples are included here in the podcast, introduced by an incorporeal voice.

Episode 02 track list

timings rounded to closest 5 second interval

01:30 - 04:05

excerpt from ‘The Bundanon Sonographies’, 2018-2020

04:55 - 14:15

recorded rehearsal for performance ‘an aleatoric ensemble [+ other sonic miscellany]’, Articulate project space, Sydney, 12 November 2017

14:55 - 15:45

soundtrack element for performance ‘Scientarctica’, That Space, Brisbane, September 1986

17:10 - 32:15

seven of the ‘aleatoric particles’ series, 2017

END

Episode description

This first episode of the Sonic Sketchbooks podcast is a rhizomatic composition of excerpts from upcoming episodes, an introduction to some of the types and uses of sound explored in the podcast series. The following playlist includes notes about the sequence of sounds, and the episode from which each is derived. More information about each episode will become available at the time of the episode’s release.

Playlist for Sonic Sketchbooks Episode 01

timings rounded to closest 5 second interval; compositions, artworks and field recordings by Gary Warner unless otherwise noted

01:25 - 02:35

field recording of A Quivering Marginalia, an installation by Gary Warner and Jon McCormack at the University of Sydney College of the Arts Gallery, 07-30 July 2016 - Ep 10

02:30 - 03:05

interview with Professor Jon McCormack, Zoom, 07 July 2020 - Ep 04

03:05 - 03:55

soundtrack to Eden, a digital interactive installation by Jon McCormack - Ep 04

03:50 - 05:10

exhibition soundtrack for An Ecology of Aleatoric Drawings, Stacks projects, 2018 - Ep 07

05:00 - 06:50

field recording of frog pond at Ryoan-ji, Kyoto Japan, 16 May 2017 - Ep 13

06:50- 07:05

Clocks and Clouds performing, Newtown, Sydney, 20 July 2019 - Ep 09

07:05 - 08:20

Untitled Intuitions, a sound art composition - Ep 06

07:55 - 09:50

field recording at Origma Reserve, warm, overcast, still, 4pm 24 November 2019 - Ep 12

09:45 - 11:00

05 July 2020 - Jeff Doring narrating while listening to audio he recorded in 1971 at Obeimi, New Guinea - Ep 14

11:00 - 13:05

Nagra field recording ‘Biami Music 30’ by Jeff Doring, Obeimi, New Guinea, 1971 - Ep 14

13:00 - 14:45

exhibition soundtrack for The First Emperor: China’s Entombed Warriors, AGNSW 2010 - a collaboration with Ian Hamilton - Ep 03

14:40 - 16:05

field recording - Keihan Line subway approaching Demachi-Yanagi station, Kyoto, 2015 - Ep 13

16:00 - 16:30

Clocks & Clouds performing at the Ort Festival, SNO Contemporary Art Projects, Marrickville, Sydney, 05 May 2017 - Ep 09

16:25 - 17:25

exhibition soundtrack for An Ecology of Aleatoric Drawings, Stacks projects 2018 - Ep 07

17:25 - 18:35

recorded rehearsal for performance at Servo, Port Kembla, 24 August 2018 - Ep 08

18:30 - 19:45

Soundtracker, installed in the Single Man’s Hut, Bundanon, 9 April – 7 May 2017 - Ep 11

19:45 - 21:20

interview with Clocks & Clouds: Kraig Grady and Terumi Narushima, Unanderra, 05 November 2020 - Ep 09

21:10 - 23:00

Clocks and Clouds performing at the International Memorial Day for Lost Species salon event at Articulate project space, 30 November 2019 - Ep 09

22:40 - 25:55

exhibition soundtrack for The First Emperor: China’s Entombed Warriors, AGNSW 2010 - a collaboration with Ian Hamilton - Ep 03

25:45 - 27:30

Soundtracker, installed at ES74 Gallery, Alexandria, 17 November 2016 - Ep 11

27:10 - 29:20

field recording of water running in a hillside gutter at Jakko-in, Ohara, Japan, 28 July 2015 - Ep 13

28:00 - 29:20

Barbara Campbell playing Dream by John Cage, Camperdown, Sydney, 09 February 2015 - Ep 05