Floating Land Launch

I’m writing in a new week, it is Wednesday the 2nd of July, and I today I begin preparations for the first full-length Hearing Now performance of Floating Land this Saturday. Last Saturday, I performed a preview version at the festival’s launch at the Noosa Regional Gallery. As mentioned previously, I had experimented with some options for live input at a picturesque little grove on the Noosa River by the gallery, and it is here that I performed. A video of the full performance is included below:

Though I had identified the matted growth of riverside plants as a source of live input through a contact mic, I hit some obstacles when it came to using this in the performance itself, mainly to do with the contact mic not having a balanced output. This was fine during experimentation, as the cable run from the mic to my Zoom H4 is short enough to get by with an unbalanced signal, but when I extended the run with a 10m XLR to reach my performance location the signal gained a horrible buzz. It almost sounded like the cable was picking up some electromagnetic interference, as the buzz changed character as I moved the cable. Additionally, when I did bring the signal into my PA, I could not amplify it to an adequate level without feedback. The proximity of the mic’d plants to the speakers was simply too close, and I needed significant gain on the signal to capture the sounds within the branches. Instead, I opted to ‘fake it’ this time around, and simply used a contact mic recording taken from a paperbark at Lake Weyba. I sold this as being genuine to the audience - oh well - it was disappointing to be disingenuous, though as I am increasingly aware working in this space, sometimes aesthetic quality is more important than technical authenticity when appealing to an audience of broad demographics. Perhaps that could suggest an area for future research…

Stylistically, the performance was ambient, peaceful, and largely successful. I performed the synthesizer, a zither, and my bansuri, with the two acoustic instruments strapped to my body, adding a sense of an ‘adventurer’ to my presence as a performer. My reflection on the music is that it suited the setting well, but it was perhaps too drone-based. My feeling is that it might have proven challenging to hold audience attention for much longer than 30 minutes, though some of my conversations with attendees after the performance counter this feeling. There were several allusions to ‘losing sense of time’. That said, I have added some rhythmic elements to the synth patch, predominantly polymetric sequencing of filter cutoffs applied to the drones. Combined with slower sine-wave modulations, these rhythmic additions add a sense of micro-structure to a larger macro modulation which I think will help to captivate audiences’ ears in a more active way.

Raga

Another element I have added in the synth is a long sine wave modulating the cutoff of a highly resonant filter applied to a harmonic sine wave oscillator. With quite a minimal range, my idea was that the filter would scan through the harmonic series, and ideally create a highly synthesized version of an Indian ‘tanpura’, an instrument which is used to repeatedly arpeggiate three note chords as a drone base in Raga music. I have long been deeply influenced by Raga, particularly through mid-century American experimentalist composers who were more directly involved with Raga music, such as La Monte Young and Terry Riley and their training with Prandit Prahn Nath. While learning the bansuri, I have been trying to interact with this tradition in a more formal way, but online resources have proven difficult to navigate and relate to. This pushed me to my bookshelf, where I rediscovered ‘Discovering Indian Music’ by Raghava R. Menon, a book which I have owned for years but only ever perused. There are several passages that aptly articulate the connections between Raga and the sonic experiences I am trying to cultivate in this project, which I sensed intuitively but have struggled to draw direct lines due to my informal encounters with Raga until now. Menon writes:

“An essential quality of a Raga is that every time it is played or sung, it makes a new effort of attention. This attention, renewed each time, discovers new worlds within the town world and opens windows to the sun. Its possibilities are infinite and yet it always remains unfinished. Its ending is always a temporal ending. This is one reason why a Raga can be called the ‘Music of the Immediate Present’. In the immediate present, there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing is finished. Everything is flying and quivering. It has the quick of both, the past and the future, and yet it is neither. We can see the invisible in it, laden with mystery and revelation, candidly open in its transit. Uncomposed, as in a ‘Kriti’ or a ‘Cheez’, the Raga is on an incalculable pilgrimage of creation. It does not want to get anywhere. It just takes place. In this lies its only kinship with Jazz. The clue to its utterance thus lies in the performer’s insight into the instant.” (p. 3)

As can be read here, the prose in this text is exquisite. There is a tangible focus on the cultivation of the performer’s mind as a key - if not the key - to performing raga;  the “insight into the present”. This is congruent with many other encounters with the Indian tradition that I have had through literature, particularly in the works of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and through the writing of John Cage. To refrain from diving too deep here, I will simply say that it is becoming increasingly obvious that the kind of music performance I am interested in looses its novelty the further you venture from popular Western musical traditions, and that I would be very amiss to not engage in at least some deep study of non-western music practice. I have also engaged with some sources on Japanese shakuhachi performance, which through its relation to Zen priorities similar kinds of cultivation of the self and a very explicit relationship to the natural world. These traditions definitely appear to prioritize attention to and participation in nature; they approach music as a vehicle to experience nature and in particular natural timescales, where the moment can be entered - where duration can be witnessed. Continuing this entanglement, I have listened to some new Raga this week, and been especially inspired by the Pakistani singer Vilambit Khayal, the work of which provides wonderful examples of interplay between zither and harmonium in a Raga setting. 

Next Steps

Today, I will revisit my MIDI weather station creation. After being unsuccessful with the Micro:bit (it can not pass MIDI over USB) I will now attempt to hardware the wind sensor into a Teensy. The Teensy should be able to pass MIDI over USB and thus allow me to use weather data in the synthesiser without a laptop. Happy days!