The First Performance
Last weekend, I overcame a challenging week of technical obstacles and a flu to perform the first full-length iteration of Hearing Now at Floating Land. As a special addition to this first feature, I welcomed to guests to perform with me, Julia Beiers and Sachi Deva. Julia and Sachi are past collaborators of mine and some of my favorite people to work with; they understand ambience, intention, and duration in the same intimate ways that I aspire to. We had a wonderful, low-light rehearsal in my living room the night before, with subtle tones scoring rising tongues of steam that rose from our from warm bowls of dahl and rice. I shared the project’s centre of amplifying, revealing, and decorating ecology and the environment, and Sachi instantly saw the parallel with Raga and the Indian classical music tradition more broadly. Sachi has increasingly enjoyed her undergraduate study at the Conservatorium as a way to formally engage with her Indian heritage, and has written several essays now tracing the lines between Raga and Jazz. She affirmed my use of the word ‘decoration’, sharing that this was also her first impression of the role of music in India - this word explicitly. I told her how I feel I have falsely, yet accurately, attributed my use of this word to Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. While I still have never found the quote that I believe I remember, I continue to discover its accuracy.
Our rehearsal jam featured playful, sparse improvisation over nocturnal field recordings gathered from lake Cootharaba, with a particular highlight when I drummed with my fingers on the underside of a zither and Julia improvised on her fretless bass in waves. Julia has a remarkable way with the bass, with plucks and bows she speaks like a whale in a distant ocean, deep glissandi echo through infinite chasms and massage the chest. She is infinitely curious, never afraid to play outside; a constantly surprising, inspirational, and comforting collaborator. Julia, Sachi, and our two friends Madeline and Anangsha who joined us to watch, enjoyed hearing about my progression with the project thus far, encouraging me to explain further. I demonstrated the wind sensor and shared some improvisation techniques that we might explore on-site. These included:
Play the horizon as a melody
Sway with the trees
Echo the environment.
Sachi reacted aghast; “Anything is possible!” Each of these ideas were not necessarily engaged explicitly in the performance, but worked well to inspire the frame of mind with which we approached it.
Julia and I woke with the sun and stretched out in its warmth on the patio. While the rest slept, we bathed in birdsong and shared sparse whispers between deep breaths. I relished the slow pace - the week leading up to this performance had become one of rapidity, forgetfulness, and insecurity. Frustrated by a coalescence of technical malfunctions, I had begun to feel wildly unprepared for this project - I had not developed any environmental sensing beyond my wind sensor (and even that had broken), I had an output die on my interface, and I realized I had lost one of my field packs - with it some important cables, my hydrophone, and my Zoom H4 field recorder. I want to say this is unlike me, as I am usually quite organized and reliable with my equipment, though I do fall victim to periods of lightheadedness in this way. To top it off, a head cold had nailed me halfway through the week, and I was still overcoming the last of it while meditating with Julia on the patio. Over the years, Julia has been a great source of clarity regarding the mindset with which to approach performance, and in this mode especially one’s attitude and mindfulness is of paramount significance. I was grateful to be invited, by her presence, to take the time to centre, slow down, cultivate attention to the world, and experience each moment. This, and several other moments over the weekend, stood as helpful reminders of what I had managed to prepare for this project - a considerable amount, as I now thankfully recognize. Slowly, the rest of our little crew emerged, and we meandered into the day.
We arrived at the lake and arranged our equipment at the water’s edge in a small cutting of beach between groves of paperbarks. Laid out on two mats were two zithers, a harmonium, Julia’s bass and amp, my two flutes, two mics, and my modular synthesizer leaned up against the easel. I had the others help me gather some suitable sticks to apply my clip-contact mic to, which I fed into my Resonator module. We were to play seated, or kneeling, on the mats. My battery PA stood wide, at the rear corners of our performance space, allowing us to hear the master mix. I accounted for feedback by facing the mics outwards, which also allowed Sachi and I to face inwards from the left and right sides respectively, with Julia facing the audience in the centre. There was a lot to set up - I had a new ADAT interface and my laptop behind the synth to multitrack record the performance, cables had to be run, field recorders and an Insta360 camera had to be set up to record documentation. I opened a field kit case to see my newly glued-back-together wind sensor again shattered… The mindfulness I had cultivated in the morning was proving tough to maintain. In my rush, I forgot to pin up the posters directing people to leave voicemails as survey data. I threw these onto the sand between us and the audience fifteen minutes into the performance, Toby helped by picking them up and distributing them.
The performance itself was wonderfully gratifying. Beginning with meditation, we shared moments of focus by trading movements, each taking turns to respond to the environment over my undulating drones. I took an early solo on my bass bansuri and relished the impact of duration on my playing. As I have found before, there seem to be two distinct phases of improvising a solo in these settings - firstly, playing musically, in the typical aspect, exploring melodic forms and contours - but then, the duration strikes, and I feel musicality become tiresome before the impending length of the performance ahead of us. I feel thoughts like “Surely I can’t flounder through half baked melodies for that long!” This pushes me to listen - listen - listen - I hear a bout of lorikeets calling, interspersed with honeyeaters, call-and-responses across the scene. I join in by trying to mimic the melodies of the calls, creating sporadic, staccato calls on the flute in higher registers. From these emerge new melodies, in off-kilter rhythms that I couldn’t have arrived at otherwise. In a later flute solo, on my alto bansuri, I found myself imitating the wind with my breath, exploring the simple sounds of blowing, without notes, on the instrument, and gradually increasing the resonance. In this way, I think time shows itself to be an indispensable part of the kind of site-responsive performance I am carving out. Call it ‘decorating’. I need the time to exasperate myself musically, to begin really listening, listening until I begin to hear myself contributing.
Later, just over an hour into our two-hour performance, we embarked on a great crescendo. From the beginning, we had moved from Eb Major, to E Minor, and were now landing in our final key of E Major. Sachi had found a melody - a minimalist one bar ostinato, which she shifted through phases by exploring its rhythmic relationship to the delay I had applied to her vocals. I strummed the zither at regular intervals, marking measures, and Julia recontextualised the ostinato by moving through related tonics. The movement built, and I stretched my free hand out to unclip keys in the harmonium to form a major 7th chord and pumped the bellows to form a drone. The crescendo ascended, and ascended, cresting to the point where, in a more traditional setting, we might have let it break and disperse. But - duration strikes again - why let it fade? We have all the time in the world. Duration has funny impacts in these performances. We held the crescendo there, at its peak, and instead chose to explore its other possible permutations. With sustained intensity, Sachi further manipulated her ostinato, shifting and flipping and transposing. I picked up the harmonium and took off into the crowd, attempting to further activate space by shifting the sound source around the audience, maintaining a musical constant but modulating all the early reflections and spatial dynamics between source and receiver. Julia held the line, grounding the phrase some semblance of progression. At the time, I did feel as through the crescendo was pushing the limit of how dramatic I wanted to go, but I didn’t intervene - the journey was as much for Sachi to lead. Finally, finding my seat in the performance space, we let the wave break. Our culmination subsided, into the space, into the water, where the magic of contrast worked to highlight the subtlety of the environment. The lake, now caressed by the soft light of dusk, was showing notable changes in color compared to when we began. Soft wavelets lapped at the tiny sand shore. Breaths of wind simmered in the expansive paperbark canopy behind the audience. Again, Julia, Sachi and I meditated. I wondered where we could possibly go from here - but withstood worry, and instead fell into the beauty of the scene, with soft eyes and a warm smile directed at the lake’s far shore. I noticed Julia was still in her original position facing the audience - that’s not right! She needs to see the scene - I caught her attention and gestured to turn around. That sorted it - it was a key transformation - and together, with the audience, we witnessed the lake’s first slips into twilight.
I checked the time - still 25 minutes to go! What could I possibly fill that with?? We gazed at the lake…
Again, duration strikes. So much time - time to do things ever so slowly, so gradually, at pace with the changing afternoon, with the oncoming twilight. I laid the zither across my folded legs, took deep breaths, and watched the undulating ripples of the lake approaching the shore. I noticed their regular rhythm - their tempo - by keeping my eyes on a specific spot on the water, and measuring the time between consecutive peaks. With this time, I ever so lightly began tapping rhythms into the underside of the zither. Dividing the tempo into threes, I slowly began hinting at a shuffle rhythm, allowing some syncopated taps to land harder, and then letting their impact sink into the scene. I recalled the paintbrush in my pocket - I had stuffed it there as an option to use on the zither (they sound great) - and brought it into my right hand. With my left tapping the rhythm, I began letting the brush fall on the strings on the twos and threes, completing the shuffle (one two three one two three). Julia joined in. I noticed Sachi staring out to the water and drawing fluid lines in her notebook. Entranced by the ever approaching ripples, Julia and I tickled around the shuffle rhythm, peeking from behind musical blinds as we listened and responded to each other. I reached for the synth and tuned the clock to the tempo of the lake, allowing me to introduce some in-time delays. Gradually, I allowed more of the brush’s handle to impact the strings, introducing percussive hammered notes that rung out into the distance. The zither’s major-seventh open tuning introduced a sense of peaceful emotion to the harmonic space. Though I haven’t mentioned it until now, I had regularly improvised with the contact mic’d sticks throughout the performance, grating them across one another to create unpredictably struck chords in the resonator. Now, I performed the mic’d stick with more intention, hitting it with my palm to mark bars in the rhythm, creating measures with decaying major chords. A second, lighter crescendo was building - though this time we kept it subdued. Multiple rhythms, each inching towards impact and backing off again, interwove with one another. They felt playful, as though responding to the more sombre prior movements of the performance. When this movement felt to have run its course, I gave one final impact on the stick, listened to it as it receded, then reached to my mixer to ever so slowly turned down the drones. We let our contribution sink into silence. Only the ambience of the place remained, dependable and significant.
The reception of the performance was very positive. Each member of the remaining audience (who were admittedly friends, family, and my supervisors) had witnessed the entirety of the performance. Many looked as though they had just awoke, they were dazed and seemingly surprised to find themselves at the lake. My impression was that the performance had achieved the desired goal, and this has become more evident through the feedback I have received since. Later that evening, at the Apollonian Hotel down the road, I recorded the conversation between Sachi, Julia, Madeline, and myself as we reflected on the performance and shared our experiences. Largely, we discussed the stagecraft of the work - the presence the performance held, the audience behavior it encouraged, and the key change that occurred when Julia turned to face the lake. We also discussed our respective experiences of the improvisation at length, in particular the effect of duration and how it pushed us to engage more deeply with the place. Julia described how the experience allowed her to feel like more than just a ‘visitor’ to the place, instead feeling like part of it, or a contributor. For me, the conversation was refreshing, and has since really helped me to identify what it is that I am actually doing in this project. I will dive into this with more depth in a consequent journal entry, but the re-centering of music in the discussion that took place by having Julia and Sachi there shone light on just how far I have come. Breaking free from the naturalized practices that constitute ‘music’ (perhaps ‘musicking’), considering their semiotic influences, and identifying how to change them in light of new goals really has been the story of Hearing Now up until this point. Not a failure to create new site-responsive tech, not necessarily a direct application of Sonic Ecologies or any theory from discourse, but an evolution - from musician (in its most practical sense) to - something else? An artist? We aren’t at the end point yet. But was has become apparent is that my evolving understanding of art, music, semiotics, and perceived-neutrality (I’ll explain later) really is a key part of this Masters project, and not something that I am embarking on separately. This is where the preparation that I have achieved is - I made the easel, I built the off-grid PA, I designated duration as a non-negotiable, and I secured a festival programming that allows me to iterate an idea over five features. These are all, at least in part, departures from the infrastructure of ‘music’ in Australia - an infrastructure that is collapsing in on itself and leaving many who depend on it stranded.
