Blog
Groundwater: solo guitar, projections, identity.
Groundwater: Bloodlines
Groundwater is a series exploring the deep currents that intersect around culture and heritage through the lens of stories, legends and myths. Culture in this context is a shared understanding of commonalities and traditions, in this case Celtic bloodlines.
Transformations form the core of this exploration that uses texts, quotations, projection and live performance of solo guitar. From the tragic transformation of stolen children into the long lived and weary swans (the Swan Children of Lir) to the descent into the wild creature of fur feathers driven mad by loss and grief (Geilt) to the quest for healing through sacred springs (Sequana).
Of all the things to create within a musical context, transformation is very demanding. The three pieces demonstrate different modes of transformation: switching from one persona to the other in suddent bursts (as in Geilt); the imposition and gradual take over by the sound of the Whooper swan as the children remember less and less of their former lives before they were swans (as in Cygnet Song); or use of a plaintive ground bass over which lamentations fall and wash away (as in Healing Waters). All these pieces required multiple rewrites over months to find their path, once again affirming for me that solo guitar works are never an easy proposition, and works that feature transformation (not to be confused with a set of variations) are perhaps the hardest of all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPN1eUOidTs
Groundwater: Place
Groundwater is a series exploring the deep currents that intersect around culture and heritage through the lens of stories, legends and myths. Culture in this context is a shared understanding of commonalities and traditions, in this case growing up Australian, under Australian stars, sun and the bush.
Depictions of elemental forces and their relationship to female spirits within the culture of first nation peoples form the core of this exploration. I use texts, quotations, projection and live performance of solo guitar. The sun (Febrile) represents a relentlessness and a brutality to me, but it is also the bringer of light and life, a force so immense that there is nothing to be done but witness its passage. It is this force that is always feminine in First Nations creation stories. The Sheoak speaks, as she has always done. For as long as I can remember I have wanted to depict the always- changing sameness of the sounds of the Australian bush. The evening/morning star is distant, cool and reliable. She is named and represented differently in every nation but is always a guide. Sometimes a guide that links this world and the eternal, sometimes a guide for the traveller.
These three works are all of very contrasting musical character, where capturing mood is the priority. The mood of the stars is created by a work constructed only in 7ths (occasionally inverted as 2nds) with two variations. The mood of the sheoak starts with A major 7 and shifts in and around it as pitches move and return like the wind stirring the leaves. A search for always-changing sameness. The mood of the sun needed to feel like that of pursuit and unpredictability with bursts and explosive energy like the hydrogen flares that power it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHDEs46YE0A
Groundwater: Legacy
The third part in the trilogy has been composed and will be recorded and shared soon.
Supported by the Strathnairn Arts Association (ACT), composed, filmed and recorded on site.
1. New Shoes: grasslands in this region are important ecosystems and home to more kangaroos than I have seen in a long time, but they are also a love of mine – the enormous variety of colours and the constant shifts in movement are something I adore. I was immediately struck by the suburban sprawl around the site and the destruction of the grasslands in vast quantities. The juxtaposition of the shiny and new with the old and “empty”; the truism that new shoes are always uncomfortable until they are worn in; these are explored along with the things we forget while all the changes are taking place.
2. Hum: situated near the convergence of a vast network of overhead cables, the cabin is less than a kilometre away from Canberra Substation. At night when the wind dies and the birds and insects hush for a brief moment, there is an ever-present hum from the wires and the substation. Underneath single posts, recorded by my little field microphone, the clear pitch can be heard of something approximating the first string of the guitar. Closer to the substation, which closes out the track, the hum is multi-pitched and very loud. I feel the hum, I hear the hum, I see the hum everywhere.
3. Rift on Rift: this place is more brutal than I remember, the wind, the savage changes in temperature, the ferocity of the storms, the crushing beauty of the sunsets. Rawness exists here. The simplest of all the musical tracks, four layers only, simple and reverent.
4. Fragment 36: The gorgeous illuminated stump in the video lies on the property of the Strathnairn Arts Association. But, well, sometimes the illumination fails. Then what to do? Is Songs gift Best?
My Mind is Divided (2025):
Interactions between layers of sound, visual cues and accidental occurrences.
My Mind is Divided (2025) grew out of a curiosity to explore interactive responses between visual imagery and musical cues. Unlike many of the works I have created as a site-specific response to a location during a residency, this was never intended to be adaptable to a live performance, but instead serve as an exploration of the possibilities of layers of music and spoken word (tracks) - up to nine simultaneous layers - that can be brought in and out in response to movements and images. Because this is a video and a fixed realization of the possibilities of the layers, the musical interactions are prioritized, however many of the sounds on the tracks were recorded with the guitar or the voice, as it is a noisy place. I began by investigating to see if a pure sound were possible, without the pervasive roar of traffic or airlines but it was not. The bird and frog life around the cabin was also vibrant, intense and ever-present, and are simply incorporated into each track. There are also layers that are simply field recordings of insects, frogs and birds as an ambient underpinning to all of the other recorded layers over the top.
Invitation: Immersive performance experiments
Performed at Fitzroy Salon in September 2024, was another step in my experiments towards an immersive performance experience. A featured work was a full performance of Tributaries, originally commissioned and written with the assistance of the City of Melbourne in 2024.
The project grew out of my yearly visits to Native Dog Creek in New England NSW, a gorgeous place of evocative red grasses that would change enormously depending on the seasons and rainfall, as well as a refuge for wild dingo populations. It had became a kind of pilgrimage for me to visit there as a way of communing with father after his death, it was his wish to have his ashes scattered there and in my walks, observations and time spent there, an idea developed to express the different sides of the place, and the different meanings it held for me, through a larger composition that would entail film from various sites along the walks at Native Dog Creek and field recordings. To create five very different faces it was written for voice guitar and percussion in different combinations. I had also found a poem, Falls Country, by Judith Wright written by her about the high country and it’s people from her time near Armidale, and incorporated snippets of it into the live performance.
1. Breath for guitar and voice
2. Restless for guitar and loop station
3. Colours for voice, guitar and percussion
4. Together for voice and percussion
5. Tributary for solo guitar
We also presented the premiere of an arrangement of Birds by Sally Whitwell for soprano, guitar and marimba, performed in conjunction with a short film. One of those songs, Nightingale:
New Recording Undomesticated Pockets: Evocations of Wild Places
New recording: undomesticated pockets: evocations of Wild Places
Undomesticated Pockets: Launch and live performance
Launch and live performance of Undomesticated Pockets, February 24th 2024.
A Panoply of grey: for guitar and loop station.
Composed in 2022 for the Artist in Residence program at Falls Creek for guitar and loop station.
Sessile Conversations: music centered installation around the senses of plants
Sessile Conversations grew out of research into the sensory corollaries of human to plant – what is seeing like for plant compared to what is seeing like for humans and how can that be explored through music?
Re-imagining and Referencing: Depression Era Songs in new Compositions: “Spare a Candy Mountain Dime”.
I wanted to reference the emotional core of the song, the genre of the original song (Tin Pan Alley, Hilly Billy, Blues and Humorous/Novelty) and melodic/lyrical content. I have not reproduced large parts of the lyrical content, instead using fragments of the lyrics, sometimes more, sometimes, less and built a song around those fragments using my narrative guitar procedure, where all of the elements of the music are organized around story telling.
Narrative Guitar
In its most stripped back form, narrative guitar is just me and my guitar. It is me working at the intersection of storytelling and music.