Updates

Of late there hasn't been much posted on the blog for reasons outlined very briefly in the previous 'Blog Hiatus' post. So I've decided to take some time to plug the gaps on what has been an eventful and mildly productive month of March.

Arts and Music:

Adelaide Fringe Festival round-up

The Adelaide Fringe festival was a crippling disappointment for me this year, with an uninspired vis arts/performance program and a few saving graces in the music programme. Apparently this was a very financially successful festival with attendances up from last year's festival, but the 'safe' middle of the road fare that has dominated the programme in the past couple of years (primarily comedy) is threatening to turn the Fringe into a literal joke.

Adelaide Festival of Arts round-up:

By contrast, what I saw of the more upmarket (and better realised) Adelaide Festival of Arts was consistently excellent. Highlights include the Speed of Light exhibition, the Adelaide Biennial, Hossien Valamanesh's in-conversation artist talk, The Imaginary Menagerie and Michael Riley's 'Cloud' photo montage that stretched along North Terrace.


One image from Michael Riley's 'Cloud'

Graffiti Research Lab:

Unfortunately, I haven't had much of a chance to keep abreast of the Graffiti Research Lab's movements in Adelaide, though I did get a chance to have a chat with one of the visiting members who encouraged me to check out New York sometime soon. Lauren and I had some fun with a bright blue throwie on the way home that night.


GRL opening at Artspace


The throwie finds a home on a gutter

Miscellaneous exhibitions:

A couple of exhibitions around the first half of the month were good too. The SASA gallery and Liverpool street art space offered up some inspiring and creative works including this shredded assemblage of vinyl records (below).


Shredded records

Womad:

This year's Womad was by far the best I've attended in several years. Musical highlights included the suave Mariachi Victor Valdez and his pimping white harp, the Jazz Fusion of Billy Cobham, a Japanese Drumming trio and some enormous fire murals around the festival site. It was a hot and dry Sunday - a little too much cider was consumed and the dustbowl conditions were inhospitable. I'm very glad I don't have a respiratory condition.


Victor Valdez at Womad


A suspended fire mural

Some live music:

Cat Power gave a splendid performance at the Governer Hindmarsh, prowling the stage with a hot shit rhythm and blues band backing her up. It was a distinctly contrasting performance to the depressing spectacle I witnessed in 2003 when she tearfully exited the stage mid way through her set.


Cat Power

The following night Ron Sexsmith delivered the goods at Fowler's Live in a mercurial set with a bassist and drummer forming a tightly knit trio. It was perhaps not the most appropriate venue for Ron's stuff (questionable acoustics and PA), but this couldn't take anything away from a brilliant performance.


Ron Sexsmith

Research and extracurricular:

Sick:

The dust at Womad and a heavy schedule took hold upon my returning home from Ron Sexsmith with a mid-tempo cough and two weeks illness commenced in the midst of Adelaide's record breaking heat wave. In other words, I became sick as a puppy. Thankfully, antibiotics are pop-rocking my world.


Ink sketch "Continuum Fruit": 1st March 08


Masters research:

The research stalled dangerously at the start of the month and I've since tried to get things running again with measured success over the past week. In May I'll be delivering a research update (ostensibly an amended version of my previous research paper), so this is providing some much needed impetus to get things done.

Robin Minard Mentorship:

Lauren and I met up with Robin and his partner Susan on a psuedo-wintery night about a month ago as Sonic Youth played downstairs from a friend's studio. It was good to see Robin and Susan after about two years, and although still heavily jet-lagged, Robin was his usual erudite self, offering some helpful advice on my research as well as making some preliminary plans for when Lauren and I get over to Germany in September. The following day, Robin and Susan headed south to the Coorong on a research gathering mission with 20,000 Euros worth of audio/video gear. Robin's expected back in Adelaide over the next couple of days, it will be good to catch up and see what he's been up to on his travels. We might even be able to figure out what exactly we'll be doing together as well.


Robin Minard's 'Sounds On Paper'

Rolf Julius:

I managed to establish contact with German sound artist (and good friend of Robin's) Rolf Julius, whose been mentioned in this blog a few times. Since he's based in Berlin I'm hoping to drop by his studio during the Germany trip. Cheers to his daughter Maija for her prompt reply to my queries and her Dad's email!




EAF 2009:

The belated EAF proposal for 2009 is virtually finished, taking up the stack from my Shoot collaborators and knocking it into some coherent sense. Once it's been submitted I'll post some info on it. Lauren's on board too as a Shoot member which is nice.

ACMC Sound:Space:

I'll be attending ACMC (Australasian Computer Music Conference) this year, I just have to write a paper and put a work together. Since the conference theme is right up my alley, it would be a shame to miss this opportunity to get my work amongst a broader realm of peers.

So all in all, it's been a frenetic and frustratingly busy (and sick) month - here's hoping April is a bit better adjusted and free flowing. There's plenty to get done.

The Imaginary Menagerie & Northern Lights

As someone who has (so far) found the 2008 Adelaide Fringe to be severely underwhelming and lacking imagination, it was a welcome relief to experience a couple of performances and presentations for the opening of the 2008 Adelaide Festival which restored my faith in Adelaide's festival season.

The Imaginary Menagerie consisted of three 20 minute sets by Hidden City in the gregarious atmosphere of Elder Hall. The combination of electronics and live instruments was very good at times, especially during the quieter moments when Stephen Whittington's Satie/Monk piano came to the fore. The sound overall though was a little imbalanced at times though, as Derek Pascoe's saxophone occasionally drowned out the other instruments. However that shouldn't discourage from the good overall performance by the group and the fact that this was the first proper electronic/experimental music performance I'd seen in Elder Hall in eons. Hopefully it will be more of a common occurance in the future.

Afterwards, the festival opened proper including some lovely (albeit slightly gaudy) projections on the facades of prominent buildings along North Terrace. A nice night.

[22.11.06] Mismanaged

On Monday afternoon after work I went to a launch party for a new book on the ledgendary Australian composer Percy Grainger. It was held in the Grainger Studio (also home of the Adelaide Symhpony Orchestra), and due to the events affilliation with the Elder Conservatorium there were an awful lot of horrible logos everywhere and a few people I regretted making eye contact with.

Grainger was certainly an eccentric character - aside from a fondness for masochism, leathergoods and crafting garments out of beachtowls, he invented a variety of his own instruments and made several (unsuccessful) attempts to overhaul the English langauge with his own brand of psuedo Dutch/English. In reality, this Grainger langauge sounds more like the way an academic writes after a few years of post-grad study whilst being stuck with a dissatisfying lecturing position. Like a snake eating its own tail (meow!).

His music is interesting, a kind of quasi-obsession with transcribing folk songs whilst absorbing Asian and American influences into his work. During the launch, one of his pianola works was played - a transcription of a neo-romantic-classical piece. The piece was transcribed for both the piano and orchestral parts, a veritable keyboard frenzy for up to twenty able digits and what must have been an early foray into over-dubbing circa 1920. I love the technology of the pianola (early MIDI), but I think I just hate classical music (up to 1897), as this piece just went on too bloody long with all of the usual cliches of exposition , development, recapitulation. I could have really done with a nice decapitation about five minutes in.

The one performance on the night that stuck out for me was a Grainger adaption of an old Chinese folk song which had been transcribed for string quartet by fellow Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe. The quartet (Grainger Quartet, but of course) played long beautiful sustained notes which overlapped each other with light harmonics arcing between the performers and around the space. The piece seemed to colour the room for me, with its shifting tints and hues. Much better.

By the way, later in the evening I found out from someone who shall remain anonymous that the Elder Conservatorium is half a million dollars in debt. Seems I got out at the right time, and I always knew those expensive plants in the garden area were a big mistake.

[30.10.06] The distance between what we have and what we need

I came across this at work today whilst I was compiling ANAT's email digest. The Distance Between What We Have And What We Need is a remarkable installation by Tavares Strachan comprising of a four-ton block of ice which is displayed in a specially built freezer and is maintained by a solar energy system which helps keep block intact. The work is currently on exhibition in a gallery in Miami, to later travel to Europe and eventually the rest of the world. The prevailing motivation behind Tavares' work is to draw attention to climate change and the current state of the environment.

There's something strangely forboding about a block of ice being carried around the world and put on display to draw awareness the array of dire ecological situations currently besetting the planet - the the melting of the polar caps and Greenland ice sheets for one. There's also something very sombre about this spectacle - like an endangered part of the earth has been captured and preserved like the last of an animal species for future generations to see.

The title of the work couldn't be anymore profound.

http://www.distancebetween.org