I received a draft of the CD cover for the CD version of Noise Husbandry today. It’s looking pretty amazing!
Draft CD cover for the CD of “Noise Husbandry”
Turns out a few of the logos are wrong, but other than that, this is what it will look like!
Well, it’s the litmus test, isn’t it? The public can be critical, but what about the family? I took my 6 year old and 8 year old and (XX year old) father around the new ACTION STATIONS exhibition, and have made a short video of them in the spaces with some related music/sound excerpts.
Couldn’t be prouder of the quality of these recordings – Jarrad has done me proud… and I’m sure you’ll recognise much of it from the many mock-ups I’ve posted over the past two years. ACTION STATIONS looks great, and while the brochure isn’t yet finished that documents my part in it, it’s on its way.
The final installation looks amazing, with the destroyer HMAS Vampire and submarine HMAS Onslow on each side of the striking new battleships pavilion.
So, what’s left now? Well, there is a short documentary about Noise Husbandry being made by the amazing Leonie Jones, so I’ll post that here once it’s released in the new year. I’ll lodge the score with the Australian Music Centre at some point, so if you’d like to perform any of these pieces in the future you’ll be able to. And Jarrad and I will work on the CD mixes and mastering over the summer break, and we’ll create a CD version of Noise Husbandry for our own records, which ANMM will own mechanical rights to and so can sell (or give away) if they like – I’ll post here if there’s news about that, too. In the meantime, you can visit the installation now!
It seems a little disingenuous to blog about the launch, given that I’m in Beijing premiering another work as it happens. Long story, but to cut it short, the launch date was moved, and I was already booked to be in Beijing enjoying an international boys’ choir premiering my new choral piece Waterside Adventures. Ah well. The new “Action Stations” website (that’s the name of the overall exhibition) looks fabulous, though:
The new Action Stations website
I had a lovely email from Anna Reid, acting Dean and Principal of the Sydney Conservatorium with a photo of some Ensemble Offspringers and she at the launch event, so I feel a little connection to the momentous event! Meanwhile, back to the final rehearsal of my piece here in Beijing…
MOD Productions have been onboard both vessels installing for several weeks already, but finally there are a few days where they are closed to the public to put the final sound in and test it with the data projection, lighting and that the sensors are making the changes they should be. It’s an exciting time.
The site when I arrived at 8am this morning – not a bad place to be working!
Jarrad and I have mixed most of the music, but there are still a few crazy taxi rides to go to handover USB sticks with the remaining tracks. The recordings all sound amazing, and once the installed versions are done, I’m looking forward to cutting them down to <74 minutes for an album version.
Just as crossing the line had to be made in my studio using samples from onboard HMAS Onslow, I’ve put together Gun Bay over the last few days. If the sampling was detailed in crossing, it wasn’t anything compared to this. As you may remember from this earlier post, the score itself includes floor diagrams and photographs of all of the objects that should be hit in concert. The sampler itself now includes several hundred sounds from the Gun Bay, and I’ve been able to trigger them with a variety of MIDI instruments including an Alesis drum pad to give a real “performed” sound.
This has literally given me the ability to play on any of those objects right here, in my studio, and to perfect the resulting recording. There are almost limitless ways it can be performed, since the score allows performers to put the sections together in any way they like, and I’m having fun choosing the order that I’ll present the ideas in the final, fairly short performance, for the CD version of Noise Husbandry.
My studio with an electric piano, Alesis drum pad and Ableton Push set-up for recording realistic MIDI performances of “Gun Bay”
I’m putting together the recording of Gun Room at the moment using samples (more of that in a post soon), but I do also have recordings of Bree and Claire jamming on some of the repeated rhythms that I composed … so these have become my model – trying to achieve a sound with samples that sounds this “real” and musical …
Building a sampler of the engineering wheels “bell” sound has been relatively easy, thanks to the mock-up process that I described in earlier blogs. I’ve been able to take the samplers that I’d already created and replace the sounds I used to do those mock-ups with the actual recordings of Bree and Claire hitting things. We made lots of recordings of each wheel at different loudnesses, so I have an awful lot of variation for each sound, meaning it should be pretty difficult to tell that it’s a sample and not the actual performance (which is really obvious if you have to use the same sound at different loudnesses and pitches)…
Well, it’s not every day that you record on a battleship and a submarine. But we did it. There were some hold-ups when we first got there, because it turned out that the steam room was effectively out of bounds because of asbestos risk … but luckily there were plenty of spare engineering wheels and other metallic objects to hit on HMAS Onslow, the submarine, and apart from some atmospheric rain and seagull calls, it was quiet there because MOD Productions had actually started the installation!
The excerpt above is from Waves, which has turned out really well in the recording (the audio here is just from the camera mics, in case you’re wondering why it’s so poor!).
Having recorded so much music yesterday, we weren’t quite as efficient today. After moving to the and recording some excellent live performances, it became obvious that we weren’t going to have time to perfect the graphic notation in crossing the line nor the complicated rhythms in gun bay. So instead we decided to sample all of the sounds that I’d specified in the score, and it’s now down to me to engineer those and then perform them as a final “real” recording. So lots more work to do, but more claim to have a truly technology-integrated electro-acoustic piece…
Yesterday was the first recording day, and thanks to Jarrad everything went just incredibly well. Here is a video of hmas voyager : in memoriam in rehearsal just before recording it. You can see Ensemble Offspring’s Bree Van Reyk and Claire Edwardes on vibraphones, Lamorna Nightingale on alto flute, and Jason Noble on bass clarinet. They were joined by just Michael Rohanek (piano) for this piece, to save Jason overdubbing the piano part.
Recording Chamber Surgery was great fun, as you can imagine. Here is Claire and Bree in a complete mess after doing foley recordings of both eating a meal and performing surgery on a body!
This one is a recording action shot… The score is now over 100 pages long, and we’re going to have hours of recordings to play around with for the installation to create incredible sonic variety for every visitor to the installation.
Well, it’s recording day today. I woke up at 4am with an idea for the one bit of scoring I hadn’t been able to do … the contrasting section in Family. And it just flowed out … so here’s what I wrote (the new section begins at 1:30):
Now to go and record it!
