Visiting the installation with family

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 new battleships pavilion

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!

How to perform in your own private Gun Bay

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.

James studio set-up

My studio with an electric piano, Alesis drum pad and Ableton Push set-up for recording realistic MIDI performances of “Gun Bay”

Bree & Claire in the Gun Room

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 …

The bell-sampler, and performing it …

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)…

 

Recording day 2: onboard the vessels

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!).

Loading into the sub

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…

 

Recording day 1: Sydney Conservatorium of Music

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!

Bree and Claire messed up

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.

Recording in action

Palindromes

The crew of HMAS Onslow are at action stations. Sonar pings the submarine, which must move both quickly and as silently as possible. The act of real Noise Husbandry happens here, in the only musical content of the installation on HMAS Onslow which itself is blurred and atmospheric. This piece will set the scene for a game where visitors have to quietly explore the submarine to find clues to solve a puzzle. Too much noise, and the sonar locates them, and the clues disappear.

score excerpt

There are three collections of material, marked CABN-E, DPBR and IDGM. Each collection uses a slightly different collection of pitches. These do not need to be thought of as “sections”, they are only marked because choosing to play in the same collection or choosing to play in different collections, and making the decision to change from one to another may have an exact affect on the listener. Here’s a mock-up, though the piece will sound different every time it is performed…

The work is open, and can be performed for as long or as short a time as is required. Players do not need to play at all “in time” with one another – even the two vibraphone parts which have definite pulse. Each piece of musical material is palindromic – it would sound the same performed backward as forward, at least to one musical extent. Performers could choose a palindromic progression through their material, if they like, but this also isn’t necessary.

Again, the pitches for the ostinati were drawn from several songs on the playlist, but I’m sure you can’t tell which…

Hendrixing it out in the name of mateship (mate-ship)

The storyworld and MOD’s design for the galley is to show the camaraderie that is so often described by the crew over the decades that HMAS Vampire was in service.

Crew of HMAS Vampire

Good old Aussie mateship on Vampire over the years

I’ve decided to take a double approach to achieving this in sound. In the MOD specification, they suggest the kinds of sounds that would have been around the galley – laughter, shouting, chatting – but my brief is to abstract didactic sounds everywhere. So my plan is to head into a bar, find some boisterous Aussie-accented blokes to record, and then to make those samples sound like distorted memories – long ago, swirling around the space, but also still recognisable as voices. I captured some speaking on the internet today to mock this up with (I’m not going to tell you where it’s from, but if you recognise it you’ll see I was being very cheeky), and was pretty happy with the results…

 

The second part of the double approach is to return to the playlist, or at least the concept of having a playlist from the time that the vessels were in service, and to write a piece that mimics the rock-funk of Jimi Henrix, but in this case for Ensemble Offspring, adding to the abstracted and even surreal nature of the sound. I’ve made a few sketches and I’ll complete a digital draft to share soon.