Last post – new site!

This is the last post to this site… I have a new one, a new domain and whole heap of new stuff online including videos from the Toy Satellite archive, archived recordings of various collaborations, open licensed content and a project wiki, largely dedicated to my various compositions and sound works.

New site: http://agarton.org/

New rss feed: http://agarton.org/feed/

Under the hood I’m running WordPress, Mediawiki and Darwin streaming server.

My podcasts are now on their own site and Secession has a wiki to. We are now an entirely virtual company.

Podcast: http://podcast.secession-records.org/.

Secession wiki: http://wiki.secession-records.org/

See you there

Andrew

Nothing known and forgotten

Arrived in Vienna this morning stiff and achy. There’s far too little leg room in Austria Airlines flights. I’d promised myself I’d not fly with them any more, but hard to tell who’s flying who with all the carrier deals going. I thought I’d be on Thai Air, but they took me from Melbourne to Bangkok only.

I’ll be based in Graz for at least a couple of months with plans for a white Christmas, the first ever, with family here. It’s been a long while since I’ve worked on a gallery piece. The ESC Gallery is giving me that opportunity with my new installation, Nothing Known. When I think about it, I’ve had more invitations like this from Austria than any other country and certainly far more than at home.

Kenyah elder, Sarawak

I want to put the faces of indigenous Sarawak on large screens, the larger the better. At very slow frame rates one will see the faces shown in detail, in close up with the camera tracking over contours of skin, facial outlines, eyes…

I’d learnt in Sarawak that archiving cultural knowledge, indigenous cultural knowledge does little to protect it. It becomes remembered in research, coffee table chatter, gossip… the deepest transmission occurs through presence… physical, immediate presence. The songs, the dances, hunting, farming, the stuff of life, accumulated generational knowledge, wisdom… from what I’d seen, from the interviews we had with the eldest people in one of the Bidayuh Kampongs, one generation is all it takes to lose their story-tellers and musicians.

The story was the same in South Africa. Meeting the anthropologist Barbera Tyrrell (on her 94th birthday!) it was clear her attempt to record traditional and ceremonial garments from many African tribes was but a drop in the proverbial ocean. She’d told me that there were few people in the various Diaspora on the continent that could remember what their own people had worn let alone danced in at least one to two generations past.

More when I’m less tired and a charged laptop…

Secession is 10!

Today Secession Records is 10 years old. The 22nd of September 1998 Secession launch was a lively event hosted by Toy Satellite on Smith Street, Fitzroy with a cast of firsts under that hood.

Founder of Synesthesia Records, Mark Harwood, played his first gig there and John Power lit up the venue with his first projected, live video mix.

The launch was video streamed to an international audience of enthusiasts and I was engrossed in a generative Lost Time Accident performance that kicked off our first release, a series of generatively composed works titled, Age to Wonder At.

From 1999 to 2000 Secession ran the ESC experimental sound and music series and produced the Unseen / Unheard interactive audio visual sessions in Melbourne.

We co-produced the Return to Timor millennium eve concert in Aliu, East Timor and contributed to the formative years of the This Is Not Art Festival.

In 2001 Secession artists performed Undercurrents at the opening of the Taipei International Arts Festival. Undercurrents was also performed at the Fringe Fashion Awards, Melbourne International Film Festival, Multimedia Asia Pacific Festival and This is Not Art.

We believe we may have even published the first podcast out of Australia. In November 2004 we commenced Sound Information with the release of Some Rights Reserved works destined for use by podcast producers the world over. We had also been a Creative Commons early adopter.

In 2004 Ollie Olsen and Steve Law joined me at the helm… we released some works online, but joint releases are yet to come – personal stuff, 21st century stuff… the stuff of life hindered and expanded us.

Secession has consistently applied itself to music and sound works that extend the capabilities of our artists, that challenges and excites, that inspires and reflects the common attributes of diversity in a world suffering the dynamics of economies that deplete natural resources and enclose creative and cultural endeavour in protections that stifle innovation, breeding sameness and a dangerously dull, careless society.

20080808 – SOS Tokyo

Garton @ Soup

On the eighth day of the eighth month of two thousand and eight I performed an entirely new solo set to mark the launch of my new album, Son of Science.

At 11 pm I stepped into one of the simplest set up’s I’ve used in years, tipping into the unknown at Soup, the undisputed underground venue for Tokyo’s noise and ambient scene. The ideas for the piece were first formulated in Brisbane when working on the recent Terminal Quartet piece, Licht Drift.

The delivery was more in keeping with my former Fierce Throat pieces and was an entirely enjoyable, if but intense experience to realise! I was to play some acoustic guitar treatments, but couldn’t stop the PA from feeding back… I was perched just above the sub! Guitar will have to wait!

Listen to Tokyo Lagoon.

The entire evening was a splendid, reverberant evening of new, fresh and solid sound works from the crew at Soup, including the delightful Paul(ie) Dunphy (aka Evil Penguin).

A generation gone…

One of 2 remaining elders

Eighty three year old elder, one of two remaining in Kampong Danu, under an hours drive west of Kuching… regrettably, many of the Kampongs have lost their last generation of story tellers and musicians. He could recall only one folk tale, that of a village that had entirely vanished leaving only a stone that is said to be a woman that had turned to stone.

He could, however, remember, as a very young man, seeing deer eat flower buds from his house of an evening… shine a torch out the door and animals would be every where… The land was abundant then. He had also worked for the Japanese, building an airstrip for a few cents a day.

He also remembered playing in the caves as a child. There are large caves in that area, within an hours walk or so from Kampong Danu, some of which take one from one side of the mountain, visible from the Kampong, to the other.

Question the EIA

It’s 3 am and I’ve just about completed the first in this micro docs series. It’s in fact the second episode based on data I’d pulled from the Bengoh Dam Environment Impact Assessment (EIA).

It was curious to find a decent listing of protected species such as bats, but no mention what so ever of the pitcher plants we had seen along the track, some of which I’d shot and you’ll see in this series. Also, no mention of any primates. Monkeys are known to steal fruit from the Kampong gardens and farms. I’d also seen a long tail species, which I think is a protected primate (in fact all primates are entirely protected here) caged in one of the Kampongs. They’re often kept as pets, occasionally eaten, often scared off.

They’re known to show themselves when it’s rained. We didn’t see any in the wild, so to speak, but we were inundated (a word used throughout the EIA) with mighty downpours and wind.

The EIA is detailed to say the least, but that it overlooked significant flora and fauna was quite a surprise when for us amateurs, it was clearly evident that we were walking through one of the more remarkable landscapes in this part of the world.

Okay, some may argue that shifting cultivation has destroyed the pristine nature of the landscape, but shifting cultivation is generally considered sustainable because it moves around, where as forestry will remove the entire biomass leaving both flora and fauna in a tragic state to recover from.

Ornamental fern

Here’s one such species I found in Semban, the highest of the four Kampongs.

To our left, sprouting from a cocunut shell is a unique ornamental fern of the epiphytic Lycopodium family. It’s a threatened species and is not listed in the EIA!

Although hunted infrequently in the region, the EIA made no mention of wild boar. Check out this photo I’d taken of wild boar jaw bones hunted by the Headman of Kampong Tabu Sait.

There was no mention of deer, although low in numbers, one of the villagers mentioned they’re known in the region. And not a single lizard listed despite the fact I’d seen many during the trek and eaten a monitor lizard in Kampong Rejoi!

I’m pretty happy with Episode 2! The soundtrack grew from a piece I’d started writing on Seymore’s guitar in Kamping Rejoi. You have no idea how pleased I was to see that instrument in Seymore’s house when we arrived and found we were staying there. Seymore and his wife are two of the loveliest people… He’s the local parishioner as well as the regions master bamboo bridge builder. And he plays guitar.

• Bengoh Dam EIA, pages 1 – 310 (PDF, 15 MB)
• Bengoh Dam EIA, Executive Summary (PDF, 2 MB)
• Bengoh Dam EIA, Appendices (PDF, 5 MB)

Kolo ‘sarawak’ Mee

By the time you read this I will be trekking into forest communities, where we commence work on the micro docs series, Sarawak Gone.

I should be back by Saturday at the latest to join the Rainforest Music Festival… a curious title given the ever decreasing rainforests in Sarawak!

And here, like so many places in the world, much work is still to be done… There is NO comprehension here of global warming let alone the dire food and energy crisis in the region. People are satisfied with their monstrous McMansions, 6 7 aircon units, 2 cars, plasma screens and Nestle diets. The few who care are few indeed and there are even less that work to make a smidgen of difference to the lives of those most affected by the plough-share mentality that has recently seen the destruction of a cave network nearby, barely explored. We are told these caves once provided natives with passage through the mountains, from one valley to the next… and all this on native title land that developers ignore because of the tight connections within government who will resort to courts and hit men when their idiot public relations campaigns fail.

In the few days I’ve been here the quality of the Kolo Mee hasn’t been as good as in previous trips. I’m told most vendors have stopped using pork fat as the base which has affected the taste significantly.

The one Laksa I’ve had was a little on the lame side, but the fern salad was, as always, sensational!

VIDEO SLAMMIN!

It’s another Arts Law Week, the 3rd I’ve worked on now and the first with apc.au under contract to OPEN CHANNEL to deliver VIDEO SLAM 02.

It’s a smaller team of slammers and we have fewer resources, but we’re a tight unit, making it all the more wholesome given a couple of familiar faces from last years VIDEO SLAM.

Horse Bazaar are once again pulling more than their fair share of bullock trains and milkcarts! Can’t wait to see the famed wireless Video Unit in action.

This years SLAM will culminate in a Remix Forum… an actual Arts Law Week forum dealing with appropriation in the arts which itself will be re-appropriated as we screen the results of our two day workshop. Bring it on!!!

Bağlama is Saz

One of the delights of Istanbul is İstiklal Avenue, which leads through to the Galata district consumed mostly by music shops of every persuasion, literally a mecca for musicians! It comes with a deep and rich history, going back to the earliest bridge built to cross the Golden Horn in the 14th century with fortifications that lasted up to the 19th century.

Now you can walk down through these glorious shops towards the new bridge, and if you’re game, perhaps even strike up a conversation with many of the learned shop owners, some of who helped me on my quest for markams and their approximate guitar tunings… which eventually led me to purchase the bağlama, or saz you can see here in this photo.

I was originally interested in an oud, but given it has no frets and I’ve not a lot of time to spend finessing my fingering over a fretless instrument, and with the saz being such a popular instrument in both the Arabesque and Fasil styles, I was hooked.

Curiously, İstiklal Avenue morphs out of Taksim Square. Taksim, or Taqsim is the name given to a style of melodic improvisation that generally leads Arabic and Turkish music! Got to love that!

Getting to know you

Firstly, I’ve just got to say, I am totally and utterly smitten with the music of Turkey… from it’s Byzantine origins to it’s deeply ornamental “art” music, from the profoundly moving choral work of the Sufi composer Dede Efendi to the gorgeous lyricism of the much loved and missed singer, Zeki Muren. I was entirely overcome and moved at one point to tears during my brief listening trip to Istanbul, which, I must add, began during my first move to Melbourne in 1992 when I’d met the Kanun player, Ali Ozsoy and his sprightly, lovable daughter, Nilufer.

I’d not heard a Kuhnen before nor had I’d had any experience of traditional Turkish music, but I was transfixed and from there began a journey exploring the traditional music of various cultures, from Sarawak to Korea, China to Mongolia and of course more recently, Turkey.

Getting to know the music of Turkey is a long but joyful journey which, I hope, will become far more enlightening through the process of learning the saz.

Tune me please

And so it came to pass that I would have to learn to tune my saz… Not surprisingly it didn’t hold its tuning at all! So much so, I had no idea where to start. I started by sending an email to the lutherier. All the documents I’d read pointed to various tuning options, including the rather open ended “tune to the vocal range of the singer”!

As I’d purchased a chromatic tuner I was keen to get this puppy sounding as sweet as it did when I’d played it in Istanbul. The other thing I wanted to ensure was that it would tune to concert pitch as I don’t intend to play it in isolation, and given I’ve got a reasonably strong 4 octave range on my voice, I wanted both a tuning that would be acceptable for Turkish tunes and my own compositions.

The saz is strung in three sets of 7 strings called courses, commonly referred to as X, Y and X. The closest tuning I’ve found to that I’d walked out of the shop with is A on the X, G on the Y and D on the X. It seems to work, but does sound some what odd, particularly the G. I think it may have something to do with the wooden tuning pegs. I can’t seem to get an entirely accurate tuning on at least 2 of the 7 strings. But at least I can start work on how these intervals are managed across the neck and and get some scales and fingering technique down.

Epilogue

After a few hours with A-G-D and twists and grunts across the tuning pegs I’ve managed to get the saz in tune and the tunes are starting to make themselves present. My fingers are gradually gaining confidence and I’m already working on a couple of new pieces. I want to hear the saz with a chamber group, or as part of a violin and cello trio… But this is how it always happens with me. As soon as I start work on a new instrument, no sooner have I got it under my fingers than I’m writing with it already, often resulting in poor technique, but a constant flow of ideas.

Gotta love royalty…

It’s not every day I find myself lauding over the wonders of music publishing particularly as I’ve had so many issues with the “pop” end of town. But today I was grateful for the fist of tunes I’d released or co-written in the eighties, and the few that Warner/Chappell Music Australia PTY LTD had managed to acquire, for today I opened a statement dated 28 February containing a cheque for a whopping AUD$707.42.

That’s the largest single royalty cheque I’ve received in years! Gone, I’d thought, were the years where I’d receive cheques in the $200 – $800 range. And given I’d had so many unexpected expenses over the past three months (such as the hand-made Township Guitar I’d bought in Cape Town and the saz I’d acquired in Istanbul), and given I’d arranged an over-draft this afternoon I’m stoked!

I’m also reminded of the Turkish coffee reading I’d been spontaneously offered whilst taking time out on a terrace cafe looking out over the Goldern Horn. Perhaps I truly am entering an era where I ought not to be concerned by $, but by my music and that which grows from it…?