It’s been a little quiet on telesound in recent months since the end of my European author talks and performance tour. I’m glad to say that the performances and book presentations were very well received and I was delighted that Neural Magazine gave my book a great little review.  For those of you reading this blog for the first time, I have just published a book called Tele-Improvisation: Intercultural Interaction in the Online Globa Jam Session. While brief, what is great about the review, is the way that it highlights the importance of the book’s investigation into networked musical perception and cognition. It is these characteristics that fascinate me the most, and while there are phenomenological differences between colocated and networked performance, I often think the two share many similarities. Particularly, the performer’s ability to transcend virtual and real spaces via musical sound.

Talking of all things telematic sound; work on the new Ethernet Orchestra album is also picking up a pace with some stunning mixes being mastered as I write. The album is a compilation of live performances and online jam sessions the ensemble has recorded since 2015 to the present. I think the material really explores the breadth of our sonic and musical pallette and the outer territories of multi-idiomatic improvised music.  We strive for intercultural interaction and exchange combining traditional and electronic instruments and processing. The following clip is a short excerpt of one of the tracks as a teaser 🙂

This track features guitarist Chris Vine performing from his home in Londrina, Brazil, keyboard player Holger Deuter playing in Speyer, Germany and myself on trumpet here in Sydney. Stay tuned for the label and release dates!

LICHT_redux by tranSTURM Collective Sydney Fringe Festival 5-8th September 2019 Bay 43 (Circular Quay), The Rocks, Sydney.

I have also enjoyed producing the sound score for a new tranSTURM work LICHT_redux, which premiered at the Sydney Fringe Festival in early September. It is a mixed-media installation of light and sound that includes animations projected onto a metal, glass, mirror, and perspex mechanism. The following clip is an excerpt I took on my mobile phone and captures four minutes of this fourty-minute soundtrack. There will be further documentation to come.

LICHT_redux emerges from earlier tranSTURM collaborations and residencies at Sydney Olympic Park and exhibitions in VIVID 2016 & 2019. The sound score includes sound produced, in, and around, the Armory at Sydney Olympic Park, and its environs.  A lot of time was spent in Building 20, a munitions bunker made up of three large cylindrical concrete tunnels that generate a large space echo when noise is sounded in them.  Drones, impulse responses and field recordings produced in these spaces capture both the internal and external acoustics of the park. Situated on Sydney’s Parramatta River, I also had the opportunity to drop a pair of hydrophones (underwater microphones) into the water at the Armory wharf. The microphones revealed the multiple activities that occur beneath the surface of the river; snapping shrimps and the occasional motorboat propeller or ferry engine all produced unique sonic events in the recordings. These recordings were then granulated and time-stretched to create site-specific soundscapes that flicker, bubble and spit in sync with the animations. Underscoring this sound is processed trumpet drones and percussive instrumental techniques, which give the soundtrack, I hope, a sense of flowing movement that occurs in waves.