ADVENTUROUS BODIES

A 2019 release of music I’ve written for dance and physical theatre over the past 6 or so years. It starts with music I’d written last year for Dean Walsh’s work “Remote Control” and finishes up with a collaboration with Amy Mauvan called “Echo”.

Available through various outlets

TRACK LIST

REMOTE CONTROL (CHOREOGRAPHER - DEAN WALSH) [2018]

1 – Trippy Waves

2 – Backward Pizz

3 – Wheelbarrow

4 – Intense Waves

5 - Broken

6 – Perpetrator

PROXIMA (BY FLŒK) [2018]

7 – Proxima Excerpt (live)

30/31 (COLLABORATORS - AUSTRALIAN ART QUARTET) [2017]

8 – 30/31 (mobile score) with the Australian Art Quartet (Dan Russell and Anna Albert Violins, Alina Zamfir Viola, James Beck Cello)

BODIES IN MOTION [2016]

9 – Bodies in Motion part 1

10 – Bodies in Motion part 2

MORPHIC (CHOREOGRAPHER - SARAH-VYNE VASSALLO) [2013]

11 – Please check the number

12 - Newself

13 – Morphic 6.1

14 – Morphic 6.2

15 – Morphic 6.3

ECHO (CHOREOGRAPHER - AMY MAUVAN) [2013]

16 - Echo

NOTES

Remote Control (aka ‘Context is Everything’) is a 90min solo by Dean Walsh was performed in 2018 at Brand X in Darlinghurst as part of their “Flying Nun” performance season. It is a 2 hour solo that Dean describes as a performed archive. It encapsulates his three decades as a dance professional and contextualises his work within the frame of his childhood abuse, neurodiversity and socio economic background. Most of the music was created from samples that he and I recorded in the dance studio whilst he was developing the work.

Created in 2018, Proxima is an excerpt of a 40 minute work created by Flœk, a duo that I have with Benjamin Hinchley. At the beginning of the performance we asked the audience to go to a website on their mobile phones and by doing so we were able to control the sound coming out of each of their devices individually. In effect, this gave us a one hundred channel surround sound immersive instrument. The sounds were triggered by algorithms that we created to respond to the data sets of clock time, our movement, touch and our live heart rates. The work’s public showing was part of Jaimie Leonarder’s The Experiment program at Brand X.

30/31 was composed in 2017 as part of a series of string quartet works that reflect on my age and whatever I was going through at the time. I created this work with the Australian Art Quartet during a residency at Bundanon using devised methodologies I’d learnt from physical theatre, dance and improvisation workshops. The full piece is about 18 minutes long, and has the performers of the quartet walking around the space, improvising, using costume, props and lighting elements, as well as playing music from their mobiles phones. This track is the music that was played back through their devices at the end of the piece. They performed this work at the Yellow House in Sydney as part of their 2017 season. The performers of the quartet were Dan Russell and Anna Albert on violins, Alina Zamfir on viola and James Beck on cello.

Bodies in Motion came about during my year as the inaugural composer in residence at Gallop House in Perth, a residency created by the Prelude Foundation and the Bundanon Trust. During that residency I began taking contemporary dance classes at Strut Dance, mainly with Bernadette Lewis. I wrote Bodies In Motion for the end of year showing of the advanced contemporary dance. All the sounds originated as recordings of Saturn by NASA, and I performed movement in a group scored improvisation to the music that I’d created.  

Morphic was choreographed by Sarah-Vyne Vassallo, and performed by Anthea Doropoulos, Sarah Fiddaman and Brianna Kell at the Seymour Centre in 2013. The work was co-produced by dance company DirtyFeet and new music collective Chronology Arts. “Please Check The Number” quite didn’t make it into the final work but I enjoy it so much I couldn’t help but include it in this collection. The final tracks of this sequence feature samples from a scored improvisation string quartet piece I wrote called 28 for The Noise Quartet in 2013 whose members included Veronique Serret and Mirabai Peart on violins, James Eccles on viola and Oliver Miller on cello. The samples of ‘28’ used were recorded and released by Vexations840 on The Noise Quartet’s album called Composed Noise, also in 2013.

Echo was composed for a dance work of the same title by Amy Mauvan in 2013. We met through a program called “Dance Meets Music” by choreographer Kay Armstrong and composer Matthew Hindson at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Amy has performed the work a few times and we continue to rehash it. This version of the audio is more or less how it was when it was first performed, but it has changed since. The work features a solo performer on stage interacting in various ways with a giant projection of themselves as well as this music.