The Idea Of South

If you live in Sydney and, in addition to this computer, you are in possession of two radios, then this Sunday you're in for a treat... At exactly 10:30 pm, three separate parts of a trumpet, cello, percussion & field recording based composition will be broadcast simultaneously on community radio stations 2SER, FBI and via a Shoutcast internet stream (find details for tuning into that here).

The work is called Idea of South and is the brainchild of musician, composer and sound artist Roger Mills. The primary inspiration for it was The Idea of North, an experimental 1967 radio documentary by Canadian pianist Glenn Gould in which he took recordings of five people talking about the solitude and isolation of life in Canada's frozen north, and fashioned them into a contrapuntal composition. (Go here to see a video of a rather impassioned Gould discussing and playing excerpts from the work.)

Mills began his antipodean version of this project by issuing an open online call for field recordings recorded anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere. The majority came from Australia, but there were also submissions from locations as far afield as Fiji, Chile, South Africa, and Macquarie Island in the Southern Ocean. And the range of sounds was just as diverse - everything from wind sculptures, restaurant ambience and in-flight announcements on planes to whalesong, cow milking, and fences humming in the wind. (If you want to hear some of the submitted recordings, there is a zoomable map of them here.)

Mills then edited this wealth of source material into the final three parts and even created his own graphical notation to guide the musicians in laying down instrumental accompaniment. And the final results?... Well, you'll just have to stay in on Sunday night and hear them for yourself.

(If you're in town and don't have the necessary equipment to pick up all the broadcasts, don't despair. You can always head on down to Don't Look Back gallery, 419 New Canterbury Rd, Dulwich Hill, where they'll be making an evening of it - starting off with a performance by the Forenzics before piping all three broadcasts through an in-house PA at the allotted time.)

To whet your appetite for this multi-broadcast radiophonic event, here's a sample from Mills' website:

Idea of South Excerpt

Sunday Free Jazz Jams with Edgard Varese

A week or so ago, WFMU blog contributor, Lukas, posted this set of 19 rather historic lo-fi recordings that were committed to tape sometime between March and August 1957. The recordings are of a series of Sunday jam sessions that were convened by avant-garde composer, Edgard Varese, and together they constitute possibly the first ever free jazz recordings in history, appearing a full 3 years before Ornette Coleman's genre-defining album, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. Although they were not released on any label, some excerpts did find their way into Varese's landmark 1958 composition, Poeme Electronique.

(PERSONNEL TRIVIA: The regular players at these sessions included Charles Mingus on bass and Teo Macero, who went on to produce Kind of Blue, Bitches Brew and Dave Brubeck's Time Out, on tenor sax.)

Found Sound: The Experimental Instrument Project

Much as I love the sun, surf and rampant bush hinterland of Sydney, those clever boffins in Melbourne keep giving me reasons for wishing I lived in their wave-challenged southern locale. Their latest is the Found Sound Project, an ongoing series of sound art events that highlight experimental instruments designed and built by Australian artists and musicians.

These events began in January this year and are held every month in a warehouse in Carlton. So far, they've featured the glass percussion, bicycle wheel and pipe ensembles of Ros Bandt and Albert Mishriki; the prepared vibraphone, modified trumpet, heat sinks and bowed cymbals of Dale Gorfinkel and Joe Talia; the light and turntable based sound contraptions of Rod Cooper and Ross Manning; and the PVC pipe organ and reinvented gamelan of Nathan Gray, Dylan Martorell & Dave Nelson.

Their next event is on May 20th and the acts on show will be Sydney electronic artist Pia Van Gelder and Melbournian robotics-obsessed composer James Hullick.

If you're in Melbourne and want to keep abreast of these happenings, they have a Facebook group you can join. If you're not, keep an eye on their blog which is updated with videos of the performances whenever they're posted on YouTube.

Marlene Dietrich Playing The Musical Saw

That's right, this is a 1944 recording of the ninth greatest female star of all time performing Aloha Oe on the musical saw. The performance doesn't begin till 1:25 in but prior to that, you get a charming introductory exchange between The Smouldering One and a rather incredulous MC... It makes me long for a parallel universe where our current crop of screen sirens have similar singular talents and we are regularly treated to recitals featuring Cate Blanchett on theremin, Scarlett Johannsen on hurdy-gurdy, and Angelina Jolie on nose flute.

(This video was introduced to me by the devilishly diverting Coilhouse)

Pridyot Voda: Yanka's Tragically Prophetic Song About Drowning

Sticking with the water theme, here's a classic song about its destructive power from the 80s/90s Siberian punk-folk scene, written and performed by a Yanka Dyagileva, a woman who's talent went sadly unrecognised outside that scene during her lifetime.

A native of Novosibirsk who began writing songs as a schoolgirl, Yanka drifted into the Siberian rock scene after meeting the Russian poet/rock musician, Alexander Bashlachev at a concert in 1985. Two years later, she met and fell in love with the godfather of Siberian punk-folk, Yegor Letev. The relationship that followed was creatively productive but ultimately rather toxic; with Letov acting as a petty tyrant at home and even going so far as to belittle her when they performed on stage together.

After her inspiration Bashlachev died in 1988, Yanka sank into a chronic depression. It didn't stop her from writing, but it no doubt contributed to the very dark cast of many of her songs. In 1991, she recorded her last song - Pridyot Voda - a wrenching 9 minute epic on the subject of drowning. The first half of the song consists of Yanka blurting out anguished tightly wound verses over racing rhythm guitar then, when it seems that a comfortable resolution has been reached, it's suddenly torn apart by a blistering dissonant organ solo that continues for 4 minutes.

Shortly after recording it, Yanka disappeared from her home and was found a week later drowned in the Ob River.

Yanka Dyagileva - Pridyot Voda

(Thanks to Brian Turner from WFMU for this. If you want to hear more from the Siberian underground check out this Vice Magazine profile or this article by Pink Reason frontman Kevin Debroux.)

The Sound of Ripples in A Bowl Of Water

In 2006, sound artist Tomoko Sauvage attended a Terry Riley concert in Paris and heard an instrument that utterly entranced her - it was called the jalatharangam. As the name might suggest, it originally hails from Southern India and consists of a series of porcelain filled with water which are "played" by striking them with small bamboo rods.

Not long after the concert, Sauvage had constructed her own jalatharangam from bowls she picked up in the local Chinatown and set to work trying to replicate classical Indian ragas on them. As she immersed herself in this new instrument, however, her focus shifted and she became fixated on the sound of the water itself; using tiny underwater microphones to capture it dripping and rippling in the individual bowls.

The recorded results of this inspired take on an ancient instrument are available as mp3 excerpts on The Wire website and as streams on the artist's website, and they are truly spellbinding. (Also, for a substance as immaterial as water, the tones produced are surprisingly strong and resonant; sounding in places like detuned bells.)

If you'd like to see how she produces these sounds, here's a video of a performance from September last year:

And if you want to hear more, keep an ear out for her debut solo album, Ombrophilia, which means "love of rain" and is due out on either/OAR later this year.