|
|
March 2004
Greetings,
Have had a relaxing break from all things musical over the few summer holiday months... chilling out down the south coast of NSW... reading (Richard Flanagan’s "Death of a River Guide" and Malcolm Knox’s book "A Private Man," the wretched detail of the free trade agreement and the lightweight summertime newspapers), drinking (South Australian reds), cricket (rediscovered my cut shot), walks (around the headland at low tide), family (daughters fifth birthday) et al... Now starting to get back into writing... spending time in the Enormodome working back into things, a few projects on the boil... Am feeling good bout the new year... Try out a few new approaches, philosophical about things... Especially after Mark Worth’s death... a great man gone too soon... puts things into perspective (too much fuckin perspective as the spinal tap lads said as they gathered round elvis’ grave...) But life is there one minute gone the next... Worthy’s funeral was a joyful affair... A life remembered and celebrated amongst kin... He was a great storyteller and we told stories til all hours of the morning...
Tour starts next week with Phil Wales... loops and sundry other guests at different gigs (see site for dates)... Phil and I have done a bit of tinkering and feel good bout what we have done... Amanda Brown plays with us in Sydney, Paul Cartright in Adelaide and Greg Patten in Melbourne... visuals for Melbourne and Perth? maybe Sydney and Hobart... see how we go... We’ve been rehearsing up some toons we ain’t played for a while such as Breath, Found Wanting, Dive and of course we’ve never played On A Day Like This... Oh there was that once at Hepburn Springs and funnily enough we never played it again... There was the suggestion of changing its name to "Train Wreck"... I think we’ve found a suitable live arrangement.
"On A Day Like This" is the new single... Simon Maidment made a film clip utilising some of Lynne Hamilton’s footage from the "Found Wanting" film off Act of Free Choice and some footage of the Bateman’s Bay fair... All saturated colours and whirly things... and my lame attempts at shirts up soccer celebration over the freeway footbridge... Plus a 'Goodies moment' at the end...
NATION
The 'Nation' show is slated for premiering at the Melbourne International Arts festival at the Concert hall for October 16th... The DVD (yes that thing) will coincide with that show... Have just finished films for Tender Trap (Lynne Hamilton) and Stumble Away (Paula Hatton) and Blue Black Sky (Tim Cole) as well...
What will Nation be? It’ll be a collaborative work with bands, films, dance, and surround soundscapes... here in artspeak!!! It’s where the whole live show has been heading and hopefully it’ll work!
Nation will combine music, song, film, dance, spoken word, found sound, movement and light to create a sensory experience intended to be inventive, atmospheric, elegiac, occasionally humorous and certainly provocative. It will be a state-of-the-nation muse on our Nation; it’s people, history, national character, geography, politics and social fabric. Think Laurie Anderson’s 'United States Live' mixed with David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts placed into an Australian context.
The form of the concert will be multi media concentrated in sound ,image and song, with additional performance pieces relating to the song, whether that be a monologue, a sound scape with accompanying textural film projection or text or dance movement, then move into the next song. The concert will cover five key themes, on this nation’s identity, culture and spirit...
The five themes are:
1. GREAT INLAND SEA/THE DESERT HEARTLAND
Landscape, sense of space, of light, metaphor for our hearts. Harmonic desert wind, recordings of windmills, gates, Max Stuart (Arrente elder)
2. SAFETY HAVEN…NATION OF THE HEARTLESS KIND
Immigration, Tampa, the egalitarian myth, Protestant/Tory/Catholic/Labor, southern European labour building the great capital projects, Bonegilla.
3. REGION PACIFICA
The songlines from West Papua to Papua New Guinea to the Torres Strait through the Gulf and into this vast continent. Sense of being part of the Pacific. Our colonial history.
4. NATION OF SHAREHOLDERS
Freedom of the individual often leads to alienation, the overload of information, a muse on the media. The great Australian bluster.
5. COCOON/SUBURBIA
The shimmer in the stories of the ordinary, those who have fallen though the safety net, our sense of suburbia, the deserters,
CAKE NEWS
MFTCC are now signed to EMI. MFTCC are releasing Parade, a best of compilation with three new tracks, "Let’s Go Walk This Town," "The Black Dog Follows" and "Television Theme #47," recorded by Darren Steffan at the Enormodome, and mixed by Simon Polinski... Haven’t worked with Simon for a couple of years... was good to get back in the studio with him... he’s released a couple of ambient albums under the moniker HESIUS DOME... well worth checking out! It will coincide with a mid-year theatre tour and the release of a songbook with sheet lyrics and a selection of photographs taken on tours over the years... There’s a classic of the band with Joh Bjelke Peterson. Took a while to choose the tracks... It’s by no means the final word on what we think our best tracks are... ’Tis probably more like which are our best known tracks (if that ain’t a tautology)...
The final track list is...
1. I’ve got a plan
2. Lighthouse keeper
3. The romp
4. Let’s go walk this town
5. A midlife’s tale
6. Throwing it away
7. Here come the sirens
8. Vandorlo live
9. Nanny’s farewell
10. Cello song for Charlie
11. The Gossip
12. I like it like this
13. Television theme #47
14. A Song from under the floorboards.
15. My friend the Chocolate Cake live
16. It’s all in the way
17. Talk about love
18. The black dog follows
19. She’s got more heart than me
UK/Europe slated for august/sept
Planetarium project.
THIS IS THE PROJECT I AM ESPECIALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO
Indigenous Australian stories from north-west Victoria will be the focus of the next show produced at the Melbourne Planetarium. Due for completion in August 2004, the show will use the full array of the Planetarium's audiovisual systems to bring to life aboriginal astronomical lore
The show will focus on the astronomical knowledge of the Boorong, an aboriginal clan that lived alongside Lake Tyrell, west of Swan Hill, and spoke the Wergaia language. The astronomical knowledge of the Boorong was recorded by William Stanbridge, a pastoralist who lived in the area in the mid-nineteenth century. Working from the anthropological accounts of Stanbridge, oral history interviews and his own astronomical research, researcher John Morieson has reconstructed the astronomical lore of the Boorong. This research, the subject of several papers and booklets by Morieson, is now to be turned into a planetarium show.
The shows include stunning images of outer space and awesome special effects, which help viewers explore our place in the universe, astronomy, cosmology and space exploration.
Through Digistar II, a purpose built computer graphics system, audience members can view the 3D positions of 9,094 stars in the Milky Way, travel through the Galaxy, backwards and forwards in time, and see how the stars were arranged in the sky up to a million years ago.
The theatre features 150 reclining seats, a giant 16 metre horizontal dome and stereo surround sound. Space travel has never been this comfortable.
The indigenous show will be a stunning array of live action, animation and cutting-edge design, accompanied by a beautiful score which takes full advantage of the surround stereo environment of the Planetarium dome.
The Men Who Would Conquer China
"The men who would conquer china" is a three part doco series the ABC is commissioning,directed by Nick Torrens that I’m doing the score for presently.
Here’s the synopsis:
After the collapse of the Soviet Union...
After China’s commitment to capitalism...
Regional and cultural differences give way to a unifying materialism...
Some say history is coming to an end...
Mart Bakal is a millionaire New York banker with a fine sense of comic timing. He is also a Harvard professor and international investment expert whose company, Crimson Capital was commissioned by the US government to oversee massive privatization programs in Eastern Europe. He has already bought, restructured & sold 900 companies there. The New York Times said of his work: "Nowhere else have Americans managed to reach a position of such decisive influence in the conversion of an economy."
But Mart now has a grand dream: to use his perfected methodologies, and his inside knowledge of the workings of centralized economies to repeat his success – this time in the fastest-growing and largest market in the world – China. This time the US government is not involved. This time the rewards will be purely for Mart and his family. And this time his investment horizons are virtually unlimited.
"The Men Who Would Conquer China" compares the business methods, the values and the motivations of the North American and the Chinese locked together by perceived mutual advantage in a struggle crucial to the future of each
Saw David Bowie at the Melbourne tennis enormodome... was a bit of a rock show... though he did play four songs off Low, Five Years, Life on Mars, and Heroes... all of which were fantastic and good choices... and his stage manner was very unpretentious and as expected a phenomenal band...
Wire rocked in a post punk seminal way... blast from the past though it still made sense...
Telek and Black Paradise records will be out in a couple of months? There’s maybe talk of Telek playing Toronto in September... on Blunt
Hope you all have a fulfilling year in whatever you do...
Safe travels... Hope to see you at a gig somewhere...
I appreciate the support...
David
|
|
