Music

This soundscape was created for NinaLovina’s Valley of the Subconscious exhition. I took inspiration from the consistent colour pallette that Nina uses throughout these works, combined with the ethereal dream-like nature the paintings, to create a looping soundscape that immerses the listener in the sounds that I hear when I view these amazing works of art.

Nina’s work explores our thoughts, patterns, and the way we move through this life form. She invites us to reflect on the parts of life we often overlook… the repetition, the performance, the surface patterns that define our days. Beneath that surface, her paintings reveal the truth …stillness, remembering and return to your truth. The Valley of the Subconscious becomes both a visual and emotional journey inward, through dreamlike landscapes that mirror the hidden rhythms shaping our human story.

The soundscape is a 20-minute loopable track that consists of an underlying and evolving drone, with three distinct melodic sections that emerge and fade away again. These three melodic sections are presented as separate tracks in the album: “The Journey”, “When Shadows Dissolve”, and “Soul Mirage” — named after the paintings that inspired each of the tracks. The evolving drone is included in the album as a separate track for blissful background listening.

The drone was created in a modular system from two sound sources layered on top of each other. The bass note is from a Makenoise Spectraphon being processed through a QPAS and then two Bruxa modules to create wide stereo field. Layered on top of this is the same fundamental note, but produced from the DPO complex oscillator run through a Frap Tools Fumana spectral processor to create the high-end fizz, with reverb from a Meris Mercury X. The three melodic sections contain only one sound source each: The Journey is a single wavetable synthesizer, When Shadows Dissolve is an electric guitar (Fender Jaguar), and Soul Mirage is a Wurlizer electronic piano. A Torso S-4 sculpting (granular) sampler was used to turn these simple sounds into the dream-like rendition that sounds familiar and simultaneously surreal.

I wanted to step back from creating busy melodic music and try to create something that was pleasing but not distracting. Something so simple that it could be on in the background and I could appreciate it but not have it take my focus away. Just as with software engineering, simple is very hard to do!

I am grateful for how the process of creating this album taught me to appreciate subtlety and the balance between what’s needed to convey a feeling versus what’s there to make a statement.

The UDO Super 6 was the mainstay of this album. I’ve not explored it in-depth, but for me it does one thing and it does it so beautifully well. Some of the Subharmonicon sounds from Leura also came back in this album. The bass, of course, was a Moog Subsequent 37.

A long weekend away in a cozy straw-bale cottage nestled in the Blue Mountains yielded the beginnings of this album. I took with me a small set of instruments. An ARP 2600, an Elektron Digitone, a few of the Moog semi-modular instruments, and an Eventide H90 and Strymon Bluesky for effects. Throughout the weekend we painted, designed sounds and melodies, and then let them loop while more art was created. All of this was recorded onto cassette tape with a Tascam Portastudio 414.

The tapes came back with me to Sydney and I used them as the base for this album. In this album I explored the harmonic series using the Moog Subharmonicon, and loved the rich bass that the ARP 2600 provides without much patching at all. The ARP 2600 also provided some of the arpeggios with liberal use of its ringmod circuit.

Shortly before I left California, I finished composing and recording the material for what would become my second album: Exit Mesa. This album uses a combination of electronic instruments, hardware and software, combined with guitar parts recorded live. Mixed and edited on many flights between Sydney and San Francisco, and finally finished once I’d found my feet again in Sydney, “Exit Mesa” was released in early 2019. The performance name is was released under “Strollfold” is a combination of the two working titles for the album “Strolling off the Mesa” and “Fold”, which after being written many times on my to-do list became increasingly shortened to “Work on Stroll & Fold”, and eventually “Strollfold” became the name that stuck.

Ableton was the DAW of choice for this project, and the sounds were primary from an Arturia Matrix Brute, Roland Juno 106, Roland TR8-S drum machine, Access Virus TI2, and a host of software instruments from Arturia, Xfer Records (Serum) and Native Instruments.

Way back in 2005, over the Christmas and New Year holiday break, I locked myself with a bunch of guitars, a bass guitar, a laptop and a drum machine. The result was this album: Long, Slow Accident. Unlike Exit Mesa, this album is very guitar driven and more alternative rock. This was before the electronic influences took over. If I remember at the time I also had a Roland JP8000 keyboard and an Akai MPC2000 but they just didn’t gel with me and I ended up selling them soon after I made this album.

The main guitar used on most tracks is the one guitar I still have with me from this time, my 1964 Fender Jazzmaster. Some tracks also used a 1974 Fender Thinline Deluxe that I had at the time but sold before moving to the US. The acoustic was a Maton EGB808 Artist. And that reminds me, I need an acoustic guitar again.