Sight and Sound of a Storm in Sky Country

Timothy O'DWYER
Born 1971, Melbourne, Australia

Sight and Sound of a Storm in Sky Country (2003)

saxophones with live electronics solo
Commissioned by ELISION Ensemble
Lilla Watson, visual artist

Lilla Watson

LINE OF SILENCE

At the centre of the culture of Indigenous Australians is the spiritual connections to land, our Mother and Teacher. The four pictures are connected by a horizontal line of silence, a constant, representing the land and its importance to all humanity, to all life.

SIGHT OF THE STORM

Storm moves through sky country like a giant snake, its aura glows and surrounds it.

The rolling Clouds transform Sky Country, and warn of its coming.

Its rain nourishes the land, and fills the rivers made (created/formed) in a (complementary?) pattern by the great snake.

Its movement pushes out into the space of sky country like sound waves, and creates a pattern of ripples radiating out from the centre of the storm into the atmosphere in all directions.

The lightning flashes across the sky, and strikes the land as the maker of fire.

The storm entraps and encapsules part of the outer space within its self: this becomes the inner-space of the storm.

SOUNDS OF A STORM

Low rumbles of thunder

• in the distance
• Middle sounds of thunder as it grows (moves) closer
• Cracks of thunder overhead
• Sounds of the receding thunder, which grows softer, quieter

Rain

• rain hitting leaves on trees
• plops of rain on still water
• on tin roofs
• rain hitting window panes

Water rushing

• down streams
• through gutters
• down drain pipes
• out overflow pipes from tanks

Thunder and wind

• the maker of Trade Routes throughout the land

This series of pictures present simultaneously the vertical and horizontal view as seen through a small window in time and space. So there are layers both at a vertical level and there are layers at a horizontal level.

The vertical level comes from the ants' eye view from beneath the ground; the horizontal level is from the eye of the storm in sky country.

The pictures represent both of these levels and views at the same time in the mind's eye, and at the blink of an eye, captures a moment in space in time.

--Lilla WATSON

Timothy O'Dwyer

Background

In May 2002 I recorded a solo c.d. called multiple-repeat commissioned and recorded at Radio Bremen (many thanks to Marita Emigholz again for facilitating this project). Instead of recording tracks of solo saxophone improvisations and notated works I began working on an idea of ordering dense `masses/blocks´ of sound made up of layers of small articulations/attacks. The duration of each block, the number of overdubs, the type of material to be used for each event was designed prior to recording.

Each block was recorded and overdubbed many times, each of these instances improvised in response to the previous overdub(s). The concept came from my desire to create a `solo improvised´ music that articulated more than one version of myself at any one time and to combine the idea of spontaneity with organised pre-composition. Another thing that I like about the process was the tactility-intensity and physicality of creating every slap tongue -- every sound individually that made up the hundreds that listener actually hears.

Structurally I worked from the premise that music is simply the rhythm of sounds and silences placed on a timeline. The way I imagine the form is like you have blown up a score of music 1000x and you hear/see each `note´ and `rest´ as an object that has been magnified to massive proportions. Each `note´ though, is a seething mass of activity when looked at through the microscope.

Collaboration

Working with Lilla Watson has been a meeting of minds. Lilla's work appealed to me greatly because to produce her work she uses a process of burning hundreds of holes through paper. I found this to have a strong correlation to my approach of using hundreds of individual `articulations/ attacks´ to make larger musical forms.

We met in Brisbane and talked and I played Lilla multiple-repeat. Lilla told me later "at this point a picture began to form in my mind". Later that evening I played a solo improvisation for her and "shapes came into being". Lilla works quickly and by the next morning she had made a design that would be used to create the larger work. I left Brisbane with this design and began working from the shapes- outlines-colours and mythology surrounding her piece to form the music. Lilla's work was inspired by listening to my music, the music this evening comes from the inspiration I found in using Lilla's piece as a graphic score -- a blueprint to order and dictate musical proportions, directions, specific sounds, colours and textures for the work.

Live processing MAX/MSP

During the performance I will be using live processing using MAX/ MSP (a software tool kit or `graphic programming environment´ that enables the construction of programs for sound manipulation and processing among other things) to create this multi layering effect in a live situation (this program was developed in collaboration with Melbourne based programmer/ musician Steve Adam). What you will be hearing is a combination of my actual live sound and pre-recorded sounds interacting with what I play in real-time. The extra layers behave with a combination of unpredictable and `designed´ outcomes.

--Timothy O'DWYER

Programme notes © 2003 Lilla WATSON and Timothy O'DWYER