Eight pianos. Two iconic sites. Four conversations.

I’m delighted to announce my new album, sanctuary x mill, created with friends Vanessa Tomlinson and Erik Griswold, will be released through Room 40 on 23 October.

Across four improvisatory encounters, weathered pianos reach across the distance between the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary and The Piano Mill, trading grooves, rhythms and textures as local birds, trees and weather share their thoughts.

Pre-order now via Room40’s Bandcamp page.

The past couple months have been a time of brewing and reflection, with a few exciting things in the pipeline that I can’t wait to share with you all!

In the meantime, here are a few updates on recent news, and upcoming movements:

Wangkangurru Community Fieldwork

As part of the Fine Tuning ARC-funded project team at the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music, I had the joy of travelling to Birdsville on Wangkangurru Yarluyandi Country earlier this month. Find below some clippings from the Elder Conservatorium newsletter about the trip:

While on the trip, I experimented with my new Insta360 recorder, which I’m finding is a useful tool for sharing the wonderful places I’m fortunate to visit.

Find a couple of videos below, one at Deon’s Lookout, and the other a sunrise at Big Red on the edge of the Simpson Desert. Note the expansive body of water that is usually a dry valley floor, and the amazing reflections of the dawn sky!

Piano Sanctuary Installation

Earlier, in June, the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary finally reached its full complement of eight pianos, with support from the Rural City of Murray Bridge Council in craning three instruments onto their plinths.

ANAT Board Appointment

Earlier this month, I joined the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) Board alongside Ruth Weldon as one of their two new South Australian Board members.

Over the past 38 years, the Australian Network for Art & Technology (ANAT) has cultivated opportunities for artists to create experimental work in and with science and technology.

Through residencies, symposia, workshops and other professional activities supported by robust national and international networks, ANAT plays a unique and critical role in Australia’s artistic and cultural ecosystem and contributes significantly to the nation’s reputation for creativity, diversity and innovation.

Having connected with ANAT’s SPECTRA programs over the past decade, I’m excited to contribute to the organisation’s development and continued flourishing over the coming years!

Elizabeth Wood Fellowship Update and Upcoming Conferences

This year, I’m grateful to be supported by an Elizabeth Wood Musicology Fellowship, allowing for in-depth research into two areas of interest:

• Bioacoustics playback in creative practice (i.e. exploring the ethical implications of playing animals’ calls back to themselves)

• Generative AI and speculative soundscapes (i.e. considering ethical implications of work in this space, through building a prototype Gen AI system combining environmental sound and meteorological data).

I’ll be sharing my findings on each topic in upcoming posts here, and will be presenting on the work at several upcoming conferences:

• Inter.noise 2026 at the Adelaide Convention Centre, SA (AUS) from 9-12 August 2026.

• World Ecoacoustics Congress in Cairns, QLD (AUS) from 17-20 August 2026.

• The Global Composition in Dieburg/Darmstadt, Germany from 3-6 September 2026.

More to report soon!

Tuesday 11 Aug 2026, doors open at 6.30pm for 7pm
at Nexus Arts Venue, Adelaide CBD

On 11 August, in collaboration with Nexus Arts, the Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology will present a concert of immersive surround sound works celebrating Australian landscape and soundscapes.

Alongside a few of my own works, the concert will feature new works by Keira Simmons, Nexus Interplay artist Felix Wang, and visiting international delegates from the Internoise 2026 Conference, ‘From the Outback to the Ocean’.

Find out more and buy tickets at the link below. Would love to see you there!

More information and Tickets

Wilcannia, NSW at night, May 2023
Photo by Greg Harm

If you’ve seen me in person recently, you’ve likely heard mention of a new release on the horizon, sanctuary x mill, an homage to the soundscapes of the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary (SA) and the Piano Mill (QLD).

A brief background: both the Sanctuary and the Mill showcase ruined pianos. As explained by WA-based composer-improviser Ros Bolleter, the doyen of ruined piano studies.

Ross proposes a taxonomy of weathered pianos, from least to most transformed:

• neglected (including veranda pianos)

• abandoned (including shed pianos)

• weathered

• decayed

• ruined

• devastated

• decomposed

• annihilated

Each stage offers different possibilities of how you might approach collaborating with the instrument. A neglected piano will likely function much like a typical, well-regulated, ‘in-tune’ piano, but as the weathering process unfolds, instead they start to become unique percussion instruments, singing what they wish according on their journey up until that point, and the particular environmental conditions on that day at that place. All kinds of sonic possibilities emerge for adventure and exploration, the piano and the performer figuring it out together in the moment.

A film on Ross Bolleter’s Well Weathered Pianos,
by Robert Castiglione

Across the decades, Ross was the curator of the Wambyn Olive Grove Piano Sanctuary at York, Western Australia, featuring dozens of weathering pianos decorating the wheat-belt landscape. Learning about weathered pianos and Ross’ work via Gabriella Smart and David Kotlowy, who had aspirations to situate a sibling piano sanctuary in the Adelaide city parklands, I wondered at the possibility of establishing one near my family home in Murray Bridge, South Australia.

Working with the Rural City of Murray Bridge Council, the site of Carey’s Park – a 750m long nature strip of remnant mallee scrub, separating the main arterial Mannum Road from the service road, and subdivided into four sections – was selected. Starting with a trial in 2018 of two pianos in one section, the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary eventually grew to feature two pianos per section, eight in total, with an official launch in May 2023 (also marking the start of the Channelling Dulcie’s Piano project).

improvisation on a ruining piano at the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary,
March 30 2021, with gamelan-like flavourings

Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary Launch, May 2023
Photos by Greg Harm

The Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary soon began opening pathways to collaborations far beyond South Australia. In December 2023, friends Nadene Thieraut Copeland and Darren Copeland from New Adventures In Sound Art (NAISA, based in South River, Ontario, CAN), asked if I might collaborate with them on a project, the Weathered Piano Exchange:

Darren Copeland related to Jesse that the Belgian visual and media artist Ward Weiss had suggested as a possible theme for Art’s Birthday 2024, an acknowledgement of the 50th anniversary of John Cage’s Etude Australis. With NAISA being in the northern hemisphere it was useful to note that Cage did have a companion piece to Etude Australes which is Etude Boreales for cello and/or piano which of course references the northern star patterns. These Cage pieces together form the notion of opposite ends working independently to achieve something larger as a result of their simultaneity. So if anything these pieces can serve as a point of inspiration for re-imagining another musical form that results from our collaboration from opposite sides of the world. Check out the Art’s Birthday web-page for more information about this annual international event.

From this initial idea came the first meeting between Nadene, Darren and Jesse, the outcome of which was to create a series of exchanges, each set of which responded to the previous set. It was agreed that Nadene would perform four pieces on the piano outside in South River (recorded by Darren) and send these to Jesse, who would respond with another four performances (recorded by Jesse) and send them back to Nadene. Nadene then responded with another four performances to Jesse’s set and the final set was performed by Jesse in response to that. This created 16 separate tracks – 4 each of 4 performances each a response to the set before all created between mid-December 2023 and mid-January 2024.

From the 16 tracks, Jesse created a binaural mix of the four pieces which was then presented by NAISA as part of its Art’s Birthday celebration. This binaural mix was then broadcast on CITR in Vancouver as part of its 24 Hours of Radio Art and on James Bailey’s show on CIUT called Electric Sense on January 17, 2024.

A Bandcamp page was created to release the solos and duos as well as a binaural mix of all four recordings of each of the four tracks. You can listen to the releases on this web-site here or follow us on our bandcamp page here.

Towards the end of the project, Nadene, Darren and Jesse discussed their thoughts on the outcomes of project and their shared interest in ‘weathered’ or ‘ruined’ pianos. You can access this on the interviews page, which can be found here.

recording in the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary, December 2023

Vol. 1 of 3 of the Weathered Piano Duos, with Nadene

Enthused by the NAISA collaboration, I sought ways to continue the exchange with other piano sanctuaries, and got in touch with fellow friends Vanessa Tomlinson and Erik Griswold, asking them to respond to my recordings with the pianos of the Piano Mill, a sister sanctuary based at Harrigan’s Lane in Queensland’s Granite Belt.

Vanessa and Erik recording their improvisations in the Piano Mill

The Piano Mill, up close

At the same time, a residency opportunity came up for the Piano Mill at Harrigan Lane, QLD. Applying for it was a no-brainer, offering dedicated time to explore the fresh material from the Australian piano sanctuary recordings made by Vanessa, Erik and me, while fostering deeper connections between the sibling sanctuaries. Fortunately, my application was accepted, and I made for the Piano Mill in April 2024, generously hosted by Bruce and Jocelyn Wolfe, the owners of Harrigans Lane.

exploring Harrigans Lane, April 2024

Putting the piano tracks together for the first time was a magical discovery: a structural and compositional logic emerging through our far-flung improvisations, undoubtedly informed by the deep listening and ecological attunement at the base of Vanessa, Erik and my creative practices. Everything seemed to fall naturally into place, with only minor adjustments to the last track to make sure the attacks at the start of the piece lined up.

Given the importance of place and site with each sanctuary – Murray Bridge situated close to the riverine banks and The Piano Mill set amidst dense Granite Belt bushland – the next step was to place the piano recordings amidst their local soundscapes. The Murray Bridge selections came from recordings made for my 2015 album, The River’s Way’, whereas the artist residency offered the chance to make recordings onsite at Harrigans Lane, using of a variety of microphones including a 2nd-order ambisonic Octomic and various stereo setups.

Much like the piano improvisations, organising the soundscape material was largely an intuitive process, dragging and dropping large audio clips of soundscapes over the piano material in the audio software Reaper, slightly adjusting positioning to taste, and listening to contrast and complement with the ruined piano timbres. Unexpectedly, each of three ‘intermissions’ between the improvisations featured impressive bird calls: a currawong winding through the forest in the first, a kookaburra and willy wagtail chorus in the second, and a murder of magpies in the third.

setting up for the performance of sanctuary x mill at Harrigans Lane, April 2024

After assembling this all together across the residency week, the first WIP performance took place on in the clearing next to the Lagavulin Concert Hall, surrounded on the periphery by a forest of sentinel eucalypts. A small audience of myself, Erik, Vanessa, Bruce, Jocelyn and Mary Findlay (the director of the nearby Stanthorpe Regional Art Gallery) gathered within my octophonic speaker array, which I’d brought from South Australia, and for the next 45 minutes, we were immersed in the swirling realm of ruined pianos, Australian soundscapes, and the live dusk chorus at Harrigans Lane.

As the gentle breeze started to chill, the boundaries blurred between the real and the recorded. Choruses of birds, crickets and frogs blended between those that were prerecorded, existing within the speakers, and those that were calling from the live environment around us. Early in the piece, between the first and second movements, a recorded currawong call was so convincing that everyone looked up to the sky, with no visible source. Later, I heard (and saw) a flock of yellow-tailed black cockatoos gliding gracefully over the performance site, but the rest of our modest human audience were focussed on listening, likely unaware of its unintentional spontaneity. I find this fusion of site-specific recorded work and live soundscape endlessly fascinating: a unique tapestry of textures unfolding in performance, never to be repeated.”

As I write this, I’m currently in the process of finding a home for the finished tracks, so I hope to report on where you can listen to the full album in the near future. In the meantime, here’s an excerpt from the third movement, bayou blues, an appropriate title (I think) with the opening bass line and ribbiting frog chorus. Happy listening!

If you missed the last update, which covered a swathe of recent and upcoming ventures, you can catch up here:

Now to a recent work, Crepuscule: Karaoke Edition, which featured as part of Open Space Contemporary Art (OSCA)’s on-site project at Adelaide’s No. 9 Karaoke on 30 April.

Several years ago, I developed a work, Crepuscule, for the FELTspace June 2021 exhibition series.

Occupying the backroom of FELTspace’s then-Compton Street premises, which was immersed in complete darkness, Crepuscule offered visitors a continuous dusk soundscape experience, livestreamed from locations all around the world on the LocusSonus Open Microphone network. Live meteorological data from nearby weather stations for each site drove audio processing of the sound, conjuring an evolving immersive soundscape installation. From the FELTspace website:

Crepuscule is an ecological sound art installation, bringing together livestreams of dusk soundscapes from around the globe into a centralised space.

Drawing the model of Reveil (an annual 24-hour broadcast of dawn choruses on International Dawn Chorus Day), Crepuscule opts for opposing dusk choruses, tuning into publicly-accessible livestreams on Locus Sonus (http://locusonus.org/, a global open microphone network) as the earth rotates toward night.

The sonification of weather data from each soundscape location provides additional creative overlay, achieved through manipulating attributes of audio processing (such as filtering, reverberation, panning, granular synthesis) to result in altered acoustic environments parsed through the lenses of local circumstances.

Through drawing together the sounds of dusk, Crepuscule offers a contemplative space to listen to commonalities and contrasts of twilight soundscapes the world over.

Earlier this year, I was contacted by friends Yusuf Ali Hayat and Alice McCool to rework Crepuscule for the on-site exhibition they were curating at No. 9 Karaoke in Adelaide’s Chinatown with Open Space Contemporary Arts (OSCA): The brief:

Situating Crepuscule in a karaoke bar, outside the confines of a white wall gallery, offered a few options to augment the original idea:

• using microphones for audience performance (blend sound with livestream soundscapes) and interaction (controlling parts of the installation)

• using in-situ lighting and TVs

• During the original 2021 presentation, there were multiple microphones situated across Japan and Korea, most of which are still operational and would be tuned into when the on-site exhibition was running.

With the new options, a few upgrades were in order. Redeveloping the software from a Max/MSP to a browser-based app, I wanted the audience to be enveloped in the dusk soundscapes, so I imagined both the soundscapes and live vocals surrounding the audience in a quadraphonic (four-speaker) array.

For the visuals, I’d become interested in further exploring TouchDesigner, a powerful generative and algorithmic audiovisual software environment, which I’d first come across in the 2024 TD LabRats tutorials series at ILA. In the past couple years, I’d wanted to use TD in a new project, and this rework of Crepuscule provided the perfect opportunity for a first foray.

For the new version’s visuals, I’d first conceived of converting the incoming livestream soundscapes into an evolving spectrogram that the vocalist could sing along to (à la karaoke lyrics), the sounds becoming something of a graphic score.

Further hunting of TD tutorials led me to find a datamoshing setup that blended static images with videos, which felt a much better fit with the themes of livestream data, janky karaoke tech, and distributed agency.

audiences playing with Crepuscule while tuned into the Seoul - Gusan soundscape

The source images became the first 20 Google images of each livestream location, updating whenever the location changed, while the video was an hour-and-fifteen-minute dusk walk through outer Tokyo played at half-speed. Interesting among the image collections were ‘Otsuchi - Otohama’, which positioned picturesque coastal vistas alongside the devastation of tsunamis, and ‘Kyoto - HydroCyberForest’ where bamboo forest and traditional architecture contrasted with hydropower and chemical plant infrastructure.

the source video, revealed through singing the soundscape

To activate and keep the video playing, one microphone needed to be sung into continuously; to change the images, the other microphone responded to ‘snare drum’-like sounds that triggered the next photo. If the image changed whilst the video was playing, the screen would glitch and fuzz, with the datamoshing video adjusting to the new dimensions.

10x speed of audiences across the night

On the night, the work ended up becoming much more playful and social than I’d initially imagined. Some audience members cautiously tested the microphones, while others immediately leaned into the karaoke premise and began performing into the dusk soundscapes.

As the evening went on and people became more comfortable, the room developed its own amorphous energy, somewhere between installation, karaoke session, live performance, and experimental playground. A particularly memorable moment involved a professor friend unexpectedly launching into an improvised rant at the state of the world, which pretty much broke the ice for everyone else in the room.

One of the most rewarding things about this version of Crepuscule was seeing how the karaoke framing completely changed the social dynamic of the work. What was originally a fairly contemplative installation became something much more collective, playful, awkward, unpredictable, and alive. People moved between hesitation, experimentation, singing, laughing, performing, and simply listening. A lot of the interaction happened through discovery rather than instruction, which honestly felt true to the spirit of the piece. The livestreams themselves are unstable and constantly shifting, and once audience voices were folded into the system, no two moments really unfolded the same way.

This new version of Crepuscule also marked my first substantial dive into TouchDesigner and live interactive visuals, combining livestreamed soundscapes, microphone input, reactive image systems, and generative video processes into a single environment. It has opened up a lot of new ideas around participation, ecological systems, live media, and audience agency that I’m keen to continue developing, particularly around my immersive soundscape practice. More than anything, this iteration felt less like revisiting an old work and more like stumbling into the beginning of a new direction.

Check out some of the work by the other amazing artists below!

Part of the motivation for switching to Substack was to get out of a rut of writing more rigid chronological updates, in which I’d attempt to share everything I’d done in the last half year (or however long I’d left it). Too often, the process became boring and burdensome, and procrastination ensued.

Here, instead, I’m moving towards a more fluid way sharing of things: topics I’m passionate about, projects I’m working on, or things I generally find interesting. Sometimes these will take the form of more traditional updates (like this post), though I expect the majority of offerings will be more focused on particular projects, ideas or curiosities.

Now to the roundup. First up - I’ve found many people have assumed through my socials’ posts that I’m still travelling OS, which has been the case. In December and January, I spent time with my partner Sean, who’s performing the role of the Engineer in Miss Saigon UK tour, spending time in Leeds, Oxford, London (for Christmas) and later Llandudno in northern Wales.

after belated birthday tea and cake at Betty’s in Harrogate UK, Dec 2025

views of Oxford UK, Dec 2025

In January, my return home included a side trip to the Netherlands to practice language (now sitting at about B1 level Dutch) and visiting family in Gelderland, before arriving back in Adelaide later in the month.

The past few months back on the ground have been fairly full, spanning South Australian festival seasons, several research projects, acoustic ecology activities, and creative practice:

• February and Mad March made for a very active festival season, this year focussing on catching shows over performing, among them The Cherry Orchard, Perle Noire: Meditations on Joséphine, Tyshawn Sorey and Mary Said What She Said in the Adelaide Festival, and My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me on Instagram, An Evening with Dame Granny Smith, The Subplot, Vicarious Cabaret and Sexy Ghost Boy in the Adelaide Fringe. All that said, I did play keys for Luke Foale’s debut in They Weren’t Saying Artistic at Dom Polski.

awaiting my Evening with Dame Granny Smith, March 2025

• Research work on the ARC Project, Fine Tuning: A Reconciliation of Indigenous and Western Musical Traditions, which is in its final few months. Amongst the various outputs include:

  • Developing a web-based analysis app, Tuning Explorer, which allows for the analysis of tuning systems in monophonic (single-line) vocal music. Intended for broad use, our particular application (and motivation for the overall project) has been analysing the interval and scale structures of song recordings from Central Australian Desert communities for their unique microtonal characteristics. These analyses are output as tuning files (in .scl or .ascl format) for use in music creation software, which composers from each community are using to develop new works for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, being premiered in October 2026 at the concert Waltjapiti Tjungu (Together, One Family).

  • Co-authoring several papers, including:

    • One on the Tuning Explorer software, its design and how it works

    • One on a critical discussion of the software through Indigenist, post-colonial, and digital culture

    • One on a survey of art music works by Indigenous composers between the years 2000-2025.

• Elizabeth Wood Musicology Fellowship: This year, this wonderful Fellowship is supporting me to explore two topics in my research discipline of acoustic ecology, with each intending to have a paper publication and associated creative project:

  • Bioacoustics Playback in Creative Practice: this topic looks at the implications of animals hearing their own calls in site-specific creative works being presented on location (increasingly part of presenting my work with my octophonic array outdoors). What impact is this having on the behaviour/ethology of the animals hearing these calls? What ethical responsibilities do creative practitioners have when taking these impacts into account?

  • Generative AI and Speculative Soundscapes: exploring connections between acoustic datasets (from the Australian Acoustic Observatory & Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network Ecoacoustics Database) and non-acoustic ecological information (i.e. weather data, ecological gradients, etc.) to explore what soundscapes might sound like in the future under particular ecological conditions. Alongside this is a deep exploration of the ethics of AI and acoustic ecology practice, which is yet to be articulated.

• AFAE and WFAE: continuing to serve as President of the Australian Forum and Secretary of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, there are a lot of exciting developments for both organisations emerging from sustained community efforts. Key amongst these are new websites for each organisation (afae.org.au and wfae.net), as well as upcoming podcast series and numerous national and international conferences this year (see below).

  

  new home page for the AFAE website

  ---

In the coming months, there’re some exciting projects unfolding in the near future:

• Releasing sanctuary x mill, a collaborative work with friends Vanessa Tomlinson and Erik Griswold, connecting the soundwords of the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary and the Piano Mill in SE QLD. I’m currently getting feedback on the final mix, before heading off to mastering, so almost there - stay tuned for a release date!

• Presenting at the SPACE(R) symposium at Flinders University on 16-17 April, with an offering of sanctuary x mill in full ambisonics each day. Public tickets for the 17 April gig can be found here.

  

• Presenting a new version of Crepuscule, an immersive surround sound installation, as part of Open Space Contemporary Arts (OSCA) onsite project No. 9 Karaoke on April 30.

A little further out, there’re a number of other ventures brewing:

• New project with AFAE and Adelaide University, deploying Hydromoths (hydrophone recorders) in the Gulf St Vincent and Spencer Gulf through a network of citizen scientists, allowing for ongoing ecoacoustic monitoring of South Australian coastal waters (especially important with the ongoing algal bloom).

• Attending several acoustic ecology conferences in August and September, including Inter.noise (Adelaide SA, 9-12 August), World Ecoacoustics Congress (Cairns QLD, 17-20 August) and the Global Composition Conference (Dieburg/Darmstadt, Germany, 3-6 September). Across these gatherings, I’ll be presenting on the research topics of my Elizabeth Wood Musicology Fellowship (see above), as well new creative works.

More soon, with much love and compassion x

Jesse

Back in October, whilst he was visiting for the 2025 COMA Curated series which I curated, friend Fin Wegener put me onto NTS Radio, a “global radio platform broadcasting music from over 50 cities around the globe, live 24/7” which I’ve found a gold mine for new musical experiences and fresh perspectives on emerging genres and scenes. Alongside the livestreams, NTS also shares sets presented by stellar artists, such as this Drumless Mix with Caribou, Floating Points and Fred Again. Well worth the full listen, a particular track in the mix stood out, featuring a gentle 1980s synth-based minimalist hocket, alongside an rich, earnest voice, lovingly singing:

Delving deeper, I found the track wasn’t new, but 40 years old: a song called Ever New from Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s album Keyboard Fantasies. The tracks are a treasure trove of late 1970s and 1980s synthesiser minimalism coupled with deep reverence for life, queer experience and the natural world. Recounted in the eponymous Keyboard Fantasies documentary on Glenn’s life and music:

as a sci-fi obsessed woman living in near isolation, Beverly Glenn-Copeland wrote and self-released Keyboard Fantasies in Huntsville, Ontario back in 1986. Recorded in an Atari-powered home-studio, the cassette featured seven tracks of a curious folk-electronica hybrid, a sound realised far before its time.

Ever New is elegantly simple in its construction: a series of looping layers over chords I & IV (in the original key: G major and C major), interlocking to produce rich extended and sustained harmonies. The melody is sublime: aspirational, each phrase starting on the supertonic note A (offering a sense of sprouting or reaching, above the G major harmony) and blooming into these gentle, reassuring lines:

There’s at once a classical poise with the writing (Glenn recounting spending evenings listening to his father playing the piano, and formative years as a folk singer combining jazz, classical and blues elements), alongside a futuristic sound conjured from exploration of then-novel synthesisers and electronics.

Enthusiastic finding out as much as I could about Glenn and his music, I learned that, in the past decade, his early releases had been rediscovered and championed by a new generation of tape collectors, electronic and pop music artists, similarly recognising the vitality and pioneering nature of his work. It seems my serendipitous encounter is far from the only one:

Take this gorgeous reworking of Ever New by Bon Iver and Flock of Dimes on 2021’s Keyboard Fantasies Reimagined:

And then this collaboration with pop singer Sam Smith, the last track on the album TRAИƧA (a “spiritual journey celebrating trans people featuring Sade Adu, Andre 3000, Clairo, Eileen Myles, Hunter Schafer, Lyra Pramuk, Moses Sumney and others”); Glenn’s baritone rich and gentle as ever:

My exploration of Glenn’s practice brought me to learn about him as a person, finding this beautiful video between Glenn and his wife Elizabeth, a noted writer and artist in her own right. Sharing their thoughts on creative and spiritual practice with presenter Talia Schlanger, there’s a point where an invitation to share what they love most about one another offers a glimpse at their mutual reverence, adoration, trust and care:

Elizabeth: My heart is forever yours. We’ve made a commitment that next life time we want to meet in the sandbox, … ‘cause we realise we would’ve had a big family together had we met when we were younger. The depth of our grief for what is happening right now is because of the depth of our love, and I love that you are determined to be with both of those extremes of heart and mind, and I’m honoured to walk you home. Though the truth is, who know who’s going to walk who home in the end, right, you never know. I just love you.

Glenn: Yeah, I know, I feel the same.

Elizabeth: (whispered) Ok, now say some things about what you love about me.

Glenn: What I love about you? Oh, there’s so many things. I love the fact that Elizabeth is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And she’s also gorgeous. But there can be gorgeous, but not necessarily brilliant, right? So Elizabeth is gorgeous and brilliant, right. And she can keep so many things going on in her head, and envision so many things simultaneously. So we have this little playful thing, which is that she is like a balloon. She’s very quick, quick, and I’m a tortoise, and I’m slow as mollasses, going up hill in the summer, or the winter (Elizabeth: That’s thick mollasses!). Yeah! So, we’re connected to each other with this chain, this string, and she’s up in the air, and she has antennae everywhere, and she’s picking up all the things that’s happening in the universe, everything that’s going on, she gets it all, right, right? And she’s tethered to me. So what I say to her is “What’s going on, what’s happening?”, and she’ll say, “A lot, but don’t let go! Hold on to me, cause otherwise I’ll float away!”

So it’s like, we’re a perfect combination that way, right? Your brilliance absolutely stuns me still, darling. Every day I’m going “You can remember all that, right?!”

After a 20 year gap from 2004’s Primal Prayer, during which time he transitioned, Glenn released a new album, The Ones Ahead. The preciousness of the connection between Glenn and Elizabeth is made all the more palpable on the song Harbour (Song For Elizabeth):

Later in the afore-referenced interview, Glenn talks about his diagnosis with MCD (major cognitive disfunction), the gradual loss of executive function and memory, and acceptance of the journey ahead:

Glenn: I’m feeling as though, you know, bit by bit, I’m losing my grip on what is told to me. I can’t remember a lot of things that are told to me. I have to put them down, and sometimes I forget to put them down, right? So you know, I have a memory of things that are older, but not the recent things, right? That’s what life handed me, right? So I’m not fighting it, right? I don’t have this, like, oh, poor me, how could they be doing this to me? You’re going to die of something. Right. We’re not here forever. You know, the part that’s difficult is the fact that Elizabeth doesn’t have what she needs, which is to be able to rest, because I need a full-time person to, you know...

Elizabeth continues, speaking about taking on a ongoing caregiver role in the relationship, and the evolving sense of identity, community, and practice:

Elizabeth: One of the reasons we appreciate you bringing this up is that every time we talk about it, I often get lots of notes from other caretakers, because not many people talk about what it means to caretake. The exhaustion, the caretaker: I have burnout brain, and I’m a writer, and sometimes, my command of nouns – Glenn and I stand in the kitchen, and because he has a cognitive disorder and because I’m burned out, we’re doing charades, “that over there, that thing”.

That sort of falling apart of community, that we’ve seen an incredible acceleration in since the pandemic, but certainly before that, it takes a village, that old African proverb, it’s not just to raise a child, it takes a village if someone is sick. It takes a village if someone is troubled. It just takes a village for all humankind, is the truth.

So in talking about this, we’re talking about our situation, but also more than our situation. Because the people that come and take the step away from just talking about Glenn as their elder on social media, but show up at our house with a casserole or a group of young people that came yesterday to keep us company, they all leave and they tell me, “I feel so fed. I thought I was going to come here and this was going to be, like, hard work and really draining, but I feel fed”. Because we both have so much yet to give.

And Glenn, it’s an interesting contrast. As parts of his executive functioning go, and he can’t drive a car anymore or do our taxes or sometimes even remember a three-step process, his essential self is more present than ever. Now, is that 50 plus years of Buddhist practice? I think that’s an influencing factor. But I am, sometimes, just, you are more. As something is less, there is also more.

And I think that’s the joy for us in talking about this, because we’ve met a lot of couples where one partner is burned out and one partner is so tired of being unable to figure out what comes next. And we just, when we realized that this was happening, it’s like: where is the life here? And how does our relationship continue? And how do we continue?

The reason we went back on tour after what was supposed to be our final tour is we were sitting on the couch doing all the right things. Glenn was doing his crossword puzzles, and we had a routine. And at one point, Glenn looked over at me and said, “maybe this is supposed to extend my life, but I just don’t feel like we’re living. I have places to go. I have people to see. I have things I want to say still. I just don’t want to sit around and see the same five people”. So we have to, we juggle it, but it’s like anything in life. It comes with risks, but, and we wanted to be able to have a sense of humor.

This year, Glenn released Laughter In Summer, a bittersweet recording of the couple’s last intended public performance following Glenn’s diagnosis (they continue to tour perform now, as Elizabeth says above). A new rendition of Harbour features, with both spouses serenading one another, their duet infused with immense care and commitment to one another:

Spending time listening with Glenn’s music, hearing him speak, and coming to appreciate his being, I feel at once calm and embraced by a kindred energy, a nourishing parasocial link across hemispheres.

There’s a vitality and queer joy that his person and creative expression generously bestows, and a profound presence rooted in many decades of Buddhist Dharma practice - a different school (Zen) than my own (Gelugpa, from Tibet), but rooted in the same core tenet of love, compassion, and the bodhisattva aspiration.

With number of recent experiences in various spheres of my life reminding of the significance of presence in how we connect with each other and the world around us, I hear and see in Glenn - his being and his music - a beacon for attunement, for embodied awareness, for consistent, intentional creative and spiritual practice in uncertain times.

There’re few final questions from the homework for Lyra Pramuk’s Practicing Experimental Songform class that I started here and continued here, this last collection focussed on listening, creative hindrances, completion, organisation and community:

Where and when do you listen, and what kind of listening do you do when you’re there? Draw a map of your different ‘listening situations!

I’m reminded of different listening schemas that I’ve taught about in various courses.

Michel Chion, coming from the world of film, talks about three modes of listening: causal listening (identifying the source of a sound), semantic listening (interpreting a message/the meaning of a sound) and reduced listening (analysing a sound’s shape/characteristics/morphology, after Pierre Schaeffer).

One of my own mentors, Barry Truax, describes three different modes, more aligned with acoustic ecology, soundscape analysis and different states of attention in the listener:

• Listening-In-Search: “listening for something, actively seeking it out”

• Listening-In-Readiness: “where something that is important or significant easily becomes the point of focus, even though you are not consciously listening for it”

• Background Listening: “where a sound is not an object of attention but still within overall awareness”

I think different times and places activate different listening modes for me, all contingent on my energy levels and state of body and mind:

• If I’m playing/listening music, my aesthetic-analytical listening is switched on - music is rarely an experience of pure emotion, with my composer brain always finding something to engage with that I find structurally curious (a stimulating experience itself)

• if I’m field recording/moving through an environment, then more somatic/deep listening modes are activated.

• If I’m in conversation with someone, I’ll probably shift to a more focussed semantic listening.

• There’s also the inner monologue and hearing thoughts, whether made up language, music, sound or perhaps something else.

How did you learn to listen?

I learned to listen through the environments I grew up in, even from my earliest days. For the first 72 hours after arriving in the world, I didn’t open my eyes (there are photos of me with cucumbers covering my little peepers. After 40 weeks in utero + 11 days overcooking, sound continued to be my first experience of the world, which I feel led to an internal attunement and orientation of aural awareness that has brought me to my current vocation. Growing up in South Australia’s Tatiara and Murraylands areas, both with large agricultural vistas, developed a deep connection and passion for the natural world of sound. No doubt, too, my musical training also taught me to listen, cultivating my analytical faculties at the same time as expanding my listening palette immensely.

Importantly, I think I learned to listen through the guidance of core values in my Catholic-schooling and youth in Scouting,

subtext, silence,

empathy

Did you have a teacher? This could be a person, an artist you admire, a record, a piece of technology...

There are of course formal teachers I’ve had, both in person (my university aural lecturer Anne Cawrse and acoustic ecology doyen Hildegard Westerkamp) and in writing (John Cage, Pauline Oliveros).

More organically, I think my main teachers have:

• been the environments that I grew up in and continue to cherish - the pastoral, riverine and coastal landscapes of south-eastern South Australia

• my mum, whose example as a nurse has shown me the importance of presence in listening to others, aiming at understanding, care and compassion

• my field recording practice, learning to listen through different ears (both the microphone and the headphones), and attuning to the dynamics of place through attentive listening (whether while recording or listening back after-the-fact)

Which artists have taught you to listen?

acoustic ecology mentors: Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp, Cheryl Leonardson

indirectly: Pauline Oliveros, John Cage - through their writings.

Who, or what taught you the most about music? This could be anyone, or anything. Name something you learned.

I’ve a tattoo of John Cage’s 4’33’’ on my right forearm, text facing me. I got it in September 2013, in my days when I was something of a Cage acolyte. In hindsight, it’s clear that this was one of the gateways to acoustic ecology for me, but many other residual learnings persist:

• what is silence? what is music?

• music being a temporal art, experienced in time and composed of moments that gather in the memory of the listening. and following that, the listener’s perception making sense of those moments, recognising relationships, connections, patterns in the sound. At the larger scale, it’s the learning that narrative here becomes meaning-making from sonic experience – anything can follow anything.

• the relationship of formal structure and improvisation/spontaneity

Describe a sound in your city that inspires you.

For my hometown of Murray Bridge, it’s most certainly the sounds of the river banks, specifically at Mobilong Swamp, where I’ve gathered materials for many projects:

For Adelaide, where I’m now based, I’m reminded of a time in early 2025, walking several kilometres from Buddha House (then in Tusmore) to the Glen Osmond Toll Gate bus stop at the edge of Adelaide, catching the 864 to the Mount Barker Park and Ride. End of the South Eastern Freeway, many heavy trucks coming in at this time of day (9:30pm). Exhaust brakes making the turn on to Portrush Road reminiscent of Tibetan Horns, resonating powerfully through the valley framing the end of the freeway. Awe-inspiring, amazing sound.

How would you describe the style of your creative process?

enfolded attunement. (ecotonality)? conceptualise, attunement, collation, transformation, assemblage, sharing. collaborative. exploratory. messy, not strictly linear.

What gets in your way when you create? (Place these in a hierarchy, show connections between them)

• politics

• anxiety

• censorship

• capitalism

• fear

• social media

• work

• sexism

• racism

• your friends

• your family time

• too many choices

• tradition

• bad habits

• procrastination

• silence

• patriarchy

• insecurity

• lack of ideas

• ignorance

• the internet

• Knowledge

• trauma

• a hard life

• an easy life

I grouped these into three loose baskets, 1 as the most prevalent, 3 the least. The order of the words doesn’t signify so much:

1 - anxiety, fear, too many choices, bad habits, procrastination, trauma

2 - capitalism, social media, work, time, tradition, insecurity, ignorance, the internet, Knowledge

3 - politics, censorship, sexism, racism, your friends, your family, silence, patriarchy, lack of ideas, a hard life, an easy life

When are you “finished” with a creation? Do you even want to be?

I don’t know that I’m ever ‘finished’ in a definitive sense. A lot of my work in the past ten years has been open-ended by design.

For me, an ecologically-minded approach to making embraces the dynamism of an ecosystem, exploring the relationships between the macrostructure (coherent modelling of patterns, expressed in algorithmic design or rules-based systems) and microstructure (embracing the multitude of agencies in an ecosystem, with execution relegated to the individual performers or components of a setup, beyond my control). The result of these works is that every single performance is unique - connected at the large scale through a perceivable shape (not unlike a dawn chorus → day cycle → dusk chorus → night cycle), but realised through the many decisions that individual performers make (like in my works Sirenity and Whispers, with each making many decisions around when to specifically play). The question remains: what is ‘finished’ here? The architectural plan/logic of the system?

I think working in an experimental context, there’s a point at which time is called, whether it be through the abandonment of moving on (your attention turned to other things) or the need to render the work into some object - a recording, documentation, something sharable with the world. But even this can prove difficult, especially with translating immersive audiovisual works to single screen-based, stereo audio setups. I’m continuing to explore translating ambisonic works into the binaural realm, and have recently got an Insta360 to convey something of the environments and immersive performance environments I regularly encounter - keen to check back in soon with findings here.

How important is organisation to simply doing anything creative? Think about different approaches to organisation.

I think, for me, organisation is important for anything creative. In the past, I’ve often become paralysed when given free rein: so many options to choose from, examples and models to compare to, continuous tinkering in the pursuit of perfection.

On the contrary, I’ve noticed that I’m most engaged when I’m in flow state, completely immersed in whatever the task is that I’m doing, with everything else fading away. Regularly in search of this experience, I’ve found that there’s some processes, rituals and tools to access flow zone.

For one, I need a clean workspace (both physically and digitally) where I’m free of distractions, and the act of cleaning-up-as-preparation helps as a form of habit-stacking. I also know that, especially when there’s multiple large-scale or long-duration projects running simultaneously, that focussing on the peaks of the mountain ranges is debilitating, and that breaking things down into small individual steps (just that boulder, then the next one…) is a massive help in moving things gently forward.

I think that different strategies are needed for different phases of creativity. In my undergraduate years, I made little progress on notated pieces for months on end by confusing the creative exploratory period of ideas generation with the critical editorial period of compositional shaping. Training the creative muscles strategically, there’s an ongoing reflection of needing the flexibility to dream, imagine and wonder when ideas and new materials are being born, and needing more tautness to focus on specific tasks (the laboriness of score editing, of long-listening sessions, focussing on one aspect at a time) in the stage of iterative doing.

Some further advice I remember from Lyra’s session:

• Like going on a trip, set and setting are important for creative practice.

• Schedule the time and show up - steady consistency is important.

• Organise and back up your files, regularly.

• Phones are terrorism for our nervous systems (in general), get them out of the studio.

How do you support your friends in their creative practice?

At the moment, I try to get to gigs, exhibitions and presentations as I can. I continue to be interested in collaborative projects with people of many different disciplines, and also love bringing together teams of people to realise meaningful community projects (as with the several mountings of Craig Hella Johnson’s Considering Matthew Shepard I put on in 2019 and 2023.

In the longer term, my dream is to develop an artist residency space in South Australia, a hub for creative research, exploration, performance, exhibition and community.

I’m writing from Guangzhou airport, on my way home to Adelaide. After several weeks in wintry Wales, England and the Netherlands, the warmth of the dry South Australian summer calls. Hereafter continues the homework for Lyra Pramuk’s Practicing Experimental Songform class that I started here, teasing out a few more undercurrents of my creative practice.

‬Page 3

‭Think of a really wild sound. It could be the call of an animal, the sound of a‬‭ printer printing, anything. Now imagine how you could make that sound with your‬‭ voice. Write it down here; then perform it.‬

I thought of coffee boiling, with the guidance:

• wide open throat, slight restriction

• inwards breath, drawn slowly, activating individual cracks of vocal fry (feel each one)

• allow the passage of air to be audible, close mic

Who or what are some of your biggest creative influences as an artist?‬

For me: place, ecosystem, soundscape.

I’m deeply interested in the relationality of beings and their environments in place, and the way that sound conveys these relationships to a listener, sensitising and attuning to the complex interdependence. A quote from the first session of Practicing Experimental Songform:

Did you ever visit a public or artistic installation that included sound? If so what‬‭ was it, and how did you find the experience?‬

Visited many, made many (a core part of my practice).

I think the most impactful I’ve had have been are presenting site-specific multichannel works outdoor, particularly at dusk, with the twilight atmosphere, the playful dialogue between the dusk chorus and creative work. Magical.

‭Draw an abstract shape that represents anger or frustration.‬

💢 concave, pressure, tight, disconnected

Draw an abstract shape that represents joy or understanding.‬

integrated, connected, expansive, inversion of anger

‭(Can you hear the shapes?)‬

Name a musical artist or group that uses percussion/drums in an interesting way.‬‭ What do you like about their use of percussion?‬

Aphex Twin: love the exploration of dense, crisp drum and bass rhythmic units.

‭Name a musical artist or group that uses their voice or an instrument in a way‬‭ that inspires you. What do you like about the use of their voice or instrument?‬‭

Roomful of Teeth: their exploration of extended vocal and choir technique through communal sound making is incredible, as is their commissioning of repertoire. Caroline Shaw, Partita for 8 Voices (which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize) is testament to their group’s sensitivity.

Page 4‬

‭Have you experienced an artwork, or life experience, in which multiple forms of art‬‭ created a more interesting whole? (Ex. video + sculpture). If so, how was it put‬‭ together? How did it make you feel?‬

Many, in small combinations of art forms (music + dance, performance art, video, etc). Along the lines of gesamtkunstwerk in the opera space, Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach at De Nederlandse Opera in January 2013. The music, spartan minimalist patterns of visuals, Lucinda Child’s choreography, Christopher Knowles’ eclectic poetry . Knee Play 5’s poetic exploration of infinitudinal love destroys me every time.

I think also my connection and love for music theatre (as a music director and some-time performer) also makes sense through this lens, especially shows that combine various art forms (see: Lapine-era Sondheim, a lot of Dave Malloy’s works, and Hadestown).

‭Describe a specific time when music seemed to change your life.‬

A small but defining moment. I remember travelling on the bus in 2012, passing through the Glen Osmond-Freeway Intersection, and having a sudden realisation of the concert going on around me: the glissando drone of the bus engine, the jangling percussion on the furnishings of the bus interior, the shrill overtones of the brakes. It was revelatory; joyous tears shed in the beauty of the moment. A reminder to listen deeply to each moment, à la Pauline Oliveros:

Which political or social ideas are important to your artwork? Why?‬

I’m interested in a whole variety of topics. Ever since I was young, I’ve found my mind making lateral connections between seemingly-unrelated ideas that become the conceptual basis of a work.

If there were one that is a constant, it is ecological attunement, the aim of connecting a human audience to the more-than-human world, sensitising them to the processes and relationships of place, sound and community. So many of the issues we face across local and global levels come down to othering of our cousins across the tree of life. Cultivating sonder – a neologism from John Koenig describing “the profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are constantly living despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it” – for those we collectively share the world with is critical in this moment. I hope that my art can be an aid towards cultivating this empathy.

‭When you make music, which instruments or tools do you go to first?‬

I think it depends on the nature of what I’m making.

On the soundscape composition side, I’ll often begin with recorders, microphones and headphones for field recording. Later, I’ll move to my trusted MacBook Pro, and use my default setup over the past couple of years of Reaper and SPAT Revolution to manage the various formats across stereo to ambisonics that the work might be realised in.

For more notation-based practice, my main instruments are piano and voice, though I’ve written quite a number of pieces for string quartet. Here my default has been to work using Sibelius.

In the past several years, I haven’t written much notated music, largely due to an impatience of the turnaround of achieving a sonic result. With journalling becoming a new mode of capturing ideas in written form (as expressed here), I’m wanting to explore returning to written sketches on staves again, starting with the short score and expanding out for orchestration (making molehills out of mountains). Let’s touch base soon on this.

Do we need to feel ‘part of something’ to make music? What might that something‬‭ be: a community, a scene, a group of friends, a historical tradition, a lineage, a‬‭ time, a place?‬

Yes. I think music-making is inherently embedded in interconnectedness, whether with people (fellow performers, audiences), more-than-humans, environments, instruments, machine.

While my training as a dots-on-the-page composer instilled a sense of ‘needing to do it all yourself’ – a Romantic-era notion of the composer-as-genius, working in monastic isolation – as my practice has grown, I’ve found that most of things I’m interested in involve some form of relationship/connection/collaboration.

Place, ecosystem and soundscape are an integral part of my main output, each revealing the complex way that beings exist in a particular location, sharing resources and information with one another. Through my creative practice, which aims at the sensitive attunement to these relationships, I feel that the soundscape composer/ecological sound artist becomes something of a conduit, highlighting the interplay of these relationships through sound.

Interdisciplinary collaboration across many projects has taught me that being part of a group of fellow makers can be a source of motivation, through shared responsibility and accountability. I love to rearrange these words, laden as they are with disciplinarian baggage, to the ‘ability to respond’ and the ‘ability to account’. Collaboration then becomes about our capacities of responding to and accounting for the processes that draw out the ideas, the music, the work, the art we want to share.

‭What, if anything, do you feel a part of? Draw a diagram with the group, locating‬‭ yourself within these different ‘somethings.’

I think I feel a part of place and community, instinctively through my roots in regional South Australia, where connection to land and close relationships with people form a cornerstone of one’s life. Spiritually too I feel part of the wider world - here the intertwined concepts of shunyata/emptiness/voidness and dependent-arising/interdependence logically reveal all things to be interconnected, reliant on causes and conditions in order to exist. For example, tracing the generosity of how one grain of rice comes to be on your plate - innumerable generations of farmers and more-than-human beings nurturing generations of crops, transported by others across lands and seas - gives a sense of all the intricate, complex relationships form such a simple experience that can be so often taken for granted. And so this can be extended to everything else in our lives and deaths.

If I were to imagining a shape of what I can concisely perceive in my life, I think an onion is apt. At its core is me, surrounded by my local community: my partner, my family, friends, environments, communities I was born in, grew up in and now live in. The next layer is my national community: fellow practitioners, friends, communities (including the Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology), environments and places I’ve had the delight to spend time in and respond creatively to. The outermost layer is my international community: peers from many countries, friends and connections made around the world, organisations I’ve served (such as the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology as Secretary for the past 6 years), and the myriad more-than-humans acquainted along the way in my travels.

Can music ask questions?‬

Ives clearly thought so.

I think that music offers many qualities that resemble the dichotomy of question and answer. For me, aspects of tension and release, dynamism and stasis, expectation and satisfaction/surprise points towards a metalinguistic capacity of music, conveying a sense of inquiry and answer/response, an exploration of the unknown and the known unfolding in time. In this sense, music becomes a form of inquiry, exploring what if…

What a weird environment we find ourselves in this new year. I’m reminded of Timothy Morton’s etymological reflection on these words ~ weird, environment ~ in what I think is their book, Dark Ecology. Without the text at hand, I’m pulling this from memory (and a little help from Wiktionary), with weird connecting to a Proto-Indo European root, *wert- (“to turn, wind”), and environment connecting to a Latin root, virer (to bear, turn, veer), potentially even to gyro (“to turn in a circle, rotate; to circle, revolve around”)

With the maelstrom in the past week both nearby (a storm on the coastal horizon here in Llandudno, North Wales) and of the changing global order, I feel a turning, a veering in motion.

Following the current Miss Saigon UK Regional Tour these past few weeks, in which my partner Seann is reprising the role of The Engineer, I’ve had the delight of returning to Leeds in early December, followed by three weeks in Oxford over Christmas and New Years, becoming familiar with the famed university town. Several trips to the iconic Blackwell’s bookstore led to several purchases – including Byung Chul Han’s Non-Things and The Palliative Society, Pauline Oliveros’ Quantum Listening – but importantly for this here, Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work, which among other things encourages sharing something small each day as a way to over come the crippling blockage of perfectionism, a regular challenge I’m seeking to find strategies to traverse through.

Towards this, I thought I’d share some responses to my homework for the CAMP.FR course I’m taking online with experimental-musician extraoardinare Lyra Pramuk, Practicing Experimental Songform. Before launching into that, I want to share a quote shared during the session by the American choreographer Martha Graham which resonated with me; a spurring-on, a winding-up of sorts in embracing exploratory practice wholeheartedly:

So, the homework: a sheet entitled:‭ What is My Personal Relationship to Sound,‬‭ Music, and Creation? There are seven pages, with an array of questions about previous. Today I answered the first two pages:

Page 1

What is one of the earliest sounds you remember hearing as a child?‬

The oinks of pig’s on my Dutch grandfather’s pig farm in Bordertown, South Australia.
The crossing of a train at the town’s main railway intersection, Mum winding down the car window’s as we wait and listen.

Describe a sound that soothes and relaxes you.‬

Music for 18 Musicians, by Steve Reich. I’ve written an article on this work, considering it as a soundscape composition. For me, the music undulates with the musicians’ breath (the clarinetists and vocalists offering waves of crescendi and decrescendi with each ebb and flow), all the while pulsating vitally away.

‭ What is one of your favorite musical artists? Why?‬

Too many to count, but the first one that came to mind is the hyperpop artist brakence. I think his 2022 album hypochondriac is a masterpiece; with exquisite timbral explorations matched with the thematic explorations of coming-of-age in the past five years, bending of song forms, immaculate track transitions, and sensitive sampling.

‭What is another favorite musical artist of yours?‬‭ What is it that inspires you about them?‬

Ted Hearne. I’ve long loved his oratorio The Source, and am currently addicted to his new work, Farming, exploring the connections of settler-colonialism with contemporary agricultural and digital domains. There’s a genius in his combination of formal experimentation, electroacoustic synthesis, and addressing of social justice topics.

Describe a sound in nature that you are attracted to.‬

Waves: cyclic, breath, in-out, exchange, transfer. I hear the Irish Sea respirating now through the window of the Imperial Hotel room on the Llandudno Promenade.

Remember a time you danced with other people in celebration. Can you describe‬‭ it?‬‭

June 2024, Annerley, Brisbane, with Erik, Vanessa and Beatrice listening to BRAT in their living room. Spontaneous joy with fellow musicians who I adore.

Page 2

‭Describe a sound which makes you feel uncomfortable.‬

Anything that gives me the experience of grima - for me, it’s the scratching of Tazos or synthetic boardshorts. Chills down the spine.

Remember a time you sang together in a group of people and enjoyed it. Can you‬‭ describe it?‬

Considering Matthew Shepard, both times I conducted and produced. Less me singing with people, thought the moments shared in rehearsal I deeply cherish.

Do you have a favorite musical genre or genres? Why are you attracted to this‬ genre or these genres?‬

Minimalism, spectralism, hyperpop. I think it’s the use of repetition, the pulsation, rhythmic strata, exploration of timbre and texture, a curiosity of sonic experience.

Describe an experience of live music (a concert, performance, etc.) which‬‭ impacted you in a strong way.‬

In the early 2010s, a small Adelaide dive bar called FORMAT hosted various experimental gigs which I made the effort to get along to, in spite of living an hour away. I remember a particular performance involving a complicated setup of exclusively modular synth feedback, a revelatory moment of exciting a latent curiosity on what music could be, and how it could be presented.

In the family or culture in which you grew up, or in which you now exist, do you‬‭ have any shared music practices together? (Ex. listening to music together when‬‭ cooking). Go crazy!‬

With some friends in Adelaide, we’ve just started to do lounge room productions of various musicals - play through the score and script!

In the country where you grew up, are there any national musical cultures that‬‭ you like or relate to?‬

My colleague and friend Vanessa Tomlinson once wrote on the importance of place and response to place in contemporary Australian art music. For me, site-specific work and acoustic ecology are a cornerstone, as are improvisation, regional/remote resourcefulness and opportunity, and a DIY mentality.

Can you describe a type of music that you really don’t like? Why?‬

Christian evangelical worship music. Much love and compassion to practitioners, glad it gives you kicks, but I find the music itself incredibly derivative, inanely predictable and thematically boring.

Page 3 - 7 to come.

On The Terrace is a free mini-festival of pop-up concerts for all ages - experience the intimacy and wonder of chamber music set amongst Adelaide’s iconic galleries, museums and creative spaces on North Terrace. More information available on the Chamber Music Adelaide website.

On 19 November (my birthday!), I had the immense privilege of conducting Adelaide Chamber Singers for the Feast Festival 2025 event, The Valley Called Hope. Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in South Australia (the first jurisdiction in English-speaking world), the event included a panel discussion (featuring Activist and historian Will Sergeant AKA Dr Gertrude Glossip, journalist Simon Royal, and former Minister and MLC: Anne Levy) and performances of several songs from Joe Twist’s beautiful oratorio Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan. A joy to return to this music I hold very dear with friends tenor Mark Oates, accompanist Josh Van Konkelenberg and the wonderful ensemble of choristers!

Towards the new year, I’m delight to be presenting the 2026 Asia-Pacific Acoustic Ecology courses developed by Barry Truax.

The first course for the year, Soundscape Composition as Context-Based Creation, explores how real-world contexts shape creative practice at every level, from field recording and material selection through to structure, spatialisation and audience experience. Across 11 sessions, we’ll explore:

• soundscape composition & context-based creation

• multi-channel & spatial audio approaches

• ecological + place-based listening

• environmental sound processing & transformation

• site-specific + phonographic practice

• abstracted + acousmatic methods

• emerging practices in the 2020s

This course moves beyond “field recordings + composition” and into the deeper terrain of how listening, context, culture, and place co-author sonic work.

To find out more and to register, visit the link below:

Register here

Over the past several months, I’ve been curating for Creative Original Music Adelaide’s COMA Curated series, which an opportunity bring together artists around a topic or theme of their choice over two performances in the COMA annual season.. Keen to share soundscape composition, multichannel surround sound and environmentally-responsive improv with South Australian audiences, I was grateful to congregate several local and interstate friends, ushering in the beginning of spring.

On September 1, I had the pleasure of performing alongside Georgia Oatley and Margie Jean Lewis with their piece soak, a sonic meditation on the current drought effecting the Adelaide Hills and continuing (devastating) algal bloom on the South Australian coastline.

My own piece, sanctuary x mill, a collaborative work with Clocked Out, QLD, explored the sound of the ruined pianos at the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary and The Piano Mill, in concert with their attendant soundscapes. Chris Reid, reviewing for the Barefoot Review shared his thoughts:

The resulting orchestration of this diverse range of sounds was utterly absorbing, immersing the audience in a sonic world that situates the piano and its life cycle in the living environment. The sound is wondrous, but the message is also clear: the decaying piano may be seen as an allegory for human civilisation, with music as the transient, fragile expression of civilisation, and it obliquely recalls the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi — finding beauty in imperfection and impermanence.

This concert was a delight but also deeply thought-provoking. The use of electronic technology greatly expands the field of musical composition and permits the composer not only to draw on a much wider range of sonic material and effects but also to draw in the symbolism of the sound sources. The use of live, mediated performance together with pre-recorded samples creates a novel musical form that generates a unique aesthetic and enables the composer-performer to highlight important issues. Both works in this concert gently but firmly reminded listeners of the precarious environmental situation confronting us.

Read Chris’s full review here,

On September 15, dear friends Continental Drifts (Vicki Hallett, VIC) and Abstract Human Radio (Fin Wegener, QLD) presented the second set at The Wheatsheaf Hotel – check Fin’s modular synth set out on the link below:

October

On Thursday 2 October, for the Australian Network for Art and Technology ANAT Spectra 2025 conference, dear friend Vanessa Tomlinson presented the next exploration Channelling Dulcie’s Piano: How the River Taught the Piano to Sing at the University of the Sunshine Coast (QLD).

The work follows a 1920s Milton pianola, once belonging to Vanessa’s Nana in Adelaide, on an 8-day journey in May 2023 from the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary to The Piano Mill at Willson’s Downfall. Along the way, we listen to the rivers and tributaries that flow between these places: the Murray, the Darling, the Barwon, the Gwydir, Boonooboonoo Creek, and countless lagoons and billabongs.

This 15-minute version of the piece explored the soundworld of the hydrophone recordings we made through the piano: channelling fish songs, aquatic resonances, and histories of place through the ivories, metals, woods, felts and glues. Channelling Dulcie’s Piano attunes to rivers, memory, and the voices that flow between, engaging art, science, and technology to explore how listening can connect us to water and place.

Photos and video to come soon!

I’m also delighted to announce that I’m one of the Elizabeth Wood Musicology Fellows in 2026!

Two fellowships awarded by the University of Adelaide are known as the Elizabeth Wood Research Fellowship in Musicology, named in honour of world-renowned musicologist Dr Elizabeth Wood who holds Bachelors’ degrees in English literature (with Honours) (1961), and musicology (with Honours) (1970) from The University of Adelaide, and a PhD from the same university (1970). Her work includes the first history of Australian opera and a series of critical studies of Ethel Smyth. A Fulbright Scholar and National Endowment for the Humanities (USA) Fellow, she received the Tormore prize (Adelaide) (1959) and Philip Brett Award (AMS) (1997) for her pathbreaking essays in gay and lesbian musicology, and a New York State Council on the Arts award for her journalism in regional arts (2001). The Fellowships have a fixed-term annual stipend and can be held for up to one year. The annual value of each stipend is $40,000 plus $10,000 top-up for travel expenses.

My Fellowship will focus on two topics both with ethical and creative exploration: one on more-than-human recorded mimesis (exploring the ethical impacts of playing an animal’s call back to them - how might this impact their behaviour and the wider ecosystem), and speculative soundscape composition through generative AI (connecting large-scale ecoacoustic databases with complementary non-acoustic datasets).

Upcoming in November

I’m looking forward to rejoining Chamber Music Adelaide’s On The Terrace Festival this year, with a new piece, Volumes.

On The Terrace is a free mini-festival of pop-up concerts for all ages - experience the intimacy and wonder of chamber music set amongst Adelaide’s iconic galleries, museums and creative spaces on North Terrace. More information available on the Chamber Music Adelaide website.

Designed for an octophonic sound array with live performance elements, Volumes envelops audiences in a multi-dimensional sonic landscape exploring the voluminous materiality and sounds of water, sand, vehicles, rockets, news media, and biodiversity in Volusia County, Florida. The piece follows my residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, as part of my 2024 Arts SA Fellowship.

Later, on 19 November (my birthday!), I’m looking forward to revisiting several songs from Joe Twist’s beautiful oratorio Watershed, which I was fortunate to repetiteur for back at its premiere in 2022. Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan was commissioned by the Adelaide Festival to commemorate 50 years since the murder of Dr George Ian Ogilvie Duncan in Karrawirraparri / The River Torrens.

This event, The Valley Called Hope, as part of Feast Festival 2025 commemorates the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in South Australia (the first jurisdiction in English-speaking world). Very much looking forward to performing alongside dear friends conductor Christie Anderson, tenor Mark Oates and members of Adelaide Chamber Singers. Hope to see you there!

The past several months have been a time of settling, recharging, and gradually building momentum after the whirlwind of Fellowship travels last year. If you missed my updates detailing my ventures, you can check them out:

• October 2024: Thailand, Singapore and the UK

• December 2024: UK, Greece, US, Netherlands and Germany

After returning to Australia from my Fellowship travels, I spent Christmas and New Year’s in Sydney with Sean, reconnecting and reflecting on the amazing year that had been. Returning in South Australia, I dove into the next phase of work on Fine Tuning, an ARC-funded project exploring microtonal tuning systems in Central Australian First Nations music. The project was successful in receiving Create SA (formerly Arts SA) funding to support the commissioning of three First Nations composers from Anangu, Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, Wangkangurru, and Arabana communities. I’ll be working as the technician on the octophonic realisation of their works alongside orchestrations by Connor Fogarty for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. More updates on this to come.

In February, I finished my role as Secretary of the Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology (AFAE) and stepped into the role of President:

In recent months, the AFAE Board have undertaken several revitalisation efforts:

• we restarted publishing a regular monthly newsletter on Mailchimp – check out some of our recent editions here.

• we launched a new membership platform on JoinIt

• we began planning our first dedicated in-person for a few years, which will be in Maroocydoore Botanic Gardens (QLD) in early October - more details soon.

Grateful to represent such an attuned, attentive community of practitioners and research, and excited to see where we grow in coming years!

I also continued as Secretary of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE), which is similarly undergoing transformative processes:

• The launch of our new brand design, and development of our new website, in collaboration with Portuguese design firm, Desisto.

• A renewal of bylaws, focussed on streamlining governance models and processes.

• Further building the WFAE Library, which features over 1000 items of acoustic ecology resources and media.

• Supporting the new journal Acoustic Ecology Review with the acquisition of the , following earlier development work supported by the World Soundscape Project Education Fund

In the Asia-Pacific region, I’ve also been privilege to deliver two online on behalf of acoustic ecology doyen Barry Truax. Starting in February, numerous practitioners and researchers joined the Soundscape Composition as Context-Based Creation course, which focusses on multichannel immersive compositions and soundscape creative design. In May, a new cohort joined the Tutorial for the Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, which provides a solid ground in sound studies and acoustic ecology. If you missed this year’s courses, I’ve set up an EOI page for the 2026 iterations of either course – register your interest here.

Fringe season saw me performing as pianist for Vicarious Cabaret, an improvisatory music-theatre group presenting new shows each night at the Austral Hotel. The March run featured everything from tales of caravan industry escapees to ship-bound musical theatre fiascos. Keep in touch for upcoming performances over on our Instagram page.

And in April (and June), I performed with Late Night Knife Fight, an separate improvisational theatre project at Prompt Creative (a beautiful venue which sadly wrapped up in the middle of the year). Stay tuned on the Instagram page for news on future shows and locations.

In May, I co-mentored the Soundstream Emerging Composers Forum alongside Cheryl Leonard (USA) and the Inarma Women’s Choir (NT). Held on the Fleurieu Peninsula, this week-long intensive brought together five early-career composer for workshops in site-responsive composition, field recording, and collaboration with the Inarma Choir.

Among the participating composers was member Vicki Hallett (VIC), Frankie Dyson-Reilly (QLD), Oscar Lush (VIC), Isabella Rahme (NSW), and Georgia Oatley (SA). The ECF emphasized field recording practice using local materials and environments, with Cheryl Leonard guiding sessions in working with found natural objects, and me leading workshops in soundscape composition utilising a mobile octophonic speaker array.

The Forum included two memorable excursions: a guided walk through the Aldinga Scrub Conservation Park with John Edmeades from Friends of the Aldinga Scrub, and a bicultural ecological tour of Lot 50 (McLaren Vale) at with environmental artist and cross-cultural facilitator Gavin Malone. These encounters enriched the composers’ engagement with place, ecology, and Indigenous knowledges, all the more important while Aldinga Beach (and the greater Gulf St Vincent and surrounds) are being impacted by the devastating algal bloom.

Members of the Aurora Vocal Ensemble, led by Christie Anderson, also visited, making for a wonderful morning of sharing song, improvisation, and culture between the two choirs.

In June, the ARC team and I presented on our research at the Musicological Society of Australia Music and Mediation Conference at Adelaide University (9-10 June), where our research team presented three papers:

• One on the challenges of developing code to analyse monophonic lines in just intonation

• A survey of Indigenous cross-cultural collaborations in Australian art music

• The history of the Inarma Women’s Choir from Titjikala Community (NT)

Later in July, our team went to Alice Springs for further workshops with the Inarma Choir, culimnating in a wonderful video being recorded in Simpson Gap.

These workshops focussed on rehearsing repertoire towards the premiere of a new work written by the choir with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in October 2026, alongside new works by Nathan May and Elisha Umuhuri - more information on the premiere here!

The Inarma Choir and ARC Team at Simpsons Gap, near Mparntwe/Alice Springs (NT), July 2025

On a more personal note, my partner Sean has been I’ve also been supporting Sean in his work, including performances of Hedwig and the Angry Inch across Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, and Tired Ass Showgirls at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival and Hayes Theatre in Sydney (Glam Adelaide Review here). Just recently, he’s head` to the UK reprising the role of The Engineer in the Miss Saigon UK Regional tour, so expect some newsletter updates from abroad at the turn of the year!

Coming up in September, I’ll be curating this COMA Curator series, featuring four sets over two nights celebrating acoustic ecology and experimental sound art in Australia:

• September 1: soak (Georgia Oatley, SA) and sanctuary x mill (Jesse Budel with Clocked Out, SA/QLD) @ Nexus Arts

• September 15: Continental Drifts (Vicki Hallett, VIC) and Abstract Human Radio (Finley Wegener, QLD) @ The Wheatsheaf Hotel

And in October, I’ll be presenting Channelling Dulcie’s Piano with Vanessa Tomlinson at ANAT SPECTRA, follow by a new work, Volumes at Chamber Music Adelaide’s On The Terrace in November. More soon!

Thanks for your support, with much love and compassion,

Jesse

After a period of intense creative and professional engagement in the UK, I carved out a window for travel — to rest, reconnect, and deepen my engagement with sound, place, and people. What followed across Greece, Florida, and Europe was a whirlwind of ancient ruins, rocket launches, sonic experiments, and long-overdue reunions.

Taking a break from my Fellowship travels, I left the UK on October 23 for Greece for a brief holiday with Sean. For a few nights, we stayed with actress friend Shalom Brune Franklin (you might know her from Baby Reindeer or the Dune: Prophecy series) in Athens amidst her filming a new TV Stan series, The Assassin.

Exploring Athens for the first time, Sean and I visited the Olympiad, Akropolis, the Library of Hadrian, Lycabettus, and many of the amazing Greek restaurants the city had to offer. An anthropological highlight was visiting the National Archaeological Museum, housing numerous historic artefacts including the Antikythera device, which colleagues Gabriella Smart and Dan Pitman used as inspired for their work DARK: ANTIKYTHERA.

Towards the end of the month, we then travelled to the island of Paros in the Cyclades, staying in Ampelas, and visiting the nearby towns of Parikia, Naousa and Lefkés, as well as the nearby island of Antiparos for Sean’s birthday.

London

Following our Cycladic retreat, we returned to London, continuing to explore the city in all of its rich diversity, including bike rides through Hyde Park, visiting the British Museum, and Halloween raves in East Hackam. Catching Hadestown — a musical that reimagines the myth of Orpheus with New Orleans grit and a hauntingly lyrical score, and one that I’d loved exclusively through cast recordings over the past decade — was a delightful early birthday gift.

Florida

Amidst less-than-favourable news of the US election outcome, I flew out of London on November 6, bound for Florida via a stopover in Reykjavik and later transit over the Greenland icesheet, an awe-inspiring vista. Arriving late at night in Orlando, I made for New Smyrna Beach to begin my residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts for the month.

Founded in 1977 by Doris Leeper, an internationally known sculptor and painter, as well as a visionary environmentalist, Atlantic Center for the Arts (ACA) is a non-profit multidisciplinary artist residency facility located in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Alongside its long standing Mentoring Artist Program (drawing in significant names across diverse disciplines), ACA recently began hosting an annual Soundscape Residency Program, which has featured practitioners like Bernie Krause, Nathan Wolek, Perry Lynch Howard, and Gordon Hempton.

Having connected with the Center in March 2023 for the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology Conference, and wanting to tap into the infrastructure and relationships cultivating the Soundscape Residency Program (particularly its relationship with Canaveral National Seashore, I knew I want to develop my own responsive soundscape composition, immersing myself in the coastal environment and wider Volusia County.

With the wonderful support of ACA staff members Eve Payor, Cayla Bartolucci-Kaualoku, Kelly Timmons and Executive Director Jennifer Coolidge, I connected with ACA board members, volunteers and members of the wider NSB community through various events. Following a volunteer dinner on 9 November at the ACA campus, I unexpectedly attended the wedding reception of Staci Janik and Lee Tesche (guitar for the band Algiers), on the New Smyrna Beach coastline, a serendipitous occasion where I connected with further friends Philomena and Juliana.

Over the course of the month, I ventured around Volusia County, exploring its coastal swamp landscapes and attendant soundscapes, a synthetic fusion of natural biophony and geophony alongside significant anthropophony (think ongoing rocket launches, 120 flight schools in the region, major motorways with huge pickup trucks, freight train lines to Miami, and ongoing construction activity).

One highlight emerging from the volunteer dinner was meeting Nancy and Bobby Maddox, ACA supporters who took me out on their boat to Mosquito Lagoon for a rocket launch. That day, there were two launches—an uncommon event. We traveled about two hours south, where no one else was around. I set up my microphones just as a herd of manatees surrounded our boat, capturing their underwater chatter as the rockets took off. The combination of the rocket’s sonic booms and the aquatic environment created a breathtaking audio experience, extending vertically up into space down and the cerulean depths of the water. Somewhere between the manatees’ chatter and the thunder of a rocket heading into orbit, I found a moment that felt like everything I’d come here for — the collision of human and non-human (hi)stories, told in sound.

I also had the pleasure to lead a soundwalk at Eldora in Canaveral National Seashore, introducing participants to ideas of acoustic ecology and modes of listening. A later engagement with the Young Sound Seekers Crew, a group of young differently-sighted folks led by Eve Payor and Nathan Wolek, had us investigate various types of recording equipment, with group members exploring hydrophones and contact microphones amidst the steady roll of Atlantic waves.

Many other days trips formed my reconnaisance and recording activity, including:

• an ACA volunteers’ day out at Cracker Creek, a local brackish waterway highlighting the significance of the local ecosystem, the impacts of the then-recent Hurricane Milton, and the necessary ongoing litigation to protect the landscape.

• Visits to vaious freshwater springs in Volusia County. I learned that many these discharge millions of gallons per day, having travelled thousands of years from more northerly regions through artesian networks.

• Traversing the sand dune board walk at New Smyrna Beach, encountering gopher tortoises and many cars on the beach (not similar to the presence of vehicles on South Australian beaches).

• Atlantic ocean waves and rocket launches at Playalinda Beach, immediately north of Canaveral National Seashore (the rocket launch happening to be that of an Australian Optus satellite).

• Contact microphone explorations of shell middens left by traditional owners, including the Seminole and Timucua peoples.

Other expeditions included:

• Attendance of an Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra concert on November 9, “An Evening with Jamie Bernstein”, featuring works by her father Leonard Berstein and Mahler’s 4th Symphony

• Visiting and diving at Alexander Springs with Philomena and Juliana (video below)

• Fresh portrait shots and experimental colourshoots with Samantha Tribble and Stephen Holvik at The Lunar Studios in New Smyrna Beach (video also below)

• Thanksgiving Dinner on November 28 with Eve Payor and her family.

“Volumes” Project

Having travelled the US and Canada previously in 2017, and then Florirda last year in 2023, I’d become interested in developing a series of works responding to the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, which I typically don’t engage with at home on the Southern Ocean. My artist residency at ACA offered a distinctive opportunity to start on the latter seaspace.

Synthesising the experiences above, and in search of a title that might help to cohere ideas, I became interested in the county name, Volusia. An etymological investigation revealed multiple different origins, but its homophonic counterpart, Volumes, was captivating, and revealed a complex interplay of sonic, material, and cultural volumes in the region:

• Volumes of sound – anthropophony (human-made sounds), including over 120 flight schools in the county, car traffic, and rocket launches (which are increasing due to SpaceX’s Starlink).

• Volumes of water – the Atlantic Ocean, brackish lagoons, and millions of gallons delivered in freshwater springs that have traveled for millennia underground.

• Volumes of sand – shifting dune systems, beach culture, and artificial sand replenishment in Miami.

• Volumes of storms – increasing hurricane frequency in recent years.

• Volumes of media & politics – the county’s conservative leanings, juxtaposed with Orlando’s political climate, and the election cycle occurring during my visit, and deluge of information.

Through this project, I looked to weave the textures and materiality of these elements in an intricate soundscape composition, overlaid with commentary from local voices, archival media, and field recordings.

As the piece developed during my time at ACA, one highlight of my Fellowship travels was the Coastal Soundscapes concert held in ACA’s Joan Harris Theatre on November 22, featuring all original works including:

• Cathedrals, a consensed version of my album, previously exhibited at the WFAE 2023 Conference also at ACA.

• Dwell, a site-specific screen-dance collaboration with Sue Hawksley, Tammy Arjona, Billy Cook, and Richard Hodges.

• a work-in-progress showing of Volumes

• sanctuary x mill – originally an acousmatic (speaker-only) work, but for this performance, I incorporated a prepared Steinway piano at the Joan Harris Theater, blending its textures with the ruined pianos and concatenated soundscape recordings from the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary (SA) and Piano Mill (NSW-QLD Border).

The event was well-attended, with around 70 people in the audience and delightful feedback:

Thank you for a truly transcendent experience Friday night. A memorable evening! – Midge Wilson

It was a great night at ACA. I need more music in my life, and Apple Music isn’t cutting it! This hit the spot. Volumes and sanctuary x mill were my favorites among the pieces you shared. What a treat! – Emily

Thanks again for sharing your work with us a the ACA. It was an inspiring evening. I found your work expansive! – Aric Attas

A smaller remount of the concert was presented for members of the ACA Board and community on December 2.

Departing ACA, farewelled by the wonderful Cayla (in New Smyrna Beach – shark capital of the world – appropriate-attire) and Eve!

After my ACA residency, my return trip back to Australian took quite the scenic route. My first destination was Chicago, where I stayed with dear friends and colleagues Eric Leonardson (vice-president and former president of the WFAE) and Deirdre Harrison (my sister-from-another-mother partner-in-crime for the WFAE 2023 conference). Alongside exploring downtown Chicago and visiting the famous Art Institute, I was guest speaker at a gathering of Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology (MSAE) members at Eric and Deirdre’s house, a great opportunity to meet fellow practitioners from the US and discuss current soundscape ideas and issues.

From Chicago, I flew to Amsterdam to spend a few days in the ‘vaderland’ and practice my Dutch. Having been twelve years since I was last in the city, I based myself from a pod in a Warmoesstraat Hostel on Oudeszijds, and made several wandelingen to the Begijnhof, Jordaan District, Wandelpark and Stedelijk Museum. Given the tight turn around, I didn’t get to touch base with family, but the bookend opportunity connect with part of my heritage (the trip opening with the visit to Scotland) was deeply rewarding, especially trialling my newfound language skills with Amsterdamers.

Aiming for Berlin, I then went to Utrecht for the first time, taking in the impressive Dom Tower, and wandered around the city’s gorgeous grachten. The following day, I made for Köln, visiting a friend Joyce (who I’d met at uni in Australia, and recently again on the Pitjantjatjara language course at the beginning of the year). Relying on her German translation, we explored around the city, visiting local Christmas markets, local Kölner Essen and a weekly Couchsurfing language exchange.

After a morning the following day exploring the impressive Köln Dom, I travelled to Berlin by train, my first time to the city. Initially based out of a hostel near the Hauptbahnhof, I made an effort to tick off the touristy sites in the first day. I spent the next morning walking by the Bundestag towards a sequence of Denkmalen: to the Sinti and Roma , to the Jewish Holocaust, and then to the Homosexuals persecuted under Nazism. From there, I crossed back through the Tiergarten, with memorials to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven as well as various Romantic-era sculpture gardens, before walking beneath the Brandenburg Tor. A cold winter’s day, the trees relatively bare. In the afternoon, sites included the Berlin Wall memorial and Checkpoint Charlie, both offering detailed perspectives on the experiences of post-WWII and Cold War Germany.

The following day, I visited the Topography of Terror (a museum documenting Nazi atrocities) and later the Martin-Gropius-Bau next door for an exhibition of Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, a retrospective of his many installations. Unexpectedly, I also had a portrait drawn by resident artist Jake Sherwood, in response to me sitting and silently reading his poem, ‘The Hero of Both’ — a quiet, mutual offering in the Bau’s atrium, amidst matches of table tennis.

Over the final few days I spent a few nights with Martin, an Australian Couchsurfing host living out near the enwalled Görlitzer Park. That part of the city felt rougher-edged, but not inhospitable. Fragments of Socialist dreams and failures; the park’s edge a haven for various characters looking to push their wares. Exploring nearby eastern districts, I found a immersive light installation at the old Stadtbad Licthenberg (a decommissioned bathhouse), a temporary reimagining of liminal derelict spaces. Martin showed me around several cool restaurants (hitting a Japanese ramen joint one night, Korean the next), and later visiting a queer dive bar with unique kitschy charm and magenta-tinged plush furnishings.

To my disappointment, I missed the chance to go clubbing at the infamous Berghain, arriving the same weekend it turned 20 years old, with lines apparently 6 hours long — but Berlin isn’t going anywhere. I’ll be back. Probably in summer. Winter suits the city’s temperament, but I’d like to see it lush, too.

As the final stop on this epic trip and year, Berlin felt right. Not tidy. Not conclusive. But full of the kind of unresolved questions where the past doesn’t just echo but leaks into the present.

There’s a lot to unpack in the upcoming months back in Australia - artistically, politically, personally. The Fellowship year ends here — but I don’t. Plenty of residual experience to reflect on, write about, and share with community at home, nourishing for many months and years to come.

Until next time, with love and compassion,

If you’ve been following my activities across 2024 - documented in the posts April 2024 and July 2024 – you’ll note there’s been a lot of travel to date, both interstate and overseas. From this point on, there’s a lot more of the latter!

Ahead of my Arts South Australia travels, I spent sometime holidaying with Seann Miley Moore. Starting in Koh Samed for Seann’s dad’s 80th birthday, we then spent several days in Bangkok before exploring Chiang Mai (visiting a cooking school, downtown markets and elephant sanctuary) and Singapore, ahead of Seann’s final leg playing the Engineer in Miss Saigon at Marina Bay Sands. Check out the reels below to see some of the adventures…

Coming back to Adelaide for all of three days from August 19-22 (mainly to repack my bags with field recording gear), I then departed for the UK; first stop: Scotland.

Scotland is a place I’ve long wanted to visit, very much due to my paternal grandmother’s heritage (she was a tall, broad Scot born in Edinburgh), but also given Edinburgh’s renowned festival season, with Adelaide being a sister festival city sharing a lot of acts between them.

Hopping between several hostels (A&O just off CowGate, and St Christopher’s near Edinburgh Central Station), I caught up with a lot of familiar faces from Adelaide and Australia, particular Shay Leach, who was producing Yoz Mensch’s No Babies at the Sauna, an award winning show I’d seen in Adelaide, and now having a stellar Edingburgh Fringe season after lauded European dates. Amidst explorations of the city with Shay, we also caught various other shows, amongst them All the Fraudulent Horse Girls, featuring the inimitable drag artist and performer Cazeleon as an 11-year-old equine-obsessed girl. Further adventures along the historic streets, through various local archives and museums, by the Greyfriars Bobby statue, hiking up the infamous Arthur’s Seat (a extinct volcano overlooking the city), as well as exploring Edinburgh Castle and Calton Tower made for an enriching introduction to the city.

In Glasgow, I enjoyed a different side of the country, spending time in its beautiful parks and visiting Stirling Castle and the Church of the Holy Rude. These quieter moments allowed me to reflect on Scotland’s rich history and its role in shaping my own heritage – my grandmother’s proud connection to the clan Murray of Atholl (her maiden name one and the same) and the various Scottish keepsakes I grew up around in my early years alongside my grandfather’s Dutch trinkets.

A particularly special part of this trip was reconnecting with family in Prudhoe, west of Newcastle. I had the pleasure of spending time with my great-aunt Jean (who I’d met when I was a toddler), her daughter Julie, Julie’s daughter Chloe, and Chloe’s young son, Kalani. These moments of family connection were deeply meaningful, grounding the trip in a personal sense of place and heritage.

At the beginning of September, I departed south for York, marking the start proper of my Arts South Australia Fellowship activities abroad.

A little bit of background: the title of my Fellowship was ‘Building a Higher Order Ambisonic Studio Practice’. I’ll go into a much more thorough explanation of ambisonics and my trip’s findings in a subsequent post, but in short, it’s a geometrically-based surround-sound format for creating immersive spatial audio environments, whether in speaker systems (with speakers directed the audience horizontally and vertically) or headphone delivery (in binaural format. Following my residency at Flinders’ University new ambisonic studio in 2023, I started looking at international settings that have thriving ambisonic scenes, and was recommended a number of places in the UK, amongst them the University of York.

With historical involvement in the development of ambisonics from the 1970s, the University of York continues to explore the technical and creative possibilities of ambisonics, with a current research project looking into the use of binaural-based higher-order ambisonics in virtual reality. For my own explorations as a visiting research scholar, much of my work was centered at the Arthur Sykes Rymer Studio (the Rymer for short), a fourth-order ambisonic studio in a raked-theatre seat setting.

Working alongside Technical Officer Ben Eyes, we prepared the studio for ambisonic use (running alongside the recent installation of Dolby Atmos software and speaker routing), and after which I spent much of my time reworking my piece sanctuary x mill (with Vanessa Tomlinson and Erik Griswold, developed during my April 2024 Harrigan’s Lane residency) from the basic horizontal octophonic setup to a fully-3D enveloping experience.

Across the month, I was also able to spend time with various staff, including lecturer Matt Barnard (whose PhD on binaural composition is an amazing trove on information), Professor of Composition Martin Suckling, and Emeritus Professor Nicola LeFanu, who I had the wonderful to talk with about the legacy of her late partner, the Australian composer and field recordist David Lumsdaine. With students, I had the opportunity to present in several classes on campus and lead a soundwalk with Ben in York, exploring the diversity of the historic city’s urban soundscape.

A highlight was the presentation of sanctuary x mill at the UoY Contemporary Music Research Collective Seminar, with Trevor Wishart, an influential composer and sound artist, in attendance. Engaging with the cohort’s critique and commentary was very much rewarding and humbling, learning much from everyone’s rich insights into ambisonic technology and its creative applications.

Outside of the university, York’s historical and cultural richness was equally impactful. I stayed in Clifton with a wonderful host, Kyera and her daughter, Jess, whose home provided a warm base for exploration. I immersed myself in the city’s vibrant culture and history, visiting the Shambles Markets and the renowned Jorvik Viking Centre, which offered a fascinating insight into the region’s Norse heritage. The natural beauty of the city was equally captivating, spending time in the York Museum Gardens and along the River Ouse.

York Minster was glorious, where I both ventured to the top of the bell tower (some 250 steps) and attended an Evensong service with the choir’s harmonies resonated magnificently within the cathedral’s acoustics. I also walked sections of York’s medieval city walls and visited Clifford Tower (the keep of York Castle), uncovering new perspectives of the city’s history on each outing.

Connections from Australia also emerged, managing catch up with friend Mark Horn, who I’d met when he was a music theatre student at Federation University in Ballarat (multiple Murray Bridge friends also studying there at the time), and now a manager at the York Theatre Royal, making for a delightful reunion at the local Bettys.

Beyond York, I ventured into the broader Yorkshire region.

A visit to Leeds with Ben Eyes led to a tour of the Ambisonic Studios at Leeds Beckett University, as well as encounters with various piano sculptures around the city centre, an installation by musical outfit S!nk and their Pianodrome (a purpose-built ampitheatre made of recycled piano frames and wood) as part of the Leeds International Piano Competition.

I’ve found that serendipity always strikes in unlikely spaces whilst travelling international, with this trip being no exception. Given my own interests in ruined pianos (with the likes of the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary and Channelling Dulcie’s Piano projects), I decided to return to Leeds for a concert at the Leeds City Museum. Attempting to put a face to a name found on the Pianodrome website, I approached a woman backstage to enquire, only to find out she was Maria Sappho, a fellow collaborator of dear exploratory piano friends Vanessa Tomlinson and Erik Griswold. After seeing incredible sets by both Maria and [NAME OF PERFORMER], I looked across to Maria during the second set of S!NK, and recognised the face of the man seated next to her. After the concert, I approached him, and asked as if struck by divine intervention, “Colin?” Learning he was Maria’s partner and working through where we might know each other from, we eventually realised that we’d had a one-on-one Zoom call the year prior (when Colin was considering coming to Australia for postgrad studies). Additionally, it turned out he was about to undertake a resident at New Adventures in Sound Art in South River, Ontario with my friends Darren Copeland and Nadene Thériault-Copeland, with whom I’d collaborated on with the Weathered Piano Exchange project and connected Vanessa and Erik via sanctuary x mill. Small world indeed!

A little further afield, I visited Marton cum Grafton one weekend for a field recording workshop with colleague Rob McKay – composer, field recordist, academic, and UKISC affiliate representative of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. As part of a open day for the project Mapping Marton Wood with NFP-organisation Chrysalis Arts Development, Rob presented a field recording workshop in Marton Wood, in which we walked a couple miles to the forest engaged in a soundwalk, and explored various field recording techniques and technologies onsite. Spending time in the forest was fascinating given its complex nature to the land around it (one of few woodlands in the area, and only about 100 years old given the historical clearing of forests for agricultural and industrial activities across the shire), with the extant species of oak and spruce providing habitat for many species of birds and insects (many of which Rob had recorded over his various visits).

Missing one of the few busses back to York on a Saturday, Chrysalis member and artist Jane Carlisle Bellerby offered to take me to the nearest train station, that of Knaresborough. Honestly a stunningly quaint station replete with suspended geranium pots and a platform-side bar, I decided to explore the village the next day, visiting the Knaresborough Castle ruins with views of the picturesque viaduct, and historic cobblestone streets. A subsequent weekend saw me visit nearby Harrogate, famous for its Victorian-era Turkish baths that I couldn’t help but indulge a visit.

Towards the end of my time in Yorkshire, I rented a car and drove eastward to the coast, first visiting Cayton Bay in blustery autumnal. A trip to Scarborough was underwhelming – the capitalist carnival of the South Bay was an immediate turnoff, as were the dismal fish and chips in the North Bay – but nearby Whitby more than made up for it. I spent several hours at the haunting beauty of the Whitby Abbey, steeped in layers of Bronze Age Viking, medieval and Stokerian history (the site an inspiration for the novel Dracula). After briefly visiting the nearby St Mary’s Church (boasting an ancient graveyard) and Whitby Brewery (where I scored a free pizza), I spent sometime at the Captain Cook Museum. The space, set in the former home of John Walker, under whom Cook apprenticed and lodged with, offered an overview of his training, world voyages, and the colonial legacies that followed from his travels, with a temporary exhibition focussed on Alaskan First Nations culture. Driving through the Yorkshire Moors in the late afternoon, I marveled through the descending fog at the rugged beauty of the landscape (even passing by the infamous Gothland train station featured in the first Harry Potter film), an apt setting for the end of a nourishing month.

From York, I travelled to Birmingham to continue my research and creative development in higher-order ambisonics. A centre for electroacoustic and acousmatic composition, the University of Birmingham houses the Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST), founded by Jonty Harrison in the late 1980s. The BEAST system, with 90 speakers at its largest setup, is internationally recognised as a destination for all things immersive audio, with an annual BEAST FEAST festival drawing composers and sound artists from around the world.

My time at BEAST, supported by BEAST co-directors Annie Mahtani and Scott Wilson, and technical officer Simon Smith, allowed me to deepen my understanding of higher-order ambisonics and engage with other immersive audio approaches based on local traditions and practice. BEAST’s focus on spatial diffusion practices, drawing on French multichannel techniques, offered a fascinating counterpoint to my own approaches. While their live mixing techniques prioritize real-time control, my practice leans towards automation and pre-rendered spatial processing. This dialogue of methods sparked valuable insights for my work, particularly around the element of ‘liveness’ and performativity as related to audience engagement.

Alongside hands-on work in BEAST’s state-of-the-art studios, I presented an acoustic ecology-focussed concert as part of the MiniBEAST series at The Dome, a stunning studio equipped with 24-32 speaker configurations supporting third-and fourth-order (high-level spatial resolution) Ambisonics.

• Aeolian (2015-16), by Annie Mahtani

• Chiroptera (2024), Nikki Sheth

• Beneath the Forest Floor (1992), by Hildegard Westerkamp

• Excerpt from Migration Patterns (2018), By Leah Barclay

• II - from sanctuary x mill (2024), by Jesse Budel with Erik Griswold and Vanessa Tomlinson

I had the chance to experiment with high-end equipment such as the Eigenmic 64, an über expensive sixth-order ambisonic microphone.

Outside the university, I stayed at the Birmingham International Student House, connected with multiple postgraduate students hailing from around the world. Apparently, I was the first ever Australian staying there in their history, and so indulged in sharing aspects of Aussie culture with fellow BISH dwellers (the Tim Tam Slams went down a treat)!

In the wider city, I explored Birmingham’s industrial and cultural heritage. The historic canals provided a unique lens into its industrial past, while the Bullring shopping precinct, with nearby migrant and lower-socioeconomic communities in Digbeth, offered a snapshot of Birmingham’s cosmopolitan makeup and juxtaposition of wealth in the UK. Another day, I visited the famous Sarehole Mill, where a young JRR Tolkien spent many years of his childhood and derived a lot of inspiration for both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

I also ventured into the natural landscapes surrounding Birmingham. Again hiring a car for the day, I visited Chaddesley Woods National Nature Reserve, one a few remaining ancient woodlands in the West Midlands, and Wyre Forest, which boasted mix of old-growth and new-growth woods, illustrating the ecological transformation of the region post-industrialisation. The quiet autumn landscape, with fewer bird migrations than in summer, led to less productive field recordings, with my mics mostly picking up air traffic from a nearby air force base. This highlighted the regional and climatic variation in field recording environments and was a valuable learning experience, contrasting with what I might take for granted with Australian soundscape seasonal cycles.

Additionally, a brief day trip to Stratford-upon-Avon saw me visit the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and Shakespeare’s Birth House, learning more about the Bard’s life around the district. A fascinating audio work in the house’s garden, It Ever Was by Dr Rosie Poebright, explored the perspectives of queer women and gender nonconformity in Shakespeare’s day, inspired by Shakespeare’s bequeathing of his clothes to his sister Joan.

Birmingham offered a blend of professional growth, fieldwork, and cultural exploration, marking the end of it a highly enriching part of my journey.

From the West Midlands, I made for London, where I stayed for a couple nights with Paul, a family friend. Being my first time in London, Paul made sure to show me around the various tourist sites, including Battersby Power Station (renovated into an impressive residential and shopping district), numerous cultural institutions situated on the south side of the Thames (culminating in the Tate Modern), St Paul’s Cathedral, Borough Markets, Westminster, Buckingham Palace, and Soho – quite the action packed day!

Next month, I’m on to Florida for a month-long residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts - more updates soon!

In early May, I travelled to the Phillipines for a variety shows and gigs. I started off in Manila, where I caught Miss Saigon (the second time I’d seen after Adelaide this year), before heading to Ilo Ilo (a provincial city on Panay Island), to accompany Seann Miley Moore, currently playing The Engineer in Miss Saigon, for a benefit concert launching Novy M Bereber’s new charity, Bereber Sayaw PD, raising awareness about Parkinson’s Disease in the Phillipines.

One of the days there was spent on an island cruise of Guimaras, celebrating the life of Novy’s husband, Ignatius Jones, alongside Novy, Iggy’s sister Monica Trapaga, and other dear friends immersed in an incredible feast on our boat, crystalline waters and exquisite beaches.

The following day, we performed at Dinner For A Cause as Bistro Mezcla, alongside Monica and dancers from Novy’s dance school.

In mid-May, we travelled to Balesin Island Club, a private island resort west of Manila featuring seven location-themed villages (Balesin, Phuket, Bali, Toscana, St Tropez, Costa Del Sol and Mykonos) replete with appropriate-themed restaurants, beach-side pools and exquisite coast lines – very White Lotus energy. Here, joined by fellow Miss Saigon performers Abigail Adriano (playing Kim), Kiara Dario (playing Gigi) and Lawrence Mossman (playing Thuy) a subsequent concert, The Heat Is On, with me accompanying on piuano through the concert. Around 400 people attended, making it a great night to end my first experience of Pinoy culture. Salamat po!

Behind the scenes at our performance of The Heat Is On at Balesin!

Flying back to Australia on May 19, the following I performed with fellow composers/sound artist Kiera Simmons in a new duo, Audio Lost and Found, for Creative Original Music Adelaide (COMA)’s Autumn season. Affectionately called ALF for short, the project conjures immersive ambient and electronic dance soundscapes from environmental field recordings, exploratory vocals and transcendent instrumentals.

You can watch the full performance below, with sound contributions from the audience.

In mid-June, I joined the creative team as musical director for ‘A Transgender Woman On The Internet, Crying’ (ATWOTIC for short), which was receiving a creative development treatment and showing as part of the 2024 Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Working with writer-performer Cassie Hamilton, director Brittanie Shipway, sound designer Beau Esposito and performers Adam Noviello, Mo Lovegood and Issy Coomber, we spent six days running and refining this new musical describe as “a hyper-pop rave war that colourfully collides love, identity, furries, and the power of the trans community”.

Multiple five-star reviews came in from InReview, Glam Adelaide and The Clothesline – here’s to the next stage whenever it may come!

Mo, Cassie, Adam, Issy and Beau on-stage for the showing of ATWOTIC, with me side-profile lit in the bottom RH corner. Image: Claudio Raschella

Not long after, on 21 June, I flew to the Yugambeh Country / Gold Coast, QLD for the opening night of Big City Lights, an audiovisual festival now in its second year.

Alongside a diverse array of outdoor installations and exhibitions across the city, Channelling Dulcie’s Piano was exhibited in a three-projection, four-channel sound format, with Vanessa Tomlinson and myself project in 10m tall strips on the side of a carpark in downtown Southport.

From the Gold Coast, I went to Meanjin/Brisbane for International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) 2024, for multiple academic and creatations presentations of Channelling Dulcie’s Piano.

Held from 21-29 June, the sympsoium’s theme, ‘Everywhen’ is beautifully articulated on the ISEA2024 website:

“ISEA2024 sets out to explore human perception of timescales and challenge our understanding of past, present and future in the days of singularity and climate change – the Everywhen.

The Everywhen is the concept of all time simultaneously present in a place and describes the notion that past, present and future are co-habiting any given location. Where many western cultures believe time is the constant and travels in a linear progression from now to then, First Nations Australians describe the before then, then, now and the future then existing in the constant presence of place: The Everywhen.

In this concept the creative act is not a process of unconnected inspiration, solo achievement or act of individual hubris but rather the process of timely connection to the landscape, accessing the already laid out ‘creation’ and relaying this to others. The role of the artist is to be the interlocutor between past, present and future through their deep relationship to place.

Art is an act of memory.”

Our short paper, ‘Channelling Dulcie’s Piano: How the River Taught the Piano to Sing’ was presented alongside acoustic ecology colleague Leah Barclay’s ‘Beeyali: Visualising Ecological Interconnection and Acoustic Ecology on Kabi Kabi Country’ and Keira Simmons’ ‘Listen, and Imagine: Speculative Soundwalking’.

An audiovisual installation of CPD’s Wilcannia performance also featured in the symposium at Queensland College of the Arts and Design in Southbank, immersively rendered through multiple projectors and speakers in the space (photos below).

Our final ISEA outing was a 20-minute version of Channelling Dulcie’s Piano, performed at KEPK Gallery on June 27th, with visuals by Greg Harm.

Vanessa and I performing a 20 minute improv on Channelling Dulcie’s Piano at KEPK Gallery on July 27.

Back at home in Tarndanya/Adelaide, I had the privilege of facilitating a MUD workshop July 4 at the Ern Malley Bar in Magill, South Australia, as part of our Composer-in-Residence Pilot Program.

The workshop featured an engaging discussion with composer-in-residence, Joseph Franklin, where we delved into the importance of working-class composition in today’s music landscape. Joe shared on his compositional practice and his current collaboration with cellist David Moran, presenting excerpts of a new work that was presented in an ensuing concert on July 6th.

Ahead of my overseas travels, I had the immense pleasure to present three works of mine at Chamber Music Adelaide’s Three Bridges Festival in my home town of Murray Bridge on 20 July.

Alongside a stellar array of South Australian performers including Thea Martin, Nathan May, Adelaide Baroque, Inkling Trio, Katie Aspel, and Kegelstatt Ensemble, Keira Simmons and I started the day with an an immersive surround sound set by Audio Lost and Found. Later, the South Australian premiere of ‘sanctuary x mill’ resounded through the auditorium, giving audiences an kaleidoscopic experience of the nearby Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary. To round out the day, an octophonic version of ‘Mandala’, which features multiple South Australian soundscape recordings, offered a restorative afternoon soundbath experience.

A overview of the weekend can be found on the Murray Bridge News website.

Dear everyone,

Writing this from York UK in September 2024 gives me an opportunity to reflect on what a significant year this has been so far, particular going back to the start (tending to much overdue updates).

My Fellowship as announced on the Arts SA website.

While the new year brought major transitions and difficult challenges for me personally, I was also blessed to turn attention to my creative endeavours with the incredible support of a 2024 Arts South Australia Fellowship from the SA Government.

This Fellowship allows a focussed year of skills and creative project development in higher-order ambisonics, a high level surround sound technology, building on my previous experience with the technology in my PhD and more recently my 2023 Flinders University Artist Residency in their new fourth-order ambisonic studio.

In addition to developing a portfolio of new works, the latter part of 2024 sees me head to the University of York in September and the University of Birmingham in October to spend time at their internationally-renowned ambisonic studios, followed by an artist residency at Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida USA. As you read on, the effects of this generous investment in my practice show themselves in the various projects I’ve been undertaking this year, something I’m very grateful for.

For now, let’s return to early 2024.

From January 8-19, I participated in a Pitjantjatjara language course at the University of South Australia. Working with multiple Aṉangu tutors, and UniSA staff Sam Osbourne and Dan Bleeby, we covered fundamental vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and conversational dialogue, alongside a culture day learning public inma (song and dance) from Elders. Amongst our 50 participants were Her Excellency the Governor of South Australia, Frances Adamson, and her husband, Rod Bunton, as participants. It was a really enriching, nourishing and nurturing two weeks learning language and culture!

Our amazing Aṉangu tutors at our final presentation for the Pitjantjatjara course

I also started a new project with Nadene Thériault-Copeland of New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA, Ontario, Canada), called Weathered Piano Exchange. Starting as a response for the annual Arts Birthday event (first proposed by French artist Robert Filliou in 1963).

Our contribution started with four improvisations by Nadene on a weathering piano at NAISA’s headquarters, which she shared with me to respond on the pianos of the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary. We volleyed our responses back and forth a further two times, result in a complex dialogue between continents, landscapes, soundscapes and keyboards. The results can be found on several albums, released on Bandcamp:

An interview with Nadene and I about the project was recorded by Darren Copeland:

Addtionally, two broadcasts on Canadian Radio of our project were made for Arts Birthday 2024:

• Vancouver’s CITR 101.9FM Radio 24 Hour Broadcast for Arts Birthday

• Toronto’s CIUT-FM 89.5 on the ‘Electric Sense’ program hosted by James Bailey

Weathered Piano Exchange has had multiple ripples in follow-up projects like sanctuary x mill (more on this below), as well as plans for further exchanges between Australia and Canada and further afield, so watch out for further developments.

In February, I finalised a new work, Soundmap of Karrawirraparri, the long-awaited result of an 2019 Inspiring SA Grant.

The original proposal for the grant would have seen me make a piece in response to the Whyalla Steel Works and local community, but the unfortunate widespread effects of COVID in 2020 made this very difficult. In discussion with Inspiring SA, I decided instead to turn my focus to Karrawirraparri (Red Gum Forest River in Kaurna language), known also as the River Torrens, the major water source of the Adelaide Plains, and develop a soundmap work exploring its terrestrial and aquatic soundscapes.

Charting the river’s flow from source to sea, I spent several months making second-order ambisonic and hydrophone recordings at 10-kilometre intervals along its banks. The piece connects each of these recordings together, blending above and below -water sounds alongside suggestive spoken voice describe various themes and issues facing the river.

Soundmap of Karrawirraparri was premiered by Soundstream New Music as part of Adelaide Fringe 2024 on March 3 at The Loft, Aldinga Beach. Further presentations of the work are planned (especially by the river), so stayed tuned for more info soon!

Ambisonic recording at Birdwood SA for Soundcamp of Karrawirraparri

In early March, I co-conducted with Stuart Patterson a new piece, Lawrence English’s Proximities, as part of the Inner Sanctum exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia for the 2024 Adelaide Festival. From the AGSA website:

Lawrence English invites us to consider our understandings of place and the body by drawing attention to our ears – the act, sense and power of ‘audition’ – and how we might come to know the world through listening. Proximities, 2024, tests this by means of a sound object, in the form of a 712-kg bronze bell. In collaboration with bellfounder Anton Hasell, English has created the bell using a technique that eliminates the minor third tone, a trademark of old-world European bells, in favour of an equal temperament tuning, pioneered by Hasell to produce a harmonically pure and uniquely Australian timbre. It is presented in the Vestibule. It is rung daily throughout the exhibition as a companion form of timekeeping.

Apart from its use as a marker of time, locality, worship and labour, the bell has played a role in long-distance communication and as a warning signal. Proximities engages these multiple functions and interests to consider how sound operates within cities more broadly and how it might once again become a unifying agent. During the opening weekend of Inner Sanctum, it is the centrepiece for a series of public activations, in which multiple bell towers and handbells are utilised to create connections between bodies and locations across Adelaide. These events feature local participants, including members of the Adelaide Bellringers and the public, who are invited to collectively create a ‘sounding event’.

Utilising multiple bells rung in a variety of multitude of ways by community performers, the piece filled the North Terrace cultural precinct with the peals of clappers large and small

The original string quartet recording of Whispers for the Invisibility Commissions

March 16 saw four back-to-back performances of my piece, Whispers as part of Floods of Fire in Adelaide Festival 2024 at Elder Conservatorium, The University of Adelaide.

Commissioned by Chamber Music Adelaide and MOD. for their 2022 Invisibility collaboration, this new version of the work featured octophonic surround sound and die-in choreography by Extinction Rebellion South Australia members.

As the program note mentions:

Endangered species are often rendered invisible as a result of low population numbers. With the advent of inexpensive long-duration field recording equipment, instead these species can again be found through listening for their calls. ‘Whispers’ is an encapsulation of the vocalisation endangered species in South Australia, marking their discovery and decline since the founding of the colony in 1836 to the present day and beyond.

Performed by Bridget McCullough, Clara Gillam Grant, Elinor Warwick and Ebony Bedford within a surround sound octophonic array, the work featured new choreography by members of Extinction Rebellion, and an opening speech by ecology honours student Gemma Dawe! Thanks to all who attended and were involved!

April saw the first of my large-scale travels for the year, where I drove from South Australia to Harrigan’s Lane, home of the Piano Mill, on the NSW/QLD border (via Bendigo for a friend’s 30th, then Melbourne – Wagga Wagga – Dubbo – Inverell and Ballandean) for an artist residency.

I had previously been to Harrigan’s Lane in the Piano Mill for the Channelling Dulcie’s Piano project in May 2023, but instead of a piano, I travelled with my octophonic surround sound system, with the intention of developing a new work, sanctuary x mill (pronounced ‘sanctuary by mill’).

Following from the responses I made on the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary pianos for the Weathered Piano Exchange Arts Birthday project in January, I sent these recording to Piano Mill co-artistic directors Vanessa Tomlinson and Erik Griswold, to record some further responses. The result of this exchange is a wonderful tapestry of weathered and ruined piano soundscapes from South Australia.

Further layered on top of this for sanctuary x mill is a concatentive synthesis (using the software Audioguide) of each of the piano recordings, comprised on sounds from their respective soundscapes (think of the piano tracks as being reconstructed/recomposed of bird song, frog croaks, tree creaks and reed rustles). Recycling soundscapes that I recorded for The River’s Way project in 2015, I made new ambisonic recordings of the Granite Belt bush at Harrigan’s Lane, replete with currawongs, lyrebirds and cockatoos joining the ensemble.

The first showing of the work was presented to a small group outside next to the Lagavulin concert hall, and I’ll be further developing the work in higher-order ambisonics whilst in the UK this coming September and October.

At the end of April, alongside piano performances by Gabriella Smart, I presented Soundmap of Karrawirraparri at the Friends of Willunga Basin Fundraiser in Willunga.

Hi everyone,

The year’s almost over, and there’s plenty that’s filled the past few months – here’s a little synopsis of what I’ve been up to…

In July, I started a new position as Research Associate on joined a new Australian Research Council-funded project at The University of Adelaide, ‘Fine Tuning: A Reconciliation of Indigenous and Western Musical Traditions’.

This important project explores the musical tuning systems of several First Nations’ songlines:

Focusing on central Australian song lines, the project strengthens our knowledge, understanding and application of the intricate tuning systems that underpin traditional Indigenous musical practices. Employing a unique methodology that combines Indigenous and contemporary Western musical performance practices with cutting-edge digital technologies, the project will show how the highly nuanced and sophisticated tunings at the heart of Indigenous music-making can be preserved when transposed to contemporary Western art music contexts. In so doing, the case is made for a more genuine, equitable dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous music-makers, to the mutual benefit of musicians, audiences, and society at large.

As part of this new role, I was fortunate to assist in a workshop at Ross River Resort NT with the Inarma Women’s Choir from Titjikala NT, who have been singing together for 40 years.

Over four days, various mentors trained the choir in breathing exercises, ensemble work, and singing old hymns that the ladies grew up with (in the Lutheran hymnal tradition, sung in Pitjantjatjara). New songs were also learnt and translated into Pitjantjatjara, including ‘The Rose’.

While assisting with food prep and general production, I also shuttled people to and from Alice Springs, allowing me to experience the breathtaking sunrise over the East MacDonnell Ranges.

One of the hymns, Godanya, sung by the old and young ladies at the workshops.

September saw rehearsals begin for “Considering Matthew Shepard,” a powerful work that I first produced and conducted the Australian premiere of in 2019 at Feast Festival, presenting this time for Soundstream New Music with co-producer Riana Chakravarti.

The piece, composed by Craig Hella Johnson, tells the tragic story of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man whose brutal 1998 murder in Wyoming sparked a global outcry against homophobic violence. The music brings Matthew’s story to life with haunting beauty and emotional depth.

This time around, with the production featuring the every amazing Mark Oates and Jennifer Trijo as soloists, incredible choristers from multiple Adelaide choirs including Young Adelaide Voices, Adelaide Chamber Singers, Adelaide Graduate Singers, and Festival Statesmen Chorus, and a stellar chamber ensemble.

Staged in Elder Hall at the University of Adelaide on the 25th anniversary of Matthew’s death (performances on October 12 and 14), this season extended on the previous 2019 presentation, with lighting design by Matt Ralph and various stage pieces including The Fence, Matthew’s clothes and memorial trickets. The full recording of the Saturday performance can be seen below:

Sopranos: Chloe Dunstan, Anastasia Ferguson, Amelia Holds, Vaishi Rajaramanan, Georgie Simmons, Brooke Window

Altos: Sanne Baltussen, Riana Chakravarti, Caitlin Merlin, Kat Ogierman. Keira Simmons, Genevieve Spalding, Caitlin Tait

Tenors:John Khammash, Anthony Little, Mat Monti, Nicholas Munday

Baritones and Basses: Will Barrett, Will Madden, Andrew Moschou, Jesse van Proctor, Mark Roberts, David Shields

Ensemble: Natalia Beos – Violin, Louis Cann – Double Bass, Karen De Nardi – Viola, Caspar Hawksley – Guitar, Steve Jarman – Clarinet, Hilary Kleinig – Cello, Henry Millar – Percussion, Nerissa Pearce – Répétiteur, Paul Sinkinson – Piano

Glowing reviews were received from Chris Reid for Limelight Magazine and Kym Clayton for The Barefoot Review:

Photo by Rosina Possingham

I’m sincerely grateful to our creative team, performers and generous donor, whose contributions made it possible to share Matthew’s story again to Adelaide audiences.

Later that month, on 24 October, Soundstream hosted cult icon Eugene Chadbourne On The Fleurieu at The Loft, Aldinga Beach.

Eugene returned to tour Australia for the first time in 13 years, sharing his unique interpretations of well known songs and originals, as well as collaborating with Gabriella Smart on electric cristal. Check out the video of their improvisation below:

November saw the culmination of my year-long residency at Flinders University’s fourth-order Ambisonic Studio (now know as ‘The Cube’) with the presentation of a new work, Mandala.

Mandala explores the ecosystems of South Australia through second-order ambisonic recordings, blending my experience of Tibetan Buddhist liturgy with environmental soundscapes (a lateral connection of three-dimensional mandala visual projection in tantric meditation to three-dimensional aural representations of soundscapes in ambisonics).

The Cube at Flinders University, a fourth-order (28.4) ambisonic system with speakers surrounding the audience on all sides. Image: Sean Williams.

Presented as a sound bath or guided meditation, the work was premiered in octophonic format first at the Migration Museum on November 19 as part of Chamber Music Adelaide’s On The Terrace 2024 festival.

Ambisonic presentations of the work featured as part of Flinders University’s Festival of Creative Arts, with two days of hearings on Monday 20 and Tuesday 21, and more on Thursday 23 following my final Artist-In-Residence presentation.

More information can be found here: Mandala presents the sounds of South Australia in a 360° studio

Later on 25 November, Soundstream celebrated its 30th birthday party extravanganza!

Having been involved with Soundstream for the past decade (as a JUMP National Mentoring Scholarship in 2012, Administrator and Associate Artistic Director the past two years, and various capacities in the interim).

As part of the day, several works of mine were presented:

• a grand piano harp improvisation for the ruined piano project Channelling Dulcie’s Piano (developed with Vanessa Tomlinson in May 2023).

• An additional presentation of Mandala for octophonic array amidst the soundscape of the Aldinga Scrub dusk chorus.

With Gabriella Smart, I was also interviewed by Chris Reid about Soundstream’s 30 year history.

Other featured performances by a cornucopia of Soundstream friends and collaborators included:

• Gabriella Smart: Glasshouse #5 by Ann Southam and For Cornelius by 2013 Soundstream resident composer Alvin Curran.

• Sage Green (Keira Simmons and Thea Martin): violin and live electronics.

• David Moran, solo cello works: Preludes #4 and #6 by Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson, Air Burnt Dry by 2014 Emerging Composers Forum participant John Pax, and Sept Papillons by Kaija Saariaho

• Gabriella Smart: Olivia Davies’ enfold, Philip Glass’ Mad Rush and Eve Beglarian’s All U Got 2 Do on harmonium

• Dylan Crismani, Gabriella Smart: An octophonic performance by on Electric Cristals, with spatialisation by Daniel Pitman

• David Kotlowy: Pulsa Listric on guitar and treatments

• A group improvisation, followed by a delicious dinner cooked by Yasser Hussein-Yassin, Colleen Smart and Gabriella Smart.

• Gabriella Smart and Dan Pitman: Nocturnal surround work Dark: Antikythera

• Georgia Oatley: Late night electronic music explorations

Lastly, on December 3, I had the premiere of a new choral setting of William’ Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud’ was performed at the Young Adelaide Voices End-Of-Year Concert in Elder Hall, conducted by dear friend Trish Hart and performed by the Intermediate Choir, Aurora, and myself as accompanist. Have a watch and listen below!

Hi everyone,

It’s now almost halfway through 2023, and ample time to share some of the creative ventures of this past half year.

In case you missed the premiere performances of Whispers, a new piece for string quartet I wrote for Chamber Music Adelaide and MOD.’s Invisibility commissions, there’s now a recording available, performed by violinists Lachlan Bramble and Emma Perkins, violist Martin Alexander and cellist Sharon Grigoryan.

As the program note explains:

“Endangered species are often rendered invisible as a result of low population numbers. With the advent of inexpensive long-duration field recording equipment, instead, these species can again be found by listening for their calls. ‘Whispers’ is an encapsulation of the vocalisation of endangered species in South Australia, marking their discovery and decline since the founding of the colony in 1836 to the present day and beyond.”

Like most of my notated music, Whispers is scored to emulate the decisions that animals make and the unpredictable nature of the environment, meaning that every single performance is unique – I’m very grateful to the contributions of the Lachlan, Emma, Martin and Sharon, whose sensitive choices and listening gave voice to the other-than-humans rendered in dots on a page.

Seeing out the end of a frenetic latter half of 2022 were the final performances of Sam Hall’s WOMB, which had seen multiple creative developments since September 2021. As Sam describes, ‘WOMB is an immersive contemporary dance performance that invites you to dive between dimensions and shed your old skin. Drawing from our hopes, fears, and vulnerabilities, it evokes in us a deep sense of connection and an ineffable understanding’.

Presented in The Lab on Adelaide’s Light Square between 23-24 November, it was a delight to see and hear the work presented amidst the immersive screen and surround setup, some of which you can catch in the adjacent video.

Some snippets from WOMB.

Director/Performer - Sam Hall; Performer - Lily Potger; Sound Design - Jesse Budel; Lighting and AV Design - Tom Kitney; AV Design and Creation - Max Brading; Costume Creation - Pam Hall; Headpiece Creation - Ellise Chenda; Production Manager - Jacinta Way

After WOMB’s final performance, and in the wake of several months of non-stop activity (a couple bouts of illness included along the way), my body finally told me to slow down in the form of a nerve injury. As I’ve found out with my physiotherapist these past few months of 2023, my left suprascapular nerve gave way, impacting the associated rotator cuff (specifically, for the medical-savvy folks, the supraspinatus and infraspinatus). Conservative treatment has gone a long way so far, with regular gym visits to rebuild my supper body strength and retrain the neural pathway, estimated between 12-18 months. Ultimately, there’s a gratitude I have in experiencing this now, understanding the care and maintenance I need to take with my body moving forward, and noting the health benefits I’m already beginning to witness.

In the early days of recovery in December, I was immensely fortunate to study a beginner course in Pitjantjatjara language and culture. For audiences not of Australian background, Pitjantjatjara is a Western Desert language of Central Australia, spoken by the Aṉangu people. Alongside Soundstream’s Artistic Director Gabriella Smart and Stuart Patterson, I spent two weeks with cultural advisor Lorna Wilson, learning rudimentary vocabulary and grammar, as well as cultural customs and norms of the Aṉangu. With Soundstream’s ongoing connection with the Inarma Choir and the Titjikala Community in NT and prospective travels to community, I’m looking forward to continuing learning from Aṉangu and learning this beautiful and nuanced language further.

Since December, I’ve also been one of Flinders University’s Assemblage Creative Centre for the Arts Artists-In-Residence. Working with the new ambisonic studios at the university, this residency will culminate in a new work, Mandala, ‘An ambisonic soundscape composition (drawing metaphorically on the Tibetan Buddhist understanding of the mandala as a three-dimensional projection of a particular deity’s palatial residence), celebrating the soundscapes of South Australian national parks and concerned with cultivating respect and reverence for their resident non-human inhabitants.’ For this project, I’ve been making second-order ambisonic recordings with a CoreAudio Octomic in various South Australian ecosystems, including the forested Adelaide Hills on Peramangk Country, coastlines of the Adelaide plains on Kaurna Country, and marshlands of the Fleurieu Peninsula on Ngarrindjeri Country. Keep an ear out for further updates in due course.

Adelaide festival season returned for February and March (now the largest festival in the Southern Hemisphere), and alongside rejoining the Darkfield FOH team for the third year running, I also accompanied comic soprano Janet Hattam at the Murray Bridge Fringe Street Party on February 25. It was a hoot to finally play with Janet (after a few previous attempts) to audiences in my home-town, churning out tunes such as sendups of La Vie en rose (including a Murray Bridge-inspired rendition), Hugh Laurie’s Mystery and David Friedman’s My Simple Christmas Wish. Check out some of the wonderful photos by Glenn Power!

For Soundstream New Music, I also produced the Emerging Composers’ Forum Concert, held at Coriole Vineyards on Sunday March 12. With music inspired by the nearby Aldinga Scrub Conservation Park, featuring world premieres by Christopher Williams (SA), Luke Cuerel (QLD), Elizabeth Jigalin (NSW) and Olivia Davies (WA) across a range of chamber instrumentation, including prepared piano and harmonium. More information on the ECF 2019-2023 program and concert can be found on the Soundstream website. Recording of the works were also made at Wizard Tone Studios in Hendon – more information on the release soon!

Later March saw me venture to the US for three weeks, with the support of an Arts SA Professional Development Grant. From March 23-26, I attended the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology 30th Anniversary Conference, Listening Pasts, Listening Futures, at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, FL USA.

Wearing a variety of hats, from WFAE Secretary and team member of the organising committee to paper and installation presenter, the conference was an incredibly rich and rewarding symposium bringing together acoustic ecology artists and researchers from around the globe.

Some amazing keynotes were presented by Amanda Gutiérrez, Bénéwendé Segueda, Veronica Mockler, David George Haskell and Claude Schryer, alongside several dozen fascinating and insightful presentations across papers, installations and music concerts.

My paper, ‘Operator Please: Field Recording Practices through the lens of Agential Realism’, will be published in the upcoming conference proceedings.

Between 28 March to April 10, I returned San Francisco, something a spiritual home for me in the US. Having spent the most time there of any US city during my 2017 American Ascent travels, it was delightful to spend time in the city once more, adding to the highlights of the trip:

• A visit to the Envelop SF Venue, a surround sound listening space at the Midway in Dogpath, catching three different listening parties of SZA’s SOS, Radiohead’s In Rainbows and Ravi Shankar’s Chants of India

• Heading to The Lab (in San Francisco) to hear two sets by ambient drone extraordinaire Kali Malone

• Hiking in the Tennessee Beach area with fellow sound artist Cheryl Leonard

Stay tuned for a full write-up of this trip in coming weeks!

On May 13, the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary finally launched, thanks to the support of multiple grants from the Rural City of Murray Bridge Council and a Regional Arts Fund grant, administered by Country Arts SA.

The launch featured a tour of the Sanctuary’s pianos in their various states of transformation and ruin. This hike was followed by a concert on 1920s Milton pianola by myself and Vanessa Tomlinson (Clocked Out).

This pianola, affectionately named Dulcie (after Vanessa’s grandmother who initially owned the piano), became the focus of our ensuing project, Channelling Dulcie’s Piano: how the river taught the piano to sing.

From May 14-20, we travelled alongside filmographer/photographer Greg Harm from Murray Bridge to Renmark, Wentworth, Wilcannia, Brewarrina, Moree and Stanthorpe QLD, following the river lines of the Murray, Baaka/Darling, Barwon and Mehi/Gwydir connecting the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary and Piano Mill in SE QLD.

I’ll be doing a further write-up of the Sanctuary launch and this epic journey (5000kms in 10 days) - for now, I’ll let Greg’s beautiful images do the telling.

Additionally, DWELL, a screen-dance work I sound-designed for, in collaboration with choreographer-director Sue Hawksley, dancers Tammy Arjona and Billie Cook, and filmmaker Richard Hodges, had its first screenings:

• WORLD PREMIERE: FlorenceDanceOnScreen Festival - Florence, Italy. May 2023.

• 3rd International Festival of Ecoperformance - São Paulo, Brazil and online - June 2023.

Subsequent screenings will be at:

• International Dance and Somatic Practices Conference - Coventry University International - July 2023.

• Solastalgia: loss and return exhibition - Coral Street Art Space, Victor Harbor, South Australia - August 2023.

Special thanks to Country Arts SA and the Regional Arts Fund for funding support!

I’m currently raising funds to remount of Considering Matthew Shepard, a beautiful modern-day oratorio by Craig Hella Johnson, reflecting on the homophobic murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming USA in 1998. Following the 2019 Australian premiere which I produced and conducted, I’ll be resuming these roles with Soundstream New Music, with performances taking place on the 25th anniversary of Matthew’s death in Adelaide’s Elder Hall from October 12-14 2023.

Our Australian Cultural Fund campaign is currently accepting tax-deductible donations, with all support gratefully appreciated. A fundraising soiree on Sunday 18 June, 3-5pm in Aldinga Beach will feature soprano Chloe Dunstan (Young Adelaide Voices) and myself performing songs from the show, alongside a screening of the PBS documentary on the work. Reserve your spot over at Trybooking!

Donate to CMS 2023 here!

In July, I’ll be starting a new research associate role at the University of Adelaide on an Australia Research Council-funded project, ‘Fine Tuning: A Reconciliation of Indigenous and Western Musical Traditions’. This important project explores the microtunal tuning systems of several First Nations songlines:

Focusing on central Australian song lines, the project strengthens our knowledge, understanding and application of the intricate tuning systems that underpin traditional Indigenous musical practices. Employing a unique methodology that combines Indigenous and contemporary Western musical performance practices with cutting-edge digital technologies, the project will show how the highly nuanced and sophisticated tunings at the heart of Indigenous music-making can be preserved when transposed to contemporary Western art music contexts. In so doing, the case is made for a more genuine, equitable dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous music-makers, to the mutual benefit of musicians, audiences, and society at large.

Lachlan Bramble, Emma Perkins, Martin Alexander and Sharon Draper prepare to perform Whispers

And 6 July, I’ll also be playing keys for Mt Carmel College’s production of Shrek Jr. at Adelaide’s Arts Theatre!

Until next time with the full updates on the WFAE 2023 conference, and a recount of the travels with Dulcie the pianola, with much love and compassion,

Jesse

2022 has flown by almost in the blink of an eye, and, catching my breath after a few intense months past, I’m excited to share some of the things I’ve been up to since the middle of the year.

First, a few updates on my work with Soundstream New Music:

• I joined Soundstream’s artistic director Gabriella Smart and Daniel Pitman for the premiere performance of DARK: ANTIKYTHERA at the Pt Augusta Golf Club on 12 August, as part of Chamber Music Adelaide’s On The Terrace in Pt Augusta. The surround sound work responds to the nocturnal firmament and is inspired by the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient orrery that accurately predicted planetary movement and eclipses. Read more on this performance in Chris Reid’s Limelight review.

• Soundstream was successful in receiving renewed Program Support funding from Arts South Australia, which means that I’ll be continuing as Administrator for the organisation, as well as curating new programs as Associate Artistic Director (including the upcoming Soundstream FRINGE 2023 program)! More information on this announcement is available here.

• Dr Dylan Crismani from the University of Adelaide was successful in receiving an Australian Research Council Grant (IN230100005), which connects with Soundstream’s ongoing work with Titjikala community in the NT, and has Gabriella and I joining as researchers on this exciting project.

Harkening back to July, we start off with Lacunae, a sound design collaboration with Tasmanian team Soma Lumia for the Illuminate Adelaide Festival. An interactive projection and sound installation, the work exhibited between the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, Murray Bridge Regional Gallery and Walkway Gallery in Bordertown from 15th-30th July. Lacunae sought to transform our separation into something where joy and connection bubbles up through movement, music and art. Joined via live-feed to share silhouettes and music tracks simultaneously from different locations, people communicated and danced with one another across SA in this joyous, shared space full of colour, music and movement.

In late July, I also reviewed Seraphim Trio’s Grand Tour: France performance (part of The Lab’s Illuminate offering) for The Serenade Files.

In early August, I performed Nurture: The Piano Album (Live) at ARTHUR Art-Bar (66 Currie Street, Adelaide), featuring arrangements by Youtuber keudae of tracks from Porter Robinson’s critically-acclaimed 2021 album Nurture.

While I play fairly regularly as an accompanist and musical director, this concert marked my first extended solo piano performance, and it was especially fulfilling to do this with the sponsorship of PianoMax on a Kawai CA99 hybrid piano. Many thanks to Cass and the team at ARTHUR for hosting me!

Later, from 24-30 September, I served as Leadership Manager for the 2022 RYLA (Rotary Youth Leadership Awards) in Rotary District 9510 at Nunyara Conference Centre in Belair, SA.

RYLA is an intensive leadership experience organised by Rotary clubs and districts where participants develop skills as leaders, cultivating skills set including building communication and problem-solving skills, discovering strategies for becoming a dynamic leader in their school or community, learning from community leaders, inspirational speakers, and peer mentors, unlocking potential to turn motivation into action, and have fun and forming lasting friendships.

This year’s RYLA included sessions on resilience, public speaking, cultural entrepreneurship (presented by yours truly), emotional intelligence in leadership, peace-building and conflict management, first impressions, self-care, growth mindset, goal setting, creativity, advocacy and ethics.

As an alum of the RYPEN (2008) and RYLA (2016) programs, I’m incredibly grateful to be able to offer something of the skillsets that I’ve picked up across my youth to this year’s cohort (some 30 strong), and to continue building my own capacities alongside a stellar team including Alex James, Benjamin Cook, Sabrina Alameen, Chris Mark, Emelia Moore, Ali Michael and la jefa, Helen Marshall.

From 6 - 15 October, I musically directed The Lot’s season of Jonathan Larson’s RENT at the Queens Theatre. With 12 performances over 6 – 15 October, this production was popular with the Adelaide audience and featured in many reviews, including:

You can see the full reviews from the AU Review, See-Do-Eat Review, Stage Whispers on each of the links, as well as other reviews from Broadway World, Weekend Notes and Glam Adelaide.

It was an absolute pleasure working on such an iconic queer show with a primarily-queer creative team including director Benjamin Maio McKay, Matt Ralph and Nina Richards, alongside my steadfast band of Mark Lanigan O’Keeffe (Guitar 1), Jennifer Trijo (Keys 2/Guitar 2), Sebastian Brook and Benjamin Waechter (Bass), Miles Farnan and Max Zillioto (Drums), and a superb cast and crew who championed this show over its twelve-performance run.

Stayed tuned for The Lot’s next production of Larson’s Tick, Tick… Boom! in mid-2023!

Amidst the second week of RENT, I had a number of launches and premieres. Friday 14 October saw the launch of the VR-collaborative work Herding Caterpillars, for which I was the sound artist, presented during Adelaide’s Nature Festival (14-16 October) as both AR and VR events.

From Glam Adelaide: “Presented by Butterfly Conservation SA and creative producer Rosina Possingham with technology partners, CDW Animation, Flinders University’s The Void and Brewed Engagement Extended Reality (BEER) Laboratory (Labs), Herding Caterpillars involves augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences showcasing the life cycle of the Chequered Copper Butterfly – a rarely seen and recently re-discovered species found in Adelaide’s Southern Parklands.”

You can find out more about the making of the project on the Herding Caterpillars website.

Then, between the matinee and evening RENT performance on Saturday 15 October was the premiere of my new string quartet, Whispers at MOD., as part of Chamber Music Adelaide’s INVISIBILITY Commissions.

Performed alongside Luke Altman’s Hidden Cities, Georgina Bowden’s Micro-Geology, Belinda Gehlert’s Beyond The Binary and Hilary Kleinig’s The River Flows Through, Whispers continues my interest in chamber music modelled on ecosystem functionality and non-human agency, where the performers get to make decisions about when and how to play with one another, make every performance unique. The program note offers some more specific thoughts on the work:

“Endangered species are often rendered invisible as a result of low population numbers. With the advent of inexpensive long-duration field recording equipment, instead these species can again be found through listening for their calls. ‘Whispers’ is an encapsulation of the vocalisation of endangered species in South Australia, marking their discovery and decline since the founding of the colony in 1836 to the present day and beyond.”

Contemplative (not lethargic) listening!

Many thanks to Lachlan Bramble, Emma Perkins, Martin Alexander, Sharon Draper and Janet Carey for bringing the piece to life!

Check out more photos in CityMag’s feature post, and read on below for more information on the first public performance on Saturday 12 October, again at MOD. as Chamber Music Adelaide’s On The Terrace Program.

At the end of the month, on October 29 and 30th, I (finally!) joined the troupe of Vicarious Cabaret for our return season at Diverse-City.

Postponed due to my contracting COVID in the middle of the year, this season’s performances improvised three wild and original stories inspired by the lives of our audience members (and the Halloween season): a haunted family of accountants needing to seal a portal to the underworld, a rom-com themed tale of an assistant principal campaigning to get his job back, and a hotelier and pharmacist contending with a zombie invasion.

After a long stint of Adelaide Fringe seasons in the past five years, Vicarious Cabaret is taking a break for the 2023 season, but we’ll return sometime in the new year to craft many more musicals from scratch!

Upcoming Ventures

The first public performance of ‘Whispers’ for string quartet will take place at MOD. at 2pm on Saturday November 12, as part of Chamber Music Adelaide’s On The Terrace series.

Performances of Sam Hall’s WOMB, which I provided sound design for and has seen numerous creative developments at The Mill, Dancehub and Adelaide Festival Centre will finally take place at The Lab in on Wednesday 23 and Thursday 24 November.

Tickets are available on The Lab’s website.

And lastly, the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary is set to be completed by the end of 2022 at Carey’s Park, Murray Bridge, through the support of a Country Arts SA grant and the Rural City of Murray Bridge.

Expanding on the existing two pianos at the foot of the park, a further six plinths have been installed across the additional sections of the park along the stretch of Mallee scrub.

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An exciting launch tour and concert is planned for Adelaide Fringe 2023 - more information soon!

More exciting announcements around the corner next month, but until then, much love and compassion,

Jesse

Since my last correspondence in February, things have amped up quite a lot!

The Past Few Months

Kicking off the new year, I started as the new administrator for Soundstream: New Music, an Adelaide new music outfit.

Rejoining the Soundstream team brings things full circle, with my early exposure working in experimental and exploratory music taking place with Soundstream and artistic director Gabriella Smart with the support of a 2012 Australia Council JUMP National Mentoring Scholarship, and periods of involvement with the organisation in intervening years.

Working behind the scenes on several projects over the past few months, including the Emerging Composers Forum and Inarma Choir performance at the SA State Library, amongst others, has been incredibly rewarding, and we’re currently working on several exciting collaborations, including Amplified Red, DARK and WAVE.

For regular updates on activities here, consider checking out Soundstream’s Facebook and Instagram.

taking it all in at the Garden of Unearthly Delights, March 2022

For the Adelaide Fringe and Festival Season 2022, I reprised several roles from seasons past.

Amongst them, I accompanied Vicarious Cabaret’s 2022 Fringe season at Star Theatres from 2-5 March. A 4.5-star review from The University of Adelaide’s Scott Bradbrook proclaimed:

A return season of Vicarious Cabaret is coming up on 15-17 July – more information below!

Photos: Frank Lynch, at Image Construction.

In the Garden of Unearthly Delights, I once again joined the Darkfield team. As their website explains:

DARKFIELD is a collection of multi-sensory audio experiences in complete darkness.

The DARKFIELD experiences take place inside purpose-built signature white shipping containers and use binaural audio, sensory deprivation and special effects to place the audience at the center of a narrative completely at odds with the space it occupies.

Immersed in the dark, the total loss of visioncauses other senses to heighten, fixating on to every movement and sound.

Adding to the immersive shows FLIGHT, COMA and SÉANCE, this year saw a new offering in EULOGY, bringing a choose-your-own-adventure spin to the arresting repertoire that is Darkfield.

Across the season, I also wrote for online magazine The Serenade Files, profiling folks and reviewing a number of shows:

• Profile: Wickedly Good collaborations – Caitlin Ellen Moore on connections and storytelling

• Profile: The art of doing it – multifaceted Mitre Khammash on producing, improvisation and forging ahead

• Review: Death Whistle – music for solo piccolo

• Review: Electric Dreams – ‘Anthropocene in C Major’

• Review: Shreklesque

• Review: Millicent Sarre Is Opinionated

• Review: Live On The Heysen Trail

• Review: A Grand Night For Singing

On May 10, I had the privilege of presenting two songs from Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan (composed by Joseph Twist, with libretto by Christos Tsiolkas and Alana Valentine) at the University of Adelaide’s Kaurna Learning Circle with conductor Christie Anderson, Adelaide Chamber Singers, and soloists Mark Oates and Jack Doherty.

Back in December 2021, I had the privilege of repetiteuring a creative development of the work, a role I reprised during the rehearsal period for its Adelaide Festival 2022 premiere in March.

This occasion marked the 50th anniversary of Dr George Ian Ogilvie Duncan’s drowning in Karrawirraparri (the River Torrens), near to where we performed.

Joined by a group of some 60 people partaking in Dr Getrude Glossip’s history tour commemorating the night, the songs Drowning Song for Ian and The Question of Love made for a poignant evening, remembering Dr Duncan and the impacts of his death on the South Australian community and broader legislative change.

Other News

Recently, I received a Invisibility Commission for a new string quartet from Chamber Music Adelaide and MOD. (Adelaide’s Museum of Design).

Alongside Hilary Kleinig, Belinda Gehlert, Luke Altmann and Georgina Bowden, the new works respond to works in MOD.’s Invisibility Exhibition (running from February – November 2022) and will be premiered at MOD. in October, with a follow-up performance on November 12 as part of CMA’s On The Terrace program.

The Invisibility Commissions are made possible through funding from Arts SA’s 2022 COVID Recovery Fund.

Read more on the commissions in Limelight Magazine, The Murray Valley Standard and InDaily.

Performances of Sam Hall’s WOMB, which I provided sound design for and has seen numerous creative developments at The Mill, Dancehub and Adelaide Festival Centre will finally take place at The Lab in November 2022, thanks to a Carclew Project Grant.

Stay tuned for more information!

Upcoming Ventures

The next few months are steadily shaping up – check out some of my upcoming performances, exhibitions and presentations below:

A return season of Vicarious Cabaret, a fully-improvised hour-long musical is on at Diverse-City from 15-17 July at 7:30pm and 9:30pm each night.

Come catch a new musical about you!

Opening the same weekend is Lacunae, a collaboration with Tasmanian team Soma Lumia for the Illuminate Adelaide Festival.

An interactive projection and sound installation, the work is exhibiting between the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, Murray Bridge Regional Gallery and Walkway Gallery in Bordertown.

Running from 15-30 July, Lacunae transforms our separation into something where joy and connection bubbles up through movement, music and art.

Joined via live-feed to share silhouettes and music tracks simultaneously from different locations, people can communicate and dance with one another across SA in this joyous shared space full of colour, music and movement.

From August 4-6 at 6pm, I’ll be performing Nurture: The Piano Album (Live) at Arthur Art-Bar (66 Currie Street, Adelaide), featuring arrangements by Youtuber keudae of tracks from Porter Robinson’s critically-acclaimed 2021 album Nurture.

September 23-30 will see me as Leadership Manager for the 2022 RYLA (Rotary Youth Leadership Awards) in Rotary District 9510 at Nunyara Conference Centre in Belair, SA.

Rotary Youth Leadership Awards (RYLA) is an intensive leadership experience organised by Rotary clubs and districts where participants develop skills as leaders while having fun and making connections. Amongst the outcomes of the program are:

– Building communication and problem-solving skills
– Discovering strategies for becoming a dynamic leader in your school or community
– Learning from community leaders, inspirational speakers, and peer mentors
– Unlocking potential to turn motivation into action
– Have fun and form lasting friendships

Applications are now open on the Rotary District 9510 RYLA website – if you’re 18-25 (or know someone who is), consider applying!

And from October 6-15, I’ll be musically directing 5 QUARTER Designs & Preachrs Productions season of RENT at the Queens Theatre.

As our production website details:

RENT tells the story of a group of impoverished young artists struggling to survive and create a life in NYC’s East Village in the thriving days of bohemian, Alphabet City, under the shadow of HIV/AIDS. Awarded the Tony® for Best Musical, this brand new production creatively led by Benjamin Maio Mackay and Matt Ralph, starring Lindsay Prodea, Tate Simpson and Cassandra Haines is sure to capture the hearts and minds of audiences once again.

Tickets are already selling fast, so get yours now!

With love and compassion,

Jesse