Chamber Folk
Violinist Rachel Meyers and accordionist Dave McNamara boldly combine Klezmer and other Jewish music with experimental instrumentals and original compositions.
Link to ABC digital full feature (including video).
Audio feature:
Musician's deep listening experiment at Arthur River
By Rick Eaves on Your Afternoon with Helen Shield
Composer and violinist, Rachel Meyers, is recording the wind, the waves and the wilds during an Arthur River residency funded by Arts Tasmania.
Duration: 9min 29secBroadcast: Wed 14 Aug 2019, 1:30pm
Soundbath definition: An immersion in sound frequency that cleans the soul.
Submersion; healing; meditative; dark/light;
It should feel like participants are submerged in sound. Comfortable seating is a must - perhaps beanbags or yoga mats, blankets.
Visually, participants see the water installation in centre of space, with reflected water lit on ceiling; performer; beanbags.
Combinations of sounds: 60 min musique concrete track including recorded sounds particularly roars from waves and wind, but also sounds getting deeper with the minutae of other recordings (pebbles, water trickles, wind, etc), manipulated sounds, drones and frquency play brought out; and live performance including traditional soundbath instruments such as singing bowls, crystal bowls, etc, solo violin, and spoken word.
Prose and poetry excerpts for Southern Ecophony:
Mary Oliver: THE SEA
Stroke by
stroke my
body remembers that life and cries for
the lost parts of itself—-
fins, gills
opening like flowers into
the flesh—-my legs
want to lock and become
one muscle, I swear I know
just what the blue-gray scales
shingling
the rest of me would
feel like!
paradise! Sprawled
in that motherlap,
in that dreamhouse
of salt and exercise,
what a spillage
of nostalgia pleads
from the very bones! how
they long to give up the long trek
inland, the brittle
beauty of understanding,
and dive,
and simply
become again a flaming body
of blind feeling
sleeking along
in the luminous roughage of the sea’s body,
vanished
like victory inside that
insucking genesis, that
roaring flamboyance, that
perfect
beginning and
conclusion of our own.
Rachel Carson, ‘Edge of the Sea’ excerpt: “The Edge of the Sea was a book Carson had always wanted to write. Her idea for it began while she still worked at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. She thought of it as a "field guide," and Houghton Mifflin editor-in-chief Paul Brooks had a similar idea in mind when the two first met after Carson achieved literary fame with The Sea Around Us. But as Carson visited each coastal area and began writing, the book became much more than any typical "guide book." It has all the hallmarks we now associate with Rachel Carson’s prose. Once again a scientifically accurate exploration of the ecology of Atlantic seashore, but also a hauntingly beautiful account of what one can find at the edge of the sea. She explores a tide pool, and an inaccessible cave, and watches a lone crab on the shore at midnight. Each is a memorable encounter.”
Jules Verne, ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ excerpt:
John Steinbeck, ‘The Log from The Sea of Cortez’:
Some ideas are brewing for Southern Ecophony. Video inspirations below.
Drone sounds created in Ableton like this. Lawrence English a big influence in drone sounds:
Instrumental improv on found instruments may sound like this. Cheryl Leonard has done some amazing found objects compositions to do with Antarctica. I also love her musical aesthetic. Particularly from about 6 minutes in:
Climate scientists talking about their work, and the Southern Ocean as a whole, like this:
Something like I imagine the event itself may LOOK like:
Training to be done:
I’ve worked quite extensively with music notation software, music recording equipment, and digital audio workstations (DAWs) such as ProTools. I need to refine my skills with Ableton Pro (already have the software, just need to develop and refine audio manipulation ideas), and will probably seek mentorship as well as complete a basic ecourse. Will be working with Doug Quin in March on field recording techniques, and will continue my training when returned from the field to use the sounds through various DAWs.
Previous work has been largely music notation-based, with accompanying extensive program notes. This work is a significant departure.
