Overlaps and Digressions, 2018

4-channel sound composition. 8'45".
3 ESI nEar 05 studio monitors, Panphonic Soundshower, cables, computer, sound card.

Relations and Un-relations, 2010

This is a two channel mix-down of a four-channel composition presented on four loudspeakers placed next to each other on a shelf, in turn part of a larger installation conceived and presented in Sight & Sound: Music and Abstraction in Australian Art (Arts Centre, Melbourne Australia, curated by Steven Tonkin)

Live at Sound Full, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 7th July 2012

I was invited to the wonderful Dunedin Public Art Gallery to create and install a new work for Sound Full: Sound in Contemporary Australian and New Zealand Art. Curated by Caleb Kelly and Aaron Kreisler, this was a superb showcase of inventive thinking, making and sounding, as was the night that this performance was recorded on: I shared the evening's bill with Marco Fusinato, Robin Fox and vjRex/Eugene Hansen.

The week leading up to this performance consisted of that energizing mix of creative urgency and practical impossibility. Aside from setting up my installation and composing a four-channel sound work in the exhibition space, I spent days driving around picking up record players and loudspeakers from willing donors, but the numbers were still too few to create a complex and changing performance.

So started the op shopping, alas with little success. Only with the generous and much-appreciated help of Sally McIntyre and Campbell Walker was I able to finally assemble a collection of Dunedin's finest discarded record players and loudspeakers for this performance. We spent days of op-shopping with barely a yield (what stereos there were stratospherically priced), until in the final hour before the weekend's closing time (and the day before the performance) the Habitat for Humanity ReStore lent me a complete carload (in fact, the wonderful curator Aaron Kreisler's car now stacked bottom to top) for a most reasonable $50 loan fee. Together with additional turntables from

The performance was now saved, I had gear to play with, and the nervous buzz of potential failure (the failure of not having an instrument to play on) slowly gave way to the nervous buzz of potential failure of improvised performance.

I remember thoroughly enjoying giving this performance, and this through-the desk recording captures much of what I created across eight metres of turntables, now for you, in vivid stereo. My record player orchestra was miked up with overheads by Forbes Williams, a little as if it was a looooong drum kit.

Credits go to Campbell Walker for recording, and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery for the permission to use this material. Thanks for your crucial turntable loans: Sally McIntyre, Richard Scowen, None Gallery, Brendan Jon Philip, and Tony from Too Tone Records (and anyone I forgot).

Enjoy.

Conjunctive and Disjunctive Relations, Multiple Spaces Mix, 2013

Materially:
This composite composition draws on two painting and sound installations presented at Place Gallery, Richmond, 2013 and SNO Contemporary Art Projects, Marrickville, 2013. In these installations painting took the form of easel painting, large-scale panel painting and wall painting. Sound took the form of five channels comprised of: a 14-minute mono composition presented on a highly directional Panphonics SoundShower carrier wave loudspeaker, a 9-minute stereo composition presented on Brown Innovations SoundBeam array loudspeaker, and a 12-minute stereo composition presented by using painted plywood panels as resonating bodies for two SolidDrive induction drivers. These three modes of sound diffusion engaged the space in varied forms, from the highly directional to the diffuse.

Conceptually:
How does the audible contribute to our experience of place, and what may it tell us about space? How do we experience sound worlds in which we can locate aspects of real places, compared to those sound worlds that appear free of place? And what happens when we diffuse sounds that are, let’s say for simplicity’s sake, abstract, into, let’s say for simplicity’s sake, real places? And in turn record those spatial phenomena and presences, before combining them with the original material that was represented in that place in the first place?

If for me this work were not about both presences and absences, then I would not mention that it reworks the materials of a painting and sound installation that existed at other places and at other times. In these installations the relationships between painting and sound were rendered complex by a confluence of conjunctive and disjunctive relations. Here and now, in this composite composition you are hearing, the disjunctures proliferate as a result of various absences. Absence of the paintings, of walking through the space, of stopping here and there, of cocking your head to capture a direction of sound, of visual referents of the gallery space, of the pacing and placing provided by the overlap of three sound compositions, of their emergence from different places in the gallery, of their varied forms of diffusion by different types of loudspeakers. Yet, by the juxtaposition of the originally composed sounds, alongside with documentary recordings of their diffusion in a gallery space, a new tension is created between the real and the represented, between the real and the imagined, and between the physical and the psychological.

When I speak of conjunctive and disjunctive relations, I seek to describe the engaging oscillation between what we are able to comprehend, and what we are unable to grasp. Conjunctive relations make sense because through them we construct causalities and understand relationships. Disjunctive relations, on the other hand, are marked by their uneasy along-sidednesses because they remain perpetually unresolved. This particular notion of relations is taken from William James’ writings where he seeks to capture the various ways in which we experience the world – and can and cannot comprehend it.

Michael Graeve, text written in 2013 for a showing at Melbourne Now, The Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria. Revised 2016.