ACUADS in Adelaide

Just returned from a week in Adelaide, brilliant old buildings, terrific art, but also must be the Australian capital for the best restaurants in the country! (a pic here of Glenelg, beach-side of Adelaide).


I was in Adelaide to attend the Australian Council for University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) annual national conference.


So, why a muso at an Art & Design conference? Well, for one reason, my partner Jenny was presenting some of her PhD work there, about the state of the creative and performing arts and their place in academia. 'Goal displacing behaviour' as some call it, that is, metrics about grants and journal articles, rather than about (say), music, art or film.


One of the relationships that is quickly developing now in Australia, is a ever-closer relationship between the arts peaks bodies. This includes matters of lobbying the federal government around the ERA review (Excellence in Research for Australia) of research indicators, ideas about a national Creative and Performing Arts body, and alternative competitive funding arrangements to what some consider as currently science-dominated Australian Research Council. In the case of this year's ACUADS conference, these and related themes were well put by Australian Chair of ACUADS and acting Head of the Victorian College of the Arts (part of the University of Melbourne), AsProf Su Baker:


To date, Art & Design (ACUADS), Film (ASPERA) and Music (NACTMUS) have been forging ever closer links and collaboration. For example, I think there is a particularly strong and useful example in the Future-proofing the Creative Arts PhD project. Essentially, this is a national collaborative project to examine the practices, outputs and assessment standards for research higher degrees in these disciplines, and by exemplar of course, what creative and performing artists *really* do when it comes to the nexus of practice-as-research through art projects . . . onward and upward.

Clocked Out

Back in the studio again, and in concert recording with Clocked Out, a wonderful Brisbane based duo who have been writing, rehearsing and recording for their album Foreign Objects.


We spent about five days trying out ideas and getting sounds for some of their more unusual ideas for instrumentation, arrangement and subsequent sound production interpretation. Prepared piano, strange percussion objects scattered about the floor, really unusual combinations of timbres, but orchestrated remarkably and performed with professional precision - terrific performers and composers. Quite challenging but a very enjoyable experience for us all.


After the studio work, we moved directly into a live concert event, and from my perspective, moved the technology approaches of what I had learned from them into the concert environment. The IMERSD studio was patched into our Ian Hanger Recital Hall and off we went with the concert entitled Dedications - compositions that paid homage to 2 giants of contemporary music: Terry Riley, the master of expanded space, and Morton Feldman, the master of intricate patterns.


This was then a premier for the new works, centred around six pieces, viginettes entitled Foreign Objects. Later back to the studio, the thing now was to produce and edit all of the material from both studio and live recordings - in some cases, by comp-ing together both environments together within a single piece. Normally, I would find this somewhat of a challenge, but these people are so professional and given that we got to know each other so well, I think the outcomes are really beautiful. Some snippets and teasers here:

Boomp3.com

Boomp3.com

Boomp3.com

Clocked Out will be touring the US West and East coasts late November /early December 2008, so look out for them around Los Angeles and New York if you're in the area. Just wonderful in concert. Foreign Objects the album will be out in early 2009.

Brian Eno's 'Bloom'

Speaking of iPhone apps (see earlier post on ProTools controller), Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers have teamed to produce this highly addictive generative music application for the iPhone - Bloom.


Its available from the iTunes App store for around $US4.00 and has to be of the nicest little additions I've made to my iPhone in recent times. Hard to put your finger on just why this works, but I do know that everyone who touches it is enthralled (and by this I also mean, those who are not musicians or usually have that little interest in music technology).

The user (performer?) is provided with a colored screen and a quiet drone. Tap the screen in various places and different tones play depending on where the screen is tapped. This loops, creating a unique piece of music on the fly, and one that changes gradually on its own. It's also beautiful, with the tones appearing as colored spots that slowly fade.

An interesting idea for musicians - to make such little apps/pieces of interactive music for a different kind of 'prod-user' audience - quite different to the old record consumption culture? For more on developing iPhone Apps and distribution, see the iPhone DevCenter.