This music was written and recorded for a performance by Sun-Bus-5, an ensemble featuring myself and Andrew Garton with an assortment of other musicians. In 2012 we created a show titled The Light Show with projection artist Hugh McSpeddon and musicians Kate Adam and Steve Law. The performance was featured over four nights in the program of Melbourne Fringe Festival. From the performances we captured footage and recordings and created a CD/DVD released by Secession Records in 2013.
For The Light Show we each wrote an individual composition of approximately six minutes with three parts. These were overlapped with each other, for example: Kate performed her piece before me, I improvised over the third part of her piece followed immediately by her improvising over the first part of my piece (this video soundtrack), Andrew then improvised over my third part with his first part etc. In this instance the technique is called Drift Theory, a structured improvisation. At the beginning and end of the performance all musicians involved perform an improvised soundtrack to the improvised projections. The overall piece is represented on The Light Show CD.
On The Epistle Of St Paul. Thanks Winnie! (Part 1), I played effected electric bass while playing the bass drum from my electronic drum kit and manipulating a record on my turntable. Kate Adam improvised on shawm (a South East Asian reed instrument). Spooky stuff. The record I used is a spoken word release by Winifred West, recorded in Mittagong NSW in 1965 and titled The Epistal Of St Paul.
For this video all I can say is this: If your numbers up: your numbers up. Pretty soon you will be nothing. Until then bang your drum, wave your flag, dance your dance. Or Don’t. Fuck it, just go swim in the river……..