NOMINATION: Excellence in Experimental Practice
For works, people or events that interrogate, extend, or challenge standard artistic practice within the Australian repertoire
If you believe you are nominated in the wrong category or the details of your nomination to be incorrect, please contact the AMC via email at awards@australianmusiccentre.com.au before proceeding with the nomination.
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Nominee
Aviva Endean
Nominated Project/Activity
The Breath Becomes The Wind - for Liquid Architecture Presents at The Meat Market Melbourne/Naarm
Nominator Statement
In The Breath Becomes The Wind, Aviva pushed her experimental instrumental and compositional practice into new territory. In this new work, Aviva delved deeper into her highly idiosyncratic instrumental approach (which often sees her transforming her instruments through the use of additional tubing, objects, or speakers), and extended this approach by considering the microphones she was using as part of the instrument. This approach revealed how the speakers and microphones colour the sound we hear and integrates the performer, the microphones, speakers, and the space itself as all co-creating the work.
For example, Aviva began the piece working with breath sounds though the clarinet with a lavalier microphone between her fingers. When she waved her hand up and down the instrument it acted as an acoustic filter effect, when she held her hand to her face, we were immediately transported inside her body, and when she held her hand to the bell of her instrument and speakers worked together to generate a controlled and musical feedback. The sounds generated where unlike anything I had heard before, and had an almost magical quality. Later in the work multiple microphones were used on her bass clarinet, capturing the sound from multiple perspectives of the instrument to generate a rhythmic groove created by turning on and off different microphones.
The work also pushed into new performative possibilities for Aviva. Employing Pat Telfer to operate sound, rather than self-operating as she usually does for solo sets, Aviva was able to free herself up physically onstage. This allowed her to explore a more performative relationship to the microphones, swinging a condenser mic to create a breathy bass pulse that underpinned the centre of the work, and later unravelling a very long microphone lead to go all the way outside the venue, bringing the sound of the lorikeets outside the space into the venue.
What is most striking about the work is the way that instrumental, vocal and textural elements came together in performance to create a cohesive composition. The work was constantly engaging, with the novel approaches to performing and amplifying sound always serving the compositional arc. The starkness of the opening, was followed by a texturally rich centrepiece in which Aviva cleverly layered live recorded sounds, creating a haunting of the space in which her physical gestures seemed to linger through their sonic residue before we were immersed in the noisy environment surrounding The Meat Market venue, and then grounded back into her instrumental skill with the propelling pulse of the bass clarinet finale.
The Breath Becomes The Wind is a exciting new development in Avivas experimental practice that she clearly put a great deal of work towards. I highly commend this work for an Art Music award as I believe it is timely to honour Avivas solo work at this moment in her ever evolving career.
Nominee
Aviva Endean
Nominated Project/Activity
The Breath Becomes The Wind - for Liquid Architecture Presents at The Meat Market Melbourne/Naarm
For example, Aviva began the piece working with breath sounds though the clarinet with a lavalier microphone between her fingers. When she waved her hand up and down the instrument it acted as an acoustic filter effect, when she held her hand to her face, we were immediately transported inside her body, and when she held her hand to the bell of her instrument and speakers worked together to generate a controlled and musical feedback. The sounds generated where unlike anything I had heard before, and had an almost magical quality. Later in the work multiple microphones were used on her bass clarinet, capturing the sound from multiple perspectives of the instrument to generate a rhythmic groove created by turning on and off different microphones.
The work also pushed into new performative possibilities for Aviva. Employing Pat Telfer to operate sound, rather than self-operating as she usually does for solo sets, Aviva was able to free herself up physically onstage. This allowed her to explore a more performative relationship to the microphones, swinging a condenser mic to create a breathy bass pulse that underpinned the centre of the work, and later unravelling a very long microphone lead to go all the way outside the venue, bringing the sound of the lorikeets outside the space into the venue.
What is most striking about the work is the way that instrumental, vocal and textural elements came together in performance to create a cohesive composition. The work was constantly engaging, with the novel approaches to performing and amplifying sound always serving the compositional arc. The starkness of the opening, was followed by a texturally rich centrepiece in which Aviva cleverly layered live recorded sounds, creating a haunting of the space in which her physical gestures seemed to linger through their sonic residue before we were immersed in the noisy environment surrounding The Meat Market venue, and then grounded back into her instrumental skill with the propelling pulse of the bass clarinet finale.
The Breath Becomes The Wind is a exciting new development in Avivas experimental practice that she clearly put a great deal of work towards. I highly commend this work for an Art Music award as I believe it is timely to honour Avivas solo work at this moment in her ever evolving career.