2014’s been a great year for my music with radio airplay and a bunch of releases. Listen above for my preemptive strike on the annual Junto activity of stitching together 12 five-second sections of audio to represent the year.
If you click on the months in the paragraphs below, you can find details of the sounds. Or see what you can pick :)
It started with an appearance on New Weird Australia’s Regional, Rural and Remote compilation in January, along with tracks opening and closing Shinobi Cuts’ remix chain. In between those two songs the material travelled around the world and there are some fascinating interpretations.
The Reimagining exhibition traveled to Wagga Art Gallery in February and it was pleasing to hear part of my soundtrack broadcast on Radio National during April. In March a track I recorded in Wagga one afternoon joined the Album In A Day release. During April I tried remixing The Occupants.
In May an impression I made of a pelican using a balloon joined 152 other musicians in the Bimblebox exhibition, which will travel through regional Australia until 2016. June featured a trip to Lismore, where I recorded Mike and Cameron (see video below) -- the latter's sculptures would feature on my album AND.
2014 was a year of anniversaries, including a decade since the release of my first album SHAKES and 25 years since I started playing bass guitar. A recording with my bass playing from 1994 became part of my contribution to Garlo Jo’s Vent De Guitars CD in 2014.
And bass playing featured in my first live show in almost a decade, when I played at Grong Grong Hall in July. (Photo by Derek Motion)
My presentation on DIY Communications at Dream Big in August drew on my experience promoting creative projects.
In September I released AND, a 20-track album with songs made from sculpture, a playground, story time at Leeton Library, a boiling kettle, wind chimes, as well as regular instruments. It’s my eighth album as Bassling.
One track is a song I wrote about the rise and slight drop in temperature during a day in January. It was part of the Regional Arts Australia summit in Kalgoorlie during October -- the month in which I also finished the track in the link here.
An exhibition opened in London during November that included a song made from the sounds of my suburb Willimbong. During that month I also manipulated a recording of Leeton’s main street during the Outback Band Spectacular, which was another fun project proposed by the Disquiet Junto. I’ve now participated in over 80 Juntos, including videos for more than 20.
I’m looking forward to starting 2015 with the release of the third remix chain and a video project with the poet Derek Motion.