‘The Breath Becomes The Wind’, is a work in development which investigates the relationship between breath at the intimate scale of the body, and the ephemeral forces of the wind which have the power to transform landscapes over vast timespans.

The initial 30 minute exploration of the work explored the anatomy of my clarinets/winds/voice in relation to close and unusual mic placements to hear the instrument from different perspectives.

It was presented by Liquid Architecture at The Meat Market (Naarm/Melbourne) in December 2024 and was winner of the 2025 AMC APRA AMCOS award for Excellence in Experimental Practice.

Sound Engineer and collaborator: Pat Telfer
Presented by Liquid Architecture at The Meat Market Dec 2024
Developed at Coburg Courthouse residency (Arts Merri-bek)

Liquid Architecture artist statement:
The Breath Becomes The Wind pushes my solo electro-acoustic practice into new territory, deeply interrogating the relationship between the body, the instrument, and the microphone, to reveal new instrumental and compositional possibilities. The first iteration was created for the cavernous space the Meat Market, but the work is also highly intimate, bringing the listener into a close proximity to my breath, wind and the anatomy of the clarinet.

The invitation to be a featured artist for Liquid Architecture’s program, was an ideal opportunity to showcase what is unique about my practice. It took some time to identify what this was, and I decided to focus on the relationship between microphones and my instruments (which I often disassemble, or extend with additional tubing). This is an area I have played with in improvised projects (for example waving pipes across a microphone to create pulsing and panning effects), but I felt I had not yet explored the full potential of this approach. I explored various microphone setups in a process that exposed the way the microphones and speakers colour the sound. I played with giving audiences different perspectives on the placement of microphones, as though their ears were right up close to isolated parts of the instruments, and then talking their ears outside of the performance space, into the environment surrounding the venue. Originally limiting the work to no FX, I decided to permit the use of live recording and playback as a haunting of the space, lingering on beyond the performance of the original sound.

I worked closely with sound engineer Pat Telfer, which allowed me to push into possibilities of gain, feedback and resonance that would otherwise be impossible, which also freed up my physicality on stage to be able to work with swinging, hanging and moving mics.

Full article on Disclaimer here

Folk Music from an Imaginary Planet

There’s something refreshingly direct, even folkloric about the Naarm born Aviva Endean’s experimentalism — folk being connected to place. Her parents migrated to Australia in the 1950s; her mother coming from Amsterdam after hiding as (non-religious) Jews throughout the war, and her father coming from Dublin. And to say, as she does; “Aviva Endean is a clarinettist, composer, sound artist and performance-maker dedicated to connecting people with each other and their environment through attentive listening”¹ seems to summarise a grounded practice. Although, of her duo with guitarist/organist Nick Ashwood, Driftwood, she complicates this, saying, “It’s like stepping into another world, almost as though the music is a folk tradition from an imaginary planet we have only ever visited in our dreams.”² Indeed, Driftwood’s melodies and chords are woven with such otherworldly tonal intervals they’d make a better substitute score to the movie Avatar (2009) than James Horner’s cliched soundtrack.

Aviva’s recombinant instrumentalism — which plunges into gritty, indeterminate materiality — is connected to a lineage; a historical ecology. From a niche within that ecology she vitally and poetically musicks, and yes, connects people with each other, although (as it is for Humanity in general in our era) her audio’s connectivity to environment is complex, even troubled (as the Denver, Colorado-born theorist Donna Haraway puts it).³ Aviva’s musicking is problematised by complex intersections between performativity, places, non-places, technological Beings, Cybourgs, and audio spatiality. Dreamscapes are constructed from close-in microphony, non-place studios, overlaid performances, and meticulous mixing and mastering; a sculpting of sonic time. This is common to the vast majority of musical audio produced these days, be it mainstream or experimental. Yet Aviva’s soundings pose a question: can auralized⁴ dreamscapes — virtual spaces — be understood as environments? Can they ground musickin?⁵

I’ll stay with this trouble, but first a disclosure: Aviva is one of my favourite musickin; I’m persuaded of Aviva’s immanent unmediated commitment to co-creation with ecologies through highly developed auditory perception and unique clarinet-ing/singing/fluting. We first played together sometime in the mid-2010s, winter, in a downtown Naarm (Melbourne) blue-stone lane. As Aviva was resident on Dharug Lands (Sydney) for much of 2021, we played on a weekly basis with the Splinter Orchestra. November that year, with the artists Victoria Stolz and Adam Gottlieb, we hiked into the Hidden Valley, Budawang Mountains, Yuin Country, sleeping in caves, cooking on fires, and over five magical days musicking with each other and the Budawangs. You can listen to the mediated artefacts of our time there on the release In Weather Volume 1: The Hidden Valley (2022).

Trouble with Clarinet

Aviva exclaims; ‘I shouldn’t have been a horn player.’⁶ She explains that there’s expectation, especially in improvised music circles, that wind instrumentalism is fast, high, and loud — showy (although, one can construct a milieu of great Australian wind players that counters that doctrine: Louise Elliot, Natasha Anderson, Rosalind Hall, Laura Altman, Aviva…). Aviva agonised over this expectation leading up to her first solo show (sometime in 2014 or 2015 in a bar on Sydney Rd) eventually performing a drone piece on her black wood Bass Clarinet’s bottom b flat, thereby aligning her instrument with this continent’s iconic instrument, Yidaki, (Didgeridoo).

She tells me that when travelling by air, in the anxiety of luggage not materialising on the carousel, she’s most concerned of losing a highly specific, irreplaceable found plastic tubing that accidentally and perfectly combines with her mouthpiece to create unique sounds, rather than her replaceable — albeit expensive — “standard” clarinets. I admit a similar ambivalence to my instrument: flute being weighed down with Aussie daggy-ness; think Greg Ham braiding a nursery rhyme, Kookaburras, Down Under, Men at Work, and the legal system all together with fluting; think the obligato flute to Kath and Kim’s theme music, The Joker (1964); or, most damning — Ja’mie King of Summer Heights High-fame is a flautist. Clarinet is less an Aussie character than the flute — or at least, less parodied — and Bass Clarinet, because of its low frequency potential, in some circles might almost be cool. Initially only a clarinettist, Bass Clarinet took up Aviva in her third year at the Victorian College of the Arts.

I’ve always questioned: With the singing voices that humans possess (hark Aviva’s lovely folkloric singing hocketting against her fluting on track four, Distant Song from Cinder – ember – ashes {2018}) why is there musical instrumentalism at all? This question is extra salient now, in awareness of coloniality on this singing Continent, criss-crossed as they are with lines and spirals.⁷ Homo sapiens already possess inbuilt generators for musicking — voices — perhaps not as virtuosic as Lyrebird Syrinx’s stereophonic mimicry,⁸ but perfectly adequate for the endless mutability required for musicking. So how to explain the compulsion to engage (on Country) with Eurocentric tools for sounding? Is it merely settler positionality habit? Many of Aviva’s projects and bands confront these questions head-on with anti-colonialism. Check out The Cloud Maker, an interweaving of her folkloric experimentalism with Wellington based artist and singer Te Kahureremoa’s knowledge of the Maori Tāonga Pūoro (including nose flutes, bone flutes and poi), Sunny Kim’s Korean vocals, Freya Schack-Arnott’s cello and nyckelharpa, and Maria Moles’ drumming. Or Aviva’s duo with David Wilfred (Yidaki) Gadayka/Grenadilla from the band Hand to Earth.

The Bass Clarinet that you hear on that track has their own weighty lineage, and as I just claimed, centres (at the beginning) in Europe. In the Münchner Stadtmuseum, Munich, stands an instrument made in the mid-1700s by a family of instrument inventors and makers, the Mayrhofer from Passeau. Looking like a Brancusi sculpture, their fantastical experiment is a snaking wooden column with a full 180-degree twist towards a flaring metal bell. The overall length of the air column is about 177cm, and the bore varies from 1.58cm to 1.67cm. This proportion of air-column length to bore is what then defines this single reed instrument as Bass Clarinet.⁹

1842 Belgium: Adolf Sax, the inventor of Saxophones, made “standardisation” of Bass Clarinet his first project.¹⁰ His “modernisation” produced roundness of tone, and enhanced well-tempered-ness, so composers started orchestrating. Viennese born (from Mazzesinel¹¹) Arnold Schoenberg requires Pierrot Lunaire’s (1912) clarinettist to double on the bass. Tellingly their dark tones moonlight the song Nacht (although the loudness of the last part of this song engenders a harsh tone one never hears with Aviva’s soft, intimate gestures). Los Angeles born Jazz multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy’s early 1960s solo re-configurations of Billy Holiday and Arthur Herzogs’ God Bless the Child metamorphised Bass Clarinet from Eurocentric orchestral Being to Afrological improvisational Being.¹² That this Eurocentric Enlightenment invention transindividuating¹³ with Aviva would still have a chrysalis-like Australogical emergence in the 21st century seems a miracle in our computing age.

Instrumentalism can become a bodying that engages with technicity to the extent one experiences in the first track of Aviva’s first solo album, Burst in Black (under). Here, a curving, flaring Contrabass Clarinet, amplifies and entones the precisely positioned vibrating reed resonating the mini-caves of the hard rubber mouthpiece, Aviva’s mouth and respiratory system, the Contrabass body, and beyond these labyrinthine entwined bodies and cavities, billowing out into surrounding resonant bodies and place. In this fleshy expression, this acousticking, this multiplicitous bodying, any distinction between Aviva and Clarinet dissolves. Or, perhaps it’s better conceived as not pre-existing; Clarinet not an external tool, but an added on organ.¹⁴ Aviva/Contrabass Clarinet is a ‘technological being,’¹⁵ a symbiotic actant, a transidividuation which negotiates a unique transaction with worlding,¹⁶ and whose sonic expression engenders the musicking.

As with most contemporary audio, this recording is contextually stark; microphones largely only transduce Aviva/Clarinet. What Place is this, what is the time? Recorded at Rolling Stock Studios, Collingwood’s inner city grittygrot is unrevealed; it could be a Sydney, rural, or Lima studio. Or is this non-place? Or Tardis Lite? Re-played into our car, bedroom, living room, headphones on the bus, or computer speakers, audio-ed Aviva/Clarinet materialises, Dr Who-like, into other timespaces. Although unlike the full Tardis, this version can’t take you back before the originary recording session date.

Setting aside sci-fi (for the moment), Aviva/Bass Clarinet’s braiding is both novel and primordial; human musickin have been engaging in technicity like this since vulture bone flutes or gum leaf play. In our era, think of Sydney born — to an Iraqi Jewish family — Oren Ambarchi’s mosh as Guitar/Mixing-Desk/Marshall-Stack/Lesley-speaker, think Magda Maya — Berlin based composer/performer born in Münster, Germany, her mother Czech and her father Lebanese — and her timbre-tango with prepared Piano. These musickin (instrument/players) are free to engage in continuous feedbacking of sonic material and entwined bodying, because the content, the phenomena generated — tones, harmonies, noises, rhythms, patterns, timbres, melodies — become authentic expressions of transindividuation. There’s immediate tropistic unity between the bodying and the hearing, listening, thinking. Instrumentality becomes a biofeedbacking, and when fissures appear in the material, these instrumentalists squeeze through to dive beyond into new horizons. This opposes Sax’s standardisation, where the ‘same’ phenomena attempt to be replicated from one player/instrument to the next across times, ensembles, Concert Halls, Cities, Countries, Continents. There’s nothing standard about Oren, Magda, or Avivas’ explorative modifications and extensions to reconfigure the off-the-shelf. Magda writes;

‘The process of finding/choosing the adequate objects is a complex one–it happens by way of chance, discovery, searching, making, systematic improvement… this is often a process which happens over many years and leads to personal relationships with and compositional approaches through objects.’¹⁷

Hence Aviva’s anxiety for potential loss of her found plastic tube; they’re essential for her recombinant Clarinet.

This biofeedbacking instrumentalism only fully blossoms without predetermined scores. The transindividuated instrument/musickin is then free to plunge into the indeterminacy of creation without boundaries. But it doesn’t mean one must adhere to some notion of “pure” improvisation. Much of Aviva’s music could be described as indeterminate composition, derived from initial improvisations, the parameters of her inquiry are narrowed so she can patiently interrogate a configuration.

Previously mentioned was the soft intimacy of Aviva’s sounding. She claims that her most rewarding performance mode is one-on-one with a blindfolded audient; she wants that person to experience the closeness of her perception of her instrumental dance. The recording of Aviva’s album Cinder – ember – ashes (2018) fulfils that desire as microphones close in. With the song Burst in Black (under) one feels her breath gesturing deeply resonant fundamental tones, simultaneous with unfolding higher overtones. This isn’t an assembly-line Contrabass Clarinet; a hole drilled into the body of the instrument for inserting a mic affords a unique harmonic series. Gleaning becomes a constant adding-to and subtracting-from her instruments and then going with the new phenomena afforded by serendipitous recombination. Way too positive to be themed as deconstruction.

Burst in Black’s (under) tone-ing isn’t atomised and then discrete tones systematised into twelve, or any other number. Aviva/Clarinet’s gestures richly stack-up into a verticality, even when fundamental-ing, always latent with overtone-ing or multiphonics. This multiplicity is sometimes rocketed by tongue moving away from the reed creating a small ‘vacuum,’ causing the reed to move further away from mouthpiece, together with tongue. When the contact between tongue and reed is broken, a percussive slap explodes.¹⁸ Lung pressure, tongue-slap, cushioning and gripping lips, column of air, and fingerings, all intra-penetrate together to engender waves.

The eight minutes of Burst in Black (under) unfolds 47 breath-length waves. As with beach-scapes each wave (phrase) is unrelentingly unique. One can conceive these phrases as miniatures; Aviva’s breath rhythm-ing a series of micro-variations. As such they seem cyclic, although not assembly-line sampled, electronic loops; Aviva/Clarinet’s loops are each, like beach waves, indeterminate, playful. But there’s flatness, no phrase is more important than the preceding or next, and you feel this musicking isn’t going anywhere, it lacks the teleology of Western Art Music; there’s no cathartic high point or dramatic ending; the piece could go on indefinitely. It seems negative to name this feeling ‘non-teleological,’ a concern not with what should, could, would, or might be, but rather with what actually is. The liner notes tell us:

‘This album took inspiration from the musicologist Andrew Killicks’ concept of ‘holicipation’ — a term he coined to describe solo musical practices that are not rehearsals, not practicing for something, but are playing for oneself. The playing is ‘holistic’ in the sense that it constitutes audience, composer and performer, and has no investment in a musical future, but instead finds nourishment in the present.’

This is musicking patiently satisfied in each moment; it’s suspended.

Moths and Stars

This holicipation isn’t continued in Aviva’s second solo release Moths and Stars (2022). Here she expresses a very different environmentality, where multiplicitous space/time-travelling Avivas swarm at you from every which way, the flash-mobbing suggesting narrative. Aviva writes about the work;

‘Sounds are freed from being confined to one place, one time, or even one perspective. I wanted the recording to have a right-up-in-your-ear kind of intimacy – so close, that you could hear the beating of a moth’s wing, but I also wanted the listener to experience the expansiveness of the recorded space, like the vast night sky.’¹⁹

The first track Between Islands starts with multiple Moths flutter-tonguing left to right against a background of harmonic-rich flutes, then seamlessly evolving into the more ambient Nightwork (track two) where a microtonal humming choir of Avivas spiral, leslie-speaker-ed in vast stereo “space.” Unconfined to one place it becomes an auralized dreamscape.

The previously discussed materiality of Aviva/Clarinet is buried here as the gestures become computational, the weaving of layers compositional. Occasionally flute, vocal, or clarinet gestures pop up above the dark oceanic turbulence, and then towards the end of track three, Moths and Stars, there’s a dramatic ending — distortion corrupts and eventually sucks up everything to a full stop. Freed from the “confinement” of one time, one perspective, by the audio’s end I’ve extrapolated that the Resources Development Administration (RDA), the antagonists of the Avatar films, has extracted all the mineral wealth from Pandora and there’s an abrupt ecocide.²⁰

There’s environmentality to solo multi-tracking. 1930s: Les Paul built his own acetate cutting machine convincing himself that Sound on sound recording arose from desire to record a song when bandmates were unavailable:

‘That was the toughest thing in the world to do—to take two pick up arms and put them down at the same time and start them off together. But I kept at it, and in a few days I had the thing so I could play back a rhythm section in sync and play my part over it… That was my first attempt at trying to do multitracking with the guitar. It was very crude…’²¹

Magnetic tape made this less crude. In his London home after the break-up of the Beatles, another Paul, with Studer four track recorder and one mic, played everything — drummer, bassist, guitarist, pianist, vocalist, recording engineer, producer (with only Linda supplying backing vocals) — on his first solo release McCartney (1970). Environment here includes Microphone, Studer, and the particles dancing on magnetic tape.

Although she’s not replicating a band, Aviva multitracks Moths and Stars ‘to discover happy accidents… unusual conditions revealed sound worlds that were fresh and fascinating to me and took me deep into processes that would unfold into the tracks that ended up on the album.’²² Moths and Stars sound worlds can be said to take place populated with Aviva’s binaural microphone, cassette players, Leslie speaker, her Apple Macintosh, studio monitors, the multichannel-ing and digitally processing software. Perhaps this isn’t the meaning of “environment” Aviva was attempting to conjure when summarising her practice, but the sum total of all the living and non-living elements and their effects that influence musicking includes our co-creation with technological Beings, be they Clarinets or Computers, and a moving with, from and in between places, non-places, and virtual spaces. These are the environmental cards Cyborg musickin are dealt in the 21st century.

Plunging bravely but gently into worldings, some directly grounded, such as blue-stone Naarm lane, and some such as Moths and Stars, kinda sci-fi, Aviva co-creates powerful audio and performance works generated by recombinant clarinet-ing, reciprocal generosity, and an auralizing of fantastical soundscapes. These auralized dreamscapes — virtual spaces — can be understood as environments. In troubled ecological times her folkloric experimentalism connects us to environmentalism.

Contributor/s

Jim Denley is one of Australia’s foremost improvisers. Over a career spanning four decades his work has emphasised the use of recording technologies, co-creation, and a concern with site-specificity.

Editor/sTiarney Miekus

Notes

1. Aviva Endean biography, https://www.avivaendean.com/biography/ (accessed 26th September 2024). Emphasis added. 
2. Driftwood (2024), Room 40 https://room40.bandcamp.com/album/driftwood (accessed 26th September 2024). 
3. “Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.” Donna J Haraway, “Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene.” Duke University Press, 2016, P1. 
4. ‘Auralize’ is a term coined by architect Mendell Kleiner for acoustic simulations of rooms and buildings. This term is also apt for referring to inner sound and sounding, or sounds and sounding heard mentally. It replaces the word ‘imagination,’ used with reference to all senses. Image, of course, is a visual term. So there is a cognitive dissonance when using ‘imagination’ to refer to hearing inner sound. Pauline Oliveros. (2011). Auralizing in the Sonosphere: A Vocabulary for Inner Sound and Sounding. Journal of Visual Culture, 10(2), 162-168. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412911402881. 
5. Hannah Reardon-Smith coined the term musickin to describe the human and more-than-human critters and energies one can share improvisation with. They have thought of the term as both verb and noun, as a descriptor and an intention. Hannah E. Reardon-Smith, “Sounding Kin: A Queer-Feminist Thinking of Free Improvisation” (PhD diss., Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, 2021), 42. 
6. Interview with the author 25 September 2024. 
7. Here I’m referring to the well known term songlines, and the Gay’Wu Group of Women (a self-described “dilly bag women’s group,” since it is a collaboration between five Yolngu women and three non-Aboriginal women) describe song spirals—the way songs travel far and are about the journey of animal and spirit beings, who can be person, animal or both. These have existed forever, coming from the land and creating it too: “they keep on creating it, and us, and everything in our country.” Gay’wu Group of Women, xvii. 
8. “The lyrebird’s syrinx is the most complexly-muscled of the Passerines (songbirds), giving the lyrebird extraordinary ability, unmatched in vocal repertoire and mimicry. Lyrebirds render with great fidelity the individual songs of other birds and the chatter of flocks of birds, and also mimic other animals, human noises, machinery of all kinds, explosions, and musical instruments.” Jerry A. Coyne, The amazing vocal skills of the lyrebird, https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2009/03/22/the-amazing-vocal-skills-of-the-lyrebird/ (Accessed 23rd October 2024). 
9. Phillip T Young. “A bass clarinet by the Mayrhofers of Passau.” Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society (1981): 36-46. 
10. Henri Joseph Bok. “The deep-rooted microtonality of the bass clarinet.” PhD diss., Ph. D Dissertation. Universiteit Leiden, 2018. 
11. “So many Jews continued to live in Leopoldstadt even after the 1867 constitution gave them the right to reside elsewhere that it was derogatorily nicknamed Mazzesinsel–Matzah Island…” Harvey Sachs. Schoenberg: Why He Matters. Liveright Publishing, 2023, P4. 
12. George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (1996): 91, https://doi.org/10.2307/779379. 
13. Gilbert Simondon conceives the subject being as a more or less perfectly coherent system of three successive phases of being: the pre-individual phase, the individuated phase, and the transindividual phase, all of which partially but not completely correspond to what is designated by the concepts of nature, the individual, and spirituality. Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 349. 
14. Merleau-Ponty writes in “Eye and Mind,” [PDF] timothyquigley.net 12, “Our organs are not instruments; on the contrary, our instruments are added on organs.” 
15. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, UP (2013) 230. 
16. Worlding indicates that creation is an ongoing generative process; the world is concurrently and constantly becoming, never arriving at fixed states. I also use this term as a substitute for the visually skewed, and fixed worldview. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest evidence for worlding from 1567, in the writing of poet and Church of England clergyman Thomas Drant. 
17. Magda Mayas, “Orchestrating Timbre—Unfolding Processes of Timbre and Memory in Improvisational Piano Performance” (PhD thesis, University of Gothenberg, 2019), 85. 
18. Henri Joseph Bok. “The deep-rooted microtonality of the bass clarinet.” PhD diss., Ph. D Dissertation. Universiteit Leiden, 2018. 
19. Aviva Endean, Liner notes to Moths and Stars (2022) https://room40.org/edition/moths-stars/ (Accessed 27th September 2024. 
20. Avatar (2009 Film) Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(2009_film) (Accessed 10th October 2024. 
21. Les, Paul, Cochran, Michael. Les Paul in His Own Words. United States: Backbeat Books, 2016. 
22. Aviva Endean. Track-by-Track: Aviva Endean’s “Moths & Stars” Foxy Digitalis
    https://foxydigitalis.zone/2022/11/29/track-by-track-aviva-endeans-moths-stars/ Emphasis added, (accessed 8th October 2024). 

“An imaginative and beautiful sonic vision of a truly original composer-musician.”- Salt Peanuts

“Aviva Endean has proven time and time again that she is an expert of the aural adventure.“
–Loud and Quiet

Australian composer and clarinetist Aviva Endean has developed an impressive capacity for creating work that merges intense control (of breath, of instrument, of composition) and a willingness to allow the music to lead. On Moths And Stars, her second solo work, she charts out a sound world that is equal parts timbre and tone, placing sounds relationship to space as a paramount focus for her pieces.- Lawrence English (Room40):

“Rich worlds revealed in slow motion”– Brad Rose (Foxy Digitalis)

“Breathtaking innovation in woodwind technique and sonic vision” – Martin Ng”

“(Aviva’s) expressive spatial variation becomes both polyphonic as well as multiphonic with the use of electronics” (The Wire)

From Aviva Endean: Coming from a background as a performer and clarinet player, the opportunity to record my own music opened up a whole new context to think about music. Sounds are freed from being con-fined to one place, one time, or even one perspective. I wanted the recording to have a right-up-in-your-ear kind of intimacy – so close, that you could hear the beating of a moth’s wing, but I also wanted the listener to experience the expansiveness of the recorded space, like the vast night sky. The microphones became extensions of my instruments, getting right up close to capture the microscopic, creating tones of feedback which captivated me, or zooming out to capture multiple acoustic spaces. My recording and composing process became more intuitive and explorative, another form of play. I could start creating and see where the piece would take me, and notice how new relationships were formed as I folded multiple time/spaces in and over each other. Sometimes I would begin by gleaning sounds from my archives, and listening to how they could be reimagined and transformed alongside the discoveries my microphones and instruments were finding. In ‘Nightwork’ I wanted to find a way to revisit some microtonal humming that I had recorded for a sound design project, and then discovered the Leslie speaker as a way to spin my bass clarinet sound around the microphones, creating bass tones emerging as waves out of the densely layered pitches. Sometimes a new instrumental fascination, such as the e-bows and magnets on ‘Mirror Signals’ or the binaural microphone feedback on ‘Moths & Stars’ would call for me to find further layers of clarinets and field recordings to be woven into their story.

Read this if you would like to hear about the process and inspiration behind each track in more detail.

Recorded and composed by Aviva Endean, on unceded Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Djaara Lands.
Field recording on What Calls in the Quiet made with Justin Marshall. Strands of Same River, Twice recorded by Bob Scott, and Leo Dale.
Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative SpaceThank you to Room40, my friends, family, and community.
This project was supported by The Australia Council for the Arts and the Peggy Glanville-HicksComposers’ House.

The delightful Ros Oades invited me on an ‘art date’ to talk about my work for her podcast Audio Sketch which is produced by Chamber Made. She is a wonderful artist herself, and a great conversation maker- I had a great time!

We discussed some of my current projects including my upcoming electroacoustic solo album- Moths & Stars, as well as some of my participatory sound art works Vibrato Virtual, A Face Like Yours, and Stranger.

You can listen to the podcast or read the full transcript here:

https://chambermade.org/audiosketch-s2-ep1/

Released on SOFA (Norway) 2018

cinder : ember : ashes is Aviva’s first solo release and marks a move towards a more introspective sound. A collection of both composed and improvised recordings, the album offers a selection of liminal, ethereal and elusive resonances. Distinct and refined instrumentations set up a framework of unique sonic environments, which then become a landscape for Aviva’s slowly morphing and contemplative improvisations.

Several tracks explore a veiling of the clarinet, placing another sonic force alongside the instrument which then works together with the clarinet in a symbiotic relationship. In ‘apparition : above’ Aviva uses the skin of the timpani as a resonant chamber which alters, distorts and beats against the tone of the clarinet and amplifies its resonant frequencies into a swirling and glissing halo of sound. ‘vapour : between’ transfigures the tone of the clarinet through a miniature pocket-sized amplifier, the sound of the clarinet distorted and fragmented in a playful and rhythmic trance-like meditation. The umtshingo (harmonic flute) reveals itself in ‘undulations : behind’ through a multitude of subtle effects and feedback, through which the listener may eventually distinguish the beautiful simplicity of this instrument. 

In part, this album took inspiration from the musicologist Andrew Killicks’ concept of ‘holicipation’—a term he coined to describe solo musical practices that are not rehearsals, not practicing for something, but are playing for oneself. The playing is ‘holistic’ in the sense that it constitutes audience, composer and performer, and has no investment in a musical future, but instead finds nourishment in the present. Aviva’s introduction to this term from the musicologist Cara Stacey (who also introduced Aviva to the umtshingo, featured on the album) inspired a refocusing of Aviva’s practice in a more introspective, meditative approach to solo playing, in parallel to her heavily collaborative artistic practices. As it happened, some of these solo explorations eventually developed into pieces that she chose to share with the world, but the process of ‘holicipation’ none the less constituted a vital part of this music’s formation.

Complete Review of cinder : ember : ashes by Joe O’Conner for Loudmouth

There has been palpable buzz around Aviva’s Endean’s work of the last few years, a sense that she is onto something interesting that is getting stronger and stronger. She is one of a number of classically trained Australian artists who have developed improvised and experimental practices in parallel with their work in notated disciplines. Cinder : ember : ashes is Aviva’s first solo recording. Released on the SOFA label, it is an introspective collection of pieces played on clarinet, bass clarinet, umtshingo flute and voice.  Each of seven pieces creates a musical microcosm where particular sonic parameters, instrumental techniques and effects are subjected to subtle and inventive permutations. Aviva coerces sophisticated timbrel palletes from her instruments, using minimal pitch materials to draw attention to resonance, inflection and the folk-like directness of her approach.

Breath and cyclical movement form the locus for improvisation in Burst in black : under. It is the opening track of cinder : ember : ashes and displays Aviva’s mastery of overtones on the bass clarinet in winding repetitions of a motif. She oscillates between low register fundamentals and multiphonic overtones that split apart as the dynamic increases. Occasionally, higher overtones emerge above the texture, parsing it into three registers with distinct timbrel identities. The cleaving of pitches into their component overtones is further inflected by an alternation up and down by an interval of a tone with an almost dance like regularity. It is a hypnotic prelude.

A number of the pieces explore the interface of acoustic instrument with an external sound device, and situate the musical exploration within the particular sonic possibilities of the interaction. Particularly effective is apparition : above, in which the sound of the clarinet activates sympathetic resonances on the skin of a timpani drum. Aviva used the timpani’s tuning pedal to manipulate this resonance, creating delicate glissandos that move independently of the clarinet’s pitch material – a counterpoint of inflection. The timpani also becomes a resonating chamber for the clarinet, creating an almost cathedral-like spatiality in which the presence of the lower and middle registers of the clarinet are amplified but also sound somehow distant. Aviva’s use of the timpani elegantly channels the resonance of the clarinet into fragile, fluctuating harmonic formations.

Vapor : between explores the interaction of clarinet and device for the opposite effect. The clarinet is projected through a pocket-sized amplifier that distorts and compresses the sounds, stripping it of the fullness of its acoustic tone. The sound is lo-fi and electronic, the lovechild of a poor quality synthesiser and virtuoso kazoo. Aviva transforms the limitations of the tiny amplifier into creative potential, using variations in pitch, volume and timbre to push it to the point of distortion.

A song-like quality emerges in the motivic consistency of a number of improvisations, but is nowhere more present than in distant song : afar. This piece combines Aviva’s voice and what I assuming to be the umtshingo, a Zulu flute capable of producing harmonics when overblown. It commences with a pentatonic melody, sung with a combination of oo, ah and eh sounds. In the opening, the oo sounds activate the flute, creating a pulsating pitch centre around which the melody rises and falls. This transitions into a harmonic texture in which the flute sounds strikingly like a medieval portative organ, though with a rugged clashing of overtones. Though I hesitate to ascribe particular influences from other cultures, there appears to be direct references to African folk traditions. There is a simplicity and modesty to this shorter piece that makes it an effective interlude between Aviva’s more esoteric explorations.

To achieve a well rounded and varied collection of short solo pieces is no easy feat for a solo wind player. Aviva has tackled the challenge with considerable imagination, revealing an impressive ability to transform iterative pitch materials into sensitive, sonically intricate formations. I consider solo albums to be an artist’s expression of confidence in their own vision. There is no hiding and no potential to feed on the creativity of others – the stakes are high! If Cinder : ember : ashes is a statement about Aviva’s confidence in her solo concept, then her confidence is well founded.

The video features works from the launch concert of cinder : ember : ashes, at the INLAND concert series. The video was presented as part of nyMusikk’s digital festival «Only Connect: From A Safe Distance» at onlyconnect.no 23-25 April 2020.

This video was made as part of the Australian Art Orchestra’s Solo Series for their 25th Anniversary

#1 AVIVA ENDEAN – clarinet and miniature loudspeaker

It is said that art of the highest order should engage both the mind and body – that it should express both the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The music that Aviva Endean creates does exactly that. It makes you think, and it asks questions of the listener, but it also creates spaces for pure sensual listening.

Aviva’s recently released solo album, cinder: ember: ashes, showcases her inventiveness as an artist. She is a virtuoso clarinettist but she also completely transcends the instrument employing a range of extended techniques, preparations, and textural approaches that far from being ‘novelties’ seem utterly essential, perhaps even inevitable, within the modes of expression she has developed.

In the solo recorded for this series Aviva focuses, for the first half, on conventional approaches to the instrument played with exquisite control and subtlety. The repeated figure with which she begins her solo moves through harmonic shifts, holding a steady pulse and trailing gossamer overtones that are produced with just the breath, fingers, and mouth, but which are so otherworldly that it is hard to believe there is no electronic processing involved. In my conversations with Aviva she refers to the incredible range of possibilities offered by the instrument but says, “I often find it more interesting to focus on a smaller field of possibilities and the subtle and minute ways that I can explore an idea within that limited frame.”

In the second half of her solo recording Aviva uses a contact microphone and a miniature loudspeaker to dip into a contrasting world of breath tones and AM radio-like frequencies that are manipulated with the simple physical movement of lifting the handheld speaker from her leg.

I particularly love that the processes involved in this work are utterly transparent. Gesture and aural outcome are linked in every moment and yet we remain transfixed by some other mysterious process. The mind of the artist. Creativity. Thoughts rendered as sound. Inhalations and exhalations suddenly sculpted into meaning bearing forms.

I asked Aviva what inspires her and what currently drives her relentless inventiveness and creativity:

“I have become very interested in the relationship that is set up between the player and the audience. On the surface, solo playing could seem to be the most egocentric form of music making, yet something of the intimacy, soul-bearing and vulnerability that can occur within the solo form can also make it incredibly generous and inclusive.”

Performance: Aviva Endean
Audio and video producer: Leo Dale
Photography: Sarah Walker
Text: Peter Knight, Artistic Director

The Solo Series program is supported by Creative Victoria.

READ MORE about the Solo Series here: aao.com.au/#/solo-series/