A solo work exploring the anatomy of my clarinets/winds/voice in relation to close and unusual mic placements to hear the instrument from different perspectives.
Winner of the 2025 AMC APRA AMCOS award for Excellence in Experimental Practice.
Presented by Liquid Architecture at The Meat Market Dec 2024
Developed at Coburg Courthouse residency (Arts Merri-bek)
Sound Engineer and collaborator: Pat Telfer
The Breath Becomes The Wind pushed 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. Created for the cavernous space the Meat Market, 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.