Sydney sound artist Gail Priest is back with an EP of experimental sounds, or as she describes it "a post-anthroposcenic package tour to a sun gone supernova." Tomatrax caught up with Gail to talk about her music.
It's been around 7 years since you were last featured on Tomatrax, what have you been up to over this time?
My main recording project in that time was Heraclitus in Iceland which was a full-length album I composed while on a residency at Listhus in Olafsfördur, Northern Iceland in 2016. It was a sound-focused residency and festival produced and curated by Kate Carr and we got to play in some great places like the Herring Era Museum in Siglufjördur and a cavernous old Fish factory turned artist space in Hjalteyri. Along with the album I also did a little side project based on improvisations in the landscape called Singing with Scenery that you can access via an interactive map.
But actually the main thing I was doing for a lot of that time was a multi-modal art project called Sounding the Future, of which Songs from the Omega Point is a kind of offshoot. I've always been interested in the relationship between science fiction and media art and so with this project I created a body of work of speculative fiction writing with soundtracks around what art in the future would sound like. This became an interactive installation that functioned like a audiovisual hypertext. You sit in the middle of a projection and navigate through the future scenarios as well as a whole non-fiction section of research that feeds into the stories, including eight audio interviews with leading Australian sound artists. The installation was presented in Germany, Hong Kong and then in an exhibition in Sydney that I curated, commissioning works from some of the artists featured in the interviews. All the sound and text material is now compiled into a hybrid audio/reading iBook and interactive PDF. It was quite epic and took a few years.
Where did you get the idea for the EP, the Omega Point?
While I was in the early days of researching Sounding the Future, I was also working on a split release with Kate Carr that was to be a follow up to our blue | green album (2012). My side was meant to be focused on the colour yellow. Interestingly the yellow theme really directed my thinking towards the outer reaches of the cosmos, to distant exploding stars and solar landscapes.
When Kate and I put our two sides together, I felt like it just didn't work. My material was just too charged with this figurative, almost narrative energy, and I didn't feel like it was the right context for this music. So we put the split release on hold. I used elements of my material within the soundscapes for the scenarios of Sounding the Future, but as they are text driven, the compositions as a whole didn't really feature.
Just recently, I was listening through my back catalogue of unreleased, and half-done things, and I had a feeling that it was now time for this material. With a bit of distance I could get more of a sense of the world the tracks were conjuring, and the idea of the Omega Point, one of the notions I'd investigated in my research for Sounding the Future, really came to the fore.
The Omega Point is this really interesting speculative notion put forward by a priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1995), who predicted that matter will become more complex over time, eventually reaching consciousness. Mathematical physicist Frank Tipler (1947-) picked up on this idea and suggested that evolution could lead to human existence taking very different forms as information coding entities, which would then be able to travel to all ends of the universe. It really opens up notions around post-humanism, substrate independent mind uploads and what a future non-biological human life form might entail. I'm not saying I believe it, but it's an evocative thought experiment.
The music is build from a lot of field recordings, how do you determine what to record when you begin writing?
With some projects, like the Heraclitus in Iceland album, I let the field recordings dictate the project. I go out and gather sounds from a new environment and then start to see what I can do with them, and how the collection of materials might begin to have its own character. I'm quite irreverent with field recordings. I'm not using them in the acoustic-ecology mode of letting the recordings speak for themselves. I use them as raw material that I manipulate in order to find the hidden melodies and rhythms, and then I augment these revelations with voice or digital instruments. I am drawn to particular textures, but also to the kind of energetic arc or gestural envelope of particular recordings. But every time I travel I take my recorder so I have a growing library of field recordings that I draw on when required.
For Songs from the Omega Point, the main field recordings are of the bubbling mud and and hot springs of Rotorua in Aotearoa (New Zealand) that I made in 2012. However I didn't want anything to sound realistic so I was interested in how I could make this organic sound seem futuristic and foreign.
When I describe my work I say that I try to walk a line between figuration (in the visual not literary sense) and abstraction. I am always conflicted between wanting to communicate - a concept, a feeling, a notion of a space and place - and yet not to be too obvious and overly explicative, so that there is room in there for the listener's imagination.
I have done quite a lot of sound design and composition for theatre, dance and video and I talk to my collaborators of the idea of 'near foley.' If the script or action calls for a the sound of a seagull, I don't want to play a seagull recording as that's all too obvious and often just describes or doubles the action. I'd rather offer the sound of a squeaking hinge that somehow makes you think of a seagull. You know what it's meant to signify, yet you also know that's not what it is. In that negotiation of the gap between what you expect and what you hear, something different happens. I think it makes you more aware of the experience of listening.
There is this idea put forward by an early psychologist, Édouard Claparède (1873-1940) called the Law of Awareness in which he proposes that you learn more from an experience if you have to negotiate something unexpected or an obstacle. This is actually what I like about experimental or unpredictable music (and art in general). Because you can't always tell where it's going or where its coming from, you have to be very present, you have to stay with it in the moment, and go where takes you.
How did you determine each songs title?
I have a strong affinity with text in association with sound (in fact it is the subject of my current doctoral study), so I love naming tracks and spend a lot of time thinking about it. I generally find my titles develop quite early, probably about 30% into the compositional process, and then that linguistic handle really helps me focus the track and take it to where it needs to go. Given the initial genesis of the work I was deliberately thinking of titles with references to yellowness, goldenness and then this evolved into references to all things solar. I use the dictionary and the thesaurus as a compositional aid.
I did slightly change a few of the titles just before I released it, because of tightening the focus around the idea of the Omega Point. For example, the final track was originally called 'Sulphur sunset,' but the optimism implicit in the notion of the Omega Point (the fact that Tipler believes we will become eternal and omnipresent), made me change it to a sunrise. The universe has ended and yet the sun also rises.
What was the inspiration behind the EP's cover?
I did a series of process photos for the original split that involved dripping yellow food colouring into a thick icing sugar paste and capturing the patterns as the colour dispersed. I used some of this as video texture in the Sounding the Future project. My image process is rather similar to my compositional process in that I often use realistic material and then apply a stupid amount of digital manipulation to conjure something abstracted, while still trying to retain some essence of its origin in a natural form. The end result was something that looked like a kind of stellar eruption, but also a flower, and maybe a Rorschach ink blot. It had the right balance of figure and abstraction to evoke the theme.
You said how this was initially intended for a Split album based on the colour yellow, are there plans to do that split album based on different music?
Kate Carr and I are often in communication and the possibility of another collaboration is definitely there. But I think if we did another colour thing, I'd need to choose a darker or more complex hue. The curious thing about this material is that it's the happiest sounding work I've ever made, and that's because it's hard to be moody and brooding with such a bright idea as yellow.
Perhaps we should choose another quite basic dualistic concept for the next one - something from geometry maybe. You heard it first.
The bulk of your music is instrumental, have you considered adding vocals to any of your music?
While this release doesn't use much voice (the not-so-secret bonus track is actually vocals) I do use vocals quite a bit, just not lyrics. I used to be a singer-songwriter in the 1990s, and in that riot grrl way my lyrics were rather forthright, feminist and often funny. When I moved towards electronic music, I just couldn't quite reconcile the explicatory nature of my lyrics. As I've gotten older I just don't seem to be able to write song lyrics that I'm happy with. I do use text in particular contexts, more as spoken word or commentary in radio-phonic or installation work, just not in my electronic music releases. It's a bit of a contradiction in my practice I'm still trying to work out.
I initially didn't use my voice either when I moved into electronic music as I needed to find a totally different way of making music, and I felt like it was often perceived that using the voice was the way that females worked within electronic music. There's nothing wrong with that but at the time I wanted to push back against that expectation. However the voice is instinctively how I understand music and so after a few years I started to bring it back, first heavily disguised, and now more openly.
I now particularly use my voice in my live performance sets. In the last few years I've begun to make a distinction between music that is composed for release and the music I make for live performance. When I was gigging with material composed for release it either felt too static or it felt like I couldn't do the composition justice. So I've been concentrating on finding semi-improvised structures for live performance that make me feel like I'm really working live. These may never end up a release because the way we perceive time in these two modes is so different. Or they may make it to onto a recording retrospectively. In this mode I explore quite sweet, harmonically rich vocal material that goes up against harsh noise. Rather than matching harsh noise with a harsh voice, I'm interested in luring the noise into the sweetness.
But I do always mix it up between vocal and non-vocal tracks. I see the voice as material and treat it in the same way as I treat field recordings, or synthesised sounds. I don't think of the voice as the lead instrument.
Do you ever listen to your own music?
Well not always, but I do check in with both finished and unfinished material everything now then. As I mentioned, I'm doing practice-based doctoral research and part of that is really trying to get a handle on what it is I've been doing all these years. So quite recently, when I was manually moving files to a new computer, I listened to all my work that I had pulled into iTunes and that was when I decided that this material was actually finished and ready to be released.
What other music do you listen to?
I used to have to do more admin tasks and that meant I could do a lot more listening. Now I spend a lot of my time reading and writing and I can't do that and listen to music anymore. And of course I can't make music and listen to music so I have a lot less time to listen in that everyday way. I totally love the discoveries you make via streaming but I also feel like it's hard to grab onto a real connection with an artist in the same way I used to - in that passionate obsessive way.
That said, I currently really love Caterina Barbieri's baroque modular and Lucrecia Dalt's dark and brooding intoning. I've also really gotten into Marie Davidson's droll spoken word minimalist techno and Ioved Jasmine Guffond's release Traced, for its precision and post-human thematic. (Jasmine is one of the artists interviewed for the Sounding the Future.) I also really like the otherworldly space in Felicia Atkinson's music. I can actually write to some of her tracks. It's interesting that they are all women. I'm not deliberately trying to just listen to music by women, but I'm certainly really excited that there are more women to listen to at the moment. But, in that unresolved conflicted singer-songwriter thing I've got going on, I've also been really intrigued by the brutally honest, free floating stream of consciousness of Mark Kozelek's more recent work. You just can't take the folk singer out of me completely.
Now that the EP is out what do you have planned next?
Well I've actually got a large performance-installation project coming up later this year exploring cymatics and vocal vibration, and I'm interested to see if some of this material might be worked into a new album, maybe for release next year. There's also a really exciting performance with a post-apocalyptic theme in collaboration with Karul Projects - Thomas E.S. Kelly & Taree Sansbury, two amazing Australian First Nations dancers - at the invitation of Soft Centre which is a fantastic newish music and arts festival in Sydney's South West (Sept 14). And I'm waist deep in doctoral research which is exploring alternate ways of writing about sonic art. So I'm kind of in the middle of quite a few future possibilities...
