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On this Wednesday night, myself and the rest of my first year composer family from the VCA will be hosting an evening of ridiculousness, frivolity, and music, good, bad and ugly. If you would like to attend, here is all the info.
The piece that I plan on performing is not slapdash but was certainly quickly put together, after I found out about this gig last Wednesday, exactly one week prior to having to perform a then-nonexistant piece. In my way I was pretty worried about it, pretty panicked, as I had about one thousand other things due in between the two dates - but I think what I have prepared touches upon something so present in all the work I have ever produced in a way that I have not 'touched' before.
The piece is a series of three videos, the first featuring Lewis and I trying to get computers to do what we need them to do around 1am one morning, the second featuring Nebraskatak, also trying to get a computer to do what it should and capture us performing a song to upload to our Facebook page, and the third, candid footage of my little cousin Jordan laboriously mixing cream with a fork, trying to whip it.
I am always recording voice memos of my friends and family without them knowing (at the time, I do tell them later when I use the audio) in an attempt to capture nostalgia and put it in a beautiful frame. I don't know for sure why I started doing this or even when exactly I started doing this, but it's become this weird compulsion now that is probably something I should talk to a therapist about but will not, for fear of getting my 'dosages upped' or something to that effect. Either way I record at parties, on the train, at home, in the car, you get it. I have a lot of voice memos with funny names like 'party chat 1' and 'docs office waiting chat' and I like to listen to them, in the pure, unedited form, and also within my pieces. Even when they have been manipulated beyond recognition, I take great comfort and happiness in knowing that they are still there somewhere, that little moment in my life, forever frozen in a piece of work.
The voice memos have worked quite well for me over the past couple of years and I feel as though I have barely scratched the surface of what I'm trying to achieve by archiving my entire life in audio format. Every aspect of my musical work reflects an aspect of myself - and these aspects of myself are, I think, quite common aspects that we all share to some degree.
Cue the videos that I'm showing on Wednesday night. These three videos show three significant parts of myself, certainly condensed, but steeped with meaning. The visual element offers a whole new world of experience that I hadn't even considered before now - body language, which has always been fascinating to me, and the littlest gestures - things I've mentioned in this blog before, those tiny movements that I just adore, they are all there, right there, caught forever on film, never changing, never going away. The voices are music, laughter is a glorious melody - all that was needed to make this clear was a sweet blanket of piano underneath, to emphasise to the viewer the preciousness of this footage.
The preciousness of the footage. We are never as young as we are right this second, we are never more alive as we are right this moment. I am frightened of losing who I love and to constantly remind myself of how important it is to hold on to the beautiful people who walk into my life, I have formed a funny habit of hoarding memories, first, just audio scrapbooking - and now, my first attempt at video scrapbooking. It's nothing spectacular, but it is something I hold very dear to me. Just making the ordinary something to be appreciated. After viewing the work today, my teacher quoted John Lennon: life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. I think that's exactly, exactly right. And if that is what an audience can take away from this strange, intimate insight into my own existence, then the work has done its job.
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