Textile Audio

Well The Pomegranate Cycle has been given a pretty sweet write up in Time Off Magazine.

The flash edition will be online here for the the next week.

Or you can click here to read a PDF of the write up.

A large chunk of the email Interview I did with Time Off’s Mitchell Knox didn’t get into print, so I thought I’d print it below.

Enjoy!

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Where did the seeds for the idea from which The Pomegranate Cycle bloomed originally come from?

In many operas, female characters experience violence, go mad, and die or are killed. Rarely do they pick up the pieces of their life and live it again. When I was teaching music technology, I had worked with number of students who used the recording process to tell stories of how they healed from violence.  My experience with these students was that the technology empowered them to move their stories to a new space, a place where they felt comfortable with themselves and their history. With Pomegranate I wanted to draw from that idea and use the textures of ambient electronica to break open stories of violence depicted in traditional opera and tell a story of healing.
Is the final show very different to your original vision? Or was there a clear idea from the outset of how you’d like to convey this particular piece of artistic expression?
The show has been in development for six years and emerged piece by piece. If anything the vision was to weave ambient electrionica and opera into something seamless, which still told a powerful story.

Our show, The Pomegranate Cycle, began as a 15minute work called Her Song that was performed in Canada in 2005. A shortened version of Her Song is now the final song in Pomegranate. Her Song offers a clear emotional endpoint, and from that emerged the direction for this work, but in a very loose way. A lot of the music came out of vocal improvisation, messing about in the recording studio, and in my home studio. Pomegranate is still in development, each day, as we play around with staging and the relationship between the dancer and the singer.  We’re pretty excited because sonically, and visually we can see the work becoming whole. It won’t ever be completed, until it arrives in front of an audience.
What is the significance of the opening of a pomegranate in terms of the metaphor’s place against the story of Persephone in influencing the themes and ideas of the work? That is, how does it fit in to everything?

Pomegranates are laden with meaning. They have been used as a symbol of divinity and worship across many cultures, and are present in the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. A lot of the earliest opera was based around ancient Greek mythology so I wanted to draw from that tradition, and based The Pomegranate Cycle around the myth known as The Rape of Persephone. In the myth, Hades steals Persephone into the Underworld. While there he tricks her into eating pomegranate seeds. When she is allowed to return to her mother, she is told that she must return to the underworld each year for several months, effectively winter, because she has eaten the seeds.

We wanted to draw from the historical symbolism of the pomegranate, but anchor it in the sensory experience of eating the fruit. Pomegranates have a dark ruby color which stains the inner white peel, the seeds burst messily when eaten, the seeds have several textures.  In the show we have used the Pomegranate as a symbol of temptation, power, ruin and ultimately rebirth, but tried to bring it back to the physicality of the fruit. You’ll have to come and see the show to really get an idea!

What’s been the biggest challenge for you in putting this show together?

I sing, I write music and I mess around in the studio. That’s the fun part. Being the person who pulls everything else together is the real challenge, especially writing press releases. I seem to be missing the PR gene! Other things like arranging insurance, designing posters, managing a budget and updating a website is all part of the business of being a musician these days. I find it difficult because what I really want to be doing is working on the music.

And the greatest reward?

Bringing opera into the world of pop and electronica was always a risk, but so far everyone has loved the result. To be able to experiment and play to audiences who are willing to explore new sounds and new performance landscapes is really energizing. It propels me back to the studio to keep writing more tunes!

Why are events like the Brisbane Festival, and moreover, initiatives like Under the Radar, important for you, personally?

Under The Radar is important because they have taken a chance on my style, which is fairly untested in Australia. When you’re working on the fringe of an art form its hard to break through and find an audience. The support of Brisbane Festival means that more people will get to sample my work and see if they like it. I’ll also be able to move my work into new places based on the feedback I get from the audience, which is vital.

And for the continued development of local arts culture in general?

Under the Radar and other fringe festival programs are cheap and accessible. The vibe of UTR is playful, so audiences come willing to engage with new things.  Ultimately these spaces make it easier for artists to develop new work which stretch convention and expand the way we think about the arts in general.  

What other projects do you have up your sleeves in the near future?

Feral Media is releasing an EP called The Pomegranate EP this week, which features two tracks from The Pomegranate Cycle plus a song written for New Weird Australia, and a remix by Gentleforce. Later in the year Feral Media will release an album version of The Pomegranate Cycle, but we are wanting to play with the format: perhaps it will be an iPhone app, a game… we haven’t decided yet! I’ve also been working on some very twisted operatic arrangements of punk songs which I’ll put online towards the end of the year.

Is there anything else about the event or other activities you’ve got going on that you’d like to mention?

I’ve been working on Pomegranate alone for the last six years, so after the album is complete I want to move into more collaborative projects that play with jazz, electronica and pop. I’m also fascinated by the relationship between gaming and music and would love to work on a video game soundtrack. People should check out my website: www.textileaudio.com and get in touch if they have a crazy idea for global music domination. I’m interested!

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Over+out.e.