Music / Chamber / Biome
Biome
for 10 player chamber ensemble
In 2018, I was invited to be composer-in-residence with the Melbourne-based experimental chamber group Forest Collective. The residency was great fun and ended up involving collaborations with the wonderful queer-folk artist Addison and cabaret performer Danielle Asciak in costume as the Velvet Underground’s Nico. I created Biome for the ensemble to perform at the final concert of their 2018 season. As a composer I’m really fascinated (and slightly intimidated) by the mindset of ‘just do one thing and let it play out for the entire piece’, and this is my foray into that world. It also has a slightly Bolero-esque 8 minute long global crescendo. It was premiered at Forest Collective Gala, conducted by Evan Lawson at the Australian Institute of Music in Melbourne, 16 November 2018.
I wrote these program notes for the performance: Biome explores an organic mass of sound that grows in, around and through the ensemble. Each player occupies their own distinct time world, exploring a sonic identity that is unique and disparate from the group. The piece is propelled by the coalescence of these sonic identities to form a blurry, bubbling ecosystem of sound, which be experienced in a variety of different ways. As a listener, one could try to pick out an individual voice from the crowd, following along as it ducks and weaves through the texture, or one may instead try instead to absorb the soundworld as a whole, paying special attention to moments of homogeneity.