co.polymer
Ken Naughton is a classically trained pianist and violinist. I think he plays a few other instruments as well ( such as piano accordion – see ‘Songs and demos – Jamais, Jamias”) but we are still working through the first two! I can play keyboards and basic piano , guitar and recorders so together we can up with everything we need especially when I throw in the 20,000 or so real instrument samples I can program in where necessary.
After saying” we should really get together and work on some stuff” for about 5 years we finally began meeting semi regularly and looking for common ground. We started by working through material I had that I hadn’t developed further but then began looking for more instrumental compositions . In the same way that I had been working with sound samples I had been collecting video scraps off the internet -so an invitation to perform at the North Coast Sound Collective called ‘Sound Crucible’ led to ‘co.polymer’ – sound, spoken word and live and programmed music performances .
Hold to Me & Robot Lover
These are just video backgrounds to our performances which also had spoken and sung words and live instruments. There are no definitive versions of these around as their charm was their level of improvisation that the sound bed provided.
‘Hold to Me’ has an edgy, urban groove to it so I decided to to end it by escaping the city to the country.
‘Robot Lover’ is a fun piece I wrote after reading about ‘love androids’. Once again no ‘live’ recording of this exists but I found an old guide track and have patched it in.
'The Sound of Concrete'
Sound Crucible was a wonderful collection of electronic and digital musicians brought together irregularly by Rex Hardjibarata. One month he announced there would be a theme – the Sound of Concrete.
I decided to take this seriously and find out just what was the sound of concrete. Using software that converted imagery to audio I photographed various types of concrete and road surface around Bangalow and Byron Bay. After converting these to sound clips I edited them into a soundscape. The software could also work in reverse, taking the audio file and making it into an image. So I used these images throughout the clip. The soundtrack was written and spoken by a scientist friend, Warren Taylor, and is an explanation of the molecular construction of co-polymers! All chemical equations provided int his clip are genuine !
Ken and I were having wonderful fun with co.polymer but change was already on the way. At our second session at Sound Crucible we saw an amazing violinist performing before a flickering video of a shrouded sun. Totally gobsmacked by his passion and intensity I summoned up the nerve to approach him and tell him how impressed Ken and I were – in response Cye Wood gave me his CD – ‘Arraya’ . I asked him if we could play together one day – he said yes. It took two years for that to happen but that was the start of the epic journey that was become co.sonance and ‘The Ice Suite’.
