Ocean, Again

Debut album on pressure-sensitive floors. DIgital, LP and a story.

The terpsichora floors are a set of pressure-sensitive wooden platforms, used as a MIDI controller for performing electronic music with. These floors were developed as part replica, part extensions on the work of Philippa Cullen and her floors. This instrument is used for controlling sound with the movement of the whole body, rather than using individual limbs or gestures to make sound. Through developments of hardware, software, creative thinking and many collaborations, this instrument has become a versatile method for playing music.

Each floor has one sensor, so playing versatile music involves finding complex mappings that use the 5-6 floors I use at a time to control the many parameters of sound that are needed for expressive playing.

Learning to navigate the complex mapping of the floors has been what’s allowed for this album to exist. Playing this instrument brings together a few dichotomies. It uses few sensors to control many sounds; its simple design allows for using specific, trained gestures; the simplicity of the sensors opens the option of layered mappings; the indirectness of the mapping is controllable by specific gestures and combinations; the finite weight of the player is used to control the myriad possibilities electronic instruments allow; most importantly, the versatility of a movement language on it allows for movement solutions to musical problems.

Learning to play this instrument has been a process of finding access to the space between mappings. It has cultivated a close but indirect connection with the instrument, sound and body.

I started this journey by trying to build an expressive instrument without modelling it based on the interaction between the playing body and interface in acoustical instruments. I wanted a close embodied connection to electronic music. This process has allowed for a different connection between gesture, sound and time. With this relationship, the instrument is now guiding new music rather than me impressing my existing ideas onto it in performance.

BACKGROUND

Philippa Cullen was a pioneering Australian dancer who died tragically at the young age of 25. In the 5 years of activity she had, she developed many new instruments and took on bold new ideas about movement, sound, transformation and connection. Her floors were one of the instruments she developed in collaboration with Michel Waisvisz, Arthur Spring and Greg Schiemer. Her work fell to obscurity following her untimely death, but is now becoming more recognised through books, exhibitions and new artists’ engagement with her ideas.

I came across her floors as an undergraduate at the Elder Conservatorium. Stephen Whittington helped me start working with them and eventually I built my own set. Cullen wanted to have control of sound as a dancer, and I wanted to be an electronic musician who moves.

THIS ALBUM

This album comes from the past decade of development. I’ve followed the path of my compositional voice alongside working on the floors. Now, the instrument is stable, I’ve learned how to play it, and have worked out where I’m at with translating my ideas to sound. With that, I present you this album as an offering for a moment of deep listening. All the tracks were performed ‘live’ in one take on the floors only, but the performance is hidden from you here. Instead, you have a physical etched out disc, one which I hope dynamically and timbrally engages with your listening space, bringing you a new way to hear your own home.

With this album, I’m releasing the bind between the floors, my interests in their performance potential, and the connection I have my sound design aesthetics. The floors are an instrument that opens up many possibly worlds, only some of which will be ones I explore; it’s my deep wish that others continue what Cullen started and I’ve followed. I hope you get joy from listening to this album; the path that’s brought me to it has been a complex decade that I wouldn’t trade.

Playing an electronic controller, the question always remains as to why bother with a large interface, when in theory, a smaller one would do? If an album of electronic music is about sound only, does it matter what makes the sound and how it feels to make it in the body? Why would someone choose to play it all in one live take rather than tidy, intricately controlled layers multitracked? I have mulled over these questions as I have moved through the past decade towards this album. I don’t think music is only organised sound for me anymore, but this record, though coming from an embodied place about connection to the body, feels like sound I was overjoyed to be able to organise.

The bandcamp release of this album is slightly different from the LP, in its inclusion of one extra track.

credits

released June 23, 2023
Recorded July 15, 2022 by Pat Telfer
Mixed November 2022 by Theo Carbo
Mastered December 2022 by Lawrence English at Negative Space
Album art and graphic design by Oliver Ledi Hanane