15 June 2011
Speak Emerging Artists speak: James Paul
Image: James Paul © Holly Kimberley
The participants in Speak Percussion's Emerging Artists Program write about the intense period of rehearsals and the final performances in Melbourne in April 2011. For their thoughts after the earlier 'creative development week' in December, please see this article on Resonate blog. For more blog articles by program participants, see the Resonate blog.
Working with Speak, Thomas Meadowcroft and the emerging artists was a great experience that I'm extremely happy to have been a part of. The last five months have been a wake-up call regarding my practice within the field of music, and this program has been an instrumental element in instigating a much-needed and overdue inspection of/reflection upon my creative output as a 'composer' and musician.
I'd like to preface my next comments by stating that working alongside the collected artists present through the program has been wonderful (and a massive help), and that the performers engaged in my piece performed and rehearsed to an excellent standard (extra kudos due for dealing with the re-writes).
Listening to the Cephalopoda recording is proving a grating experience, and though I consider the performance a great success I wish I had written a far better piece. This is largely because I spent a great deal of my own time engaged in excessive flirtation with concept over qualitative musical material, and as such I consider the current manifestation of the work to be a piece of visual art.
All this being said, I'm both very thankful and grateful to all involved for the experience: I had the opportunity to begin an extensive exploration into sound events and methods of generation, develop and mutate creative processes with excellent musicians, be performed (always good!) and meet artists with whom I hope to continue to work and maintain contact. This has been an invaluable stage in my mutation/regeneration as an artist and I hope that my work was in some manner enriching for the others involved.
Read also: Lionel Pierson's blog article.
Further links
'Speak
Percussion's emerging artists speak for themselves' -
Resonate blog (22 December 2010)
Speak Emerging Artists Program (Speak Percussion
website)
© Australian Music Centre (2011) — Permission must be obtained from the AMC if you wish to reproduce this article either online or in print.
James Paul is an electronic musician with an interest in systems, abstraction and space. He performs (solo and small ensemble); records; and scores film as David Boring – a project with a focus on creating electronic sound analogs to physical, biological and synthetic phenomena. He has worked and performed in an eclectic array of projects, including works with/by Kynan Tan, Cat Hope, Speak Percussion and The Boost Hero Man. He was recently performed by Speak Percussion as part of their inaugural Emerging Artists Program and had a solo appearance in the 2010 Liquid Architecture festival of sound arts.
Comments
Be the first to share add your thoughts and opinions in response to this article.
You must login to post a comment.