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18 March 2025

Creating music from heritage museum machines


'drawn and twisted' album cover Image: 'drawn and twisted' album cover  
© Vicki Hallett and Steve Ashby

Steve Ashby and I met in 2017 during a field recording residency located on the Mmabolela Reserve in Limpopo, South Africa. We quickly discovered we shared an interest in improvised performance, field recording, and electronic manipulation of sound to enliven a listening experience through a connection with its place of performance. As time passed, a curiosity grew towards composing works that would explore the intersection of each person's style on their principle instrument, clarinet and guitar respectively. With a hemisphere's worth of distance between us, we began trading tracks via the internet. drawn and twisted is our fourth collaborative album.

In 2020, I had the unique opportunity to explore the sonic qualities of the heritage machines housed in the National Wool Museum of Australia. Granted access to the space during the COVID lockdown period, I was able to experiment, perform, and record with each piece of equipment in an unprecedented moment of quiet as the presence of other people, traffic, and construction were halted. The machinery in the museum follows the process of turning raw wool into the thread, fabric, and clothing consumed throughout the world. I approached each machine as a musical instrument as I investigated the combs, looms, levers, bins, and other mechanisms inherent to their physical materials. Each producing a unique set of textures, resonances, and percussive elements. I also recorded sounds of the quintessential Australian shearing process and field recordings of local native grasslands and sheep grazing areas. I passed this new collection of recordings onto Steve with the invitation to begin composing and collaborating on a new set of works. Over the course of the years since, Steve and I have explored iterations and avenues that finally became drawn and twisted.

With this new collection of recordings, we began editing, sampling, morphing the discrete voices of each machine into imagined soundscapes centering around the various stages of processing wool from raw fleece into a commercial textile products. Each piece like a scene from a possible narrative interweaving the hardship and prosperity inherent to the process and history of manufacturing sheep's wool from herding to shearing to finished product. The process yields the thread of comfort and warmth brought to people around the world in the form of clothing, jackets, blankets, and socks. It has also polluted waterways adjacent to mills where the wool is cleaned, trampled the grasslands to dust with the herding of sheep, and impinged upon the freedom and vitality of indigenous people. With drawn and twisted, we encourage a listening towards the future in which the wealth of knowledge from as yet untold stories and perspectives is foregrounded, where a reverence for the land embraces a returned vitality to its native grassland.

Playing" and recording heritage wool machinery. Image: Vicki Hallett.


Listen to drawn and twisted on Bandcamp.


Vicki Hallett is a composer, versatile musician, sound artist, music practitioner and educator. Vicki has composed, produced and performed in live concerts, international conferences, solo recordings and videos ranging from chamber music to exploratory work with sound art, meditations, the Elephant Listening Project and acoustic ecology. Vicki travels the world recording nature's sounds as well as improvising in acoustically interesting environments including Mabolel Rock (South Africa) with a pod of Hippopotami. Her focus is to document and record the ever-diminishing habitats and species of our planet.


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