Resonate Magazine | Australian Music Centre

Image: Jennifer Hankin aka The Emerald Ruby  

This Saturday in Brisbane/Meanjin, Dots+Loops will present a new mini-festival for new music: PLAYBACK. An addition to their recurring NONSTOP festival program, PLAYBACK offers a new platform to support the careers of their Fellowship participants and continue engaging with them as part of the vibrant new music community. In its inaugural program, PLAYBACK will feature performers and creators from the 2021-2022 Dots+Loops Fellowship Alumni, including the Andromeda Saxophone Quartet, led by Paige Gullifer (2022 Performance Fellow), Oliver Brown (2021 Composition Fellow), New Resource (a duo project by Dale Schlaphoff (2022 Performance Fellow) and Samuel Carrick), and Jennifer Hankin (aka The Emerald Ruby, 2022 Composition Fellow).

Recently inducted as an AMC Associate Artist, I caught Jennifer Hankin on the phone to find out more about her upcoming presentation and her experience through the Dots+Loops Fellowship program. She was at the airport, waiting for her flight to Brisbane/Meanjin ahead of her festival. "Perfect," she says of the timing.

Jennifer applied to the Dots+Loops Composition Fellowship program in 2021 after having heard of the concert series through the "former-classical muso grapevine" or, as she elaborated, "other people who had trained classically but explored other areas." She'd tapped into a community of musicians hungry for alternative pathways to music-making.

"I had a difficult time finding an artistic voice after leaving formal music education," she told me. "I was left with no direction, few contacts, and no guidance. I was tinkering around with music and composition by myself, but lacking authority in the art that I was producing."

Through the Dots+Loops Fellowship program, she found an environment where she could explore and find creative autonomy in her musical exploration and works. "I worked quite closely with [program mentors] Connor D'Netto, Sally Whitwell, Vanessa Tomlinson, and Chris Perren. I would bring work in and say, 'I don't know what I'm doing', and they'd say, 'This is great, keep going with it!'" As a result of the Fellowship, she created the work H4LT THE HUSTLE/FROLIC 4EVA for percussion (toy drums, rainbow glockenspiel) and electronics (double Gameboy, octave pedal, and otamatone), which she performed alongside percussionist Nozomi Omote.

Her selection of instruments is also reflective of her growing collection. Attached to her practice as composer-performer, her collection is driven by an underlying goal to find on-stage competence. "Not what classical musicians aim for," she explains, "but to be able to play well enough that the technical inefficiencies aren't there." Jennifer had previously described herself as a jack of all trades with a flute focus, learning to play new instruments to record her work. "I never wanted to be a recording artist. It's a craft that I'm very proud of and have found a lot of enjoyment in it, but live performance will always be my focus."

For PLAYBACK, Jennifer's solo set will comprise of part of her Folksy Dreams suite, as well as introducing new works yet to be released. She will showcase a self-developed technique which she calls "long-form looping". "I'll be performing on the flute, ukulele, and voice by myself, but it doesn't sound like I'm playing by myself." She pre-emptively defends the technique after popular associations with Ed Sheeran's pop pedal looping: "Ed Sheeran's loops are short and simple, mine are very long and very intricate." One of the new works, Eternity at Sea, is hinted to be some of her most delicate ukulele work. Describing what audiences might expect from the performance, she recalls, "I've had audiences describe The Emerald Ruby sets as a magic trick and an auditory illusion. There are layers of sound that, for the audience, seemingly come out of nowhere."

Dots+Loops have also recently announced their incoming 2024 Fellows: violist Ella Beard (they/them), drummer Hayley Chan (she/her), saxophonist Courtz Lovell aka Clover Love (They/them), harpist Paul Nicolaou (he/him), prog RnB artist Saro Roro (she/her), pianist Julia Vlahogiannis aka OOLIA (she/her), and composers Samuel Carrick (he/they) and Leila Harris (she/they).

For the incoming cohort, Jennifer was ready to impart some of her own learnings from her experience in the program: "Trust your artistic instincts. If you haven't yet, find a way to develop that trust. Something I took away and continued to learn throughout 2023 is that nobody quite makes music the same way, and every musical voice and idea is important."

Jennifer's performance at PLAYBACK will be followed by a year full of planned releases. An album of flute duos will come to fruition as part of ABC Classic and ABC Jazz Composer Commissioning Fund, she will also release an album of singer-songwriter work called Patchwork (some of which will be teased at PLAYBACK), the next two instalments of her Folksy Dreams suite, and a project that will culminate in the Folksy Dreams Orchestra.

Find out more about Jennifer Hankin and explore her works in the AMC catalogue.

Dots+Loops mini-festival PLAYBACK
5pm-10pm, Saturday 9 December 2023 at The Old Museum, Studio 1

More information: https://www.dotsandloops.com.au/calendar/2023/12/09/playback