Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

You're trying to describe something to someone - an object, a concept, an idea, a memory - but however you try to go about describing it, you don't quite manage to get to the core of the thing - you skim around the topic, relay certain details, related ideas, fragmented glimpses - but never managing to give it's essence with clarity, always hazed and obscured . . .

Small Round Strangely Furry with Spots Stripes and Other Patterns is like this kind of experience. At its core are just a handful of musical ideas - short melodies, themes, rhythmic patterns - only two or three; though at no point are these heard clearly. The trio's actual musical substance are abstractions from these core ideas, alluding to the themes, echoing and augmenting the rhythms, constantly trying to focus in on different facets of the core material, which then spin out to develop new material related to it. Slowly parts drift on musical tangents, the texture becomes more complex, parts conflict and the core of the material becomes obscured/obstructed - while the core musical ideas are always present in some way, they are always shifting in and out of focus.

I'll admit the title is a little unwieldy; I think I chose it simply wanting to come up with a nonsensical title, something slightly cumbersome, something so unlike the many other titles of "new music" compositions I'd come across. Well, I think I achieved that, so much so that I practically never write the title out in full, mostly just referring to it in short-hand as Small Round et al.

Originally this EP was just going to be the trio along with three remixes: the two by Alicia and Alex, and one I had begun to create. I started out recording fragments of melodies from the trio with my modular synthesisers, elongating, augmenting, and layering phrases to create a gradually morphing bed of tones, peppered atop with more active motifs. I went to record some new piano samples to layer into remix, but as I did realised this was- and could become a piece in its own right - my good friend and fabulous pianist Samuel Mitchell was in town for a couple weeks, so I locked in a recording session and wrote a fresh piano part that wove in amongst the synthesiser lines. Seeing as the trio had so frequently been referred to in short-hand by lopping off half the title and replacing with "et al", Latin for "and others", I thought that would be a fitting title for this reimagining.