The experimental music 'summer camp' at ANU was most enjoyable: for me, a chance to get to grips with Arduino and Pure Data programming which surfaced in a piece for feedback-driven piano with loops, plus soprano sax, two oboes and gratuitous crotales (there they were in the percussion store: how could you not use them?)
After three concerts with Coro in February, I'm singing with Clarion at the National Portrait Gallery on April 25th and 26th. It's Heritage Week earlier in April and I'll be doing the sound (and possibly concertina) component of a show on April 12th at Mugga Mugga with Jenny Gall: concerning music and sound in that house and the surrounds. The cottage's piano is being restored, but I was able to play and record it in its former state - which yielded some strange and beautiful sounds that are surfacing elsewhere, in a slowly unfolding video work by Marzena Wasikowska.
Pekka Mikkola is coming to Australia , and I'm brushing up on my Finnish tango chops for some gigs with him at the National Folk Festival this Easter. After several hours of bass playing with Cassidy's Ceili on St. Patrick's Day I feel well limbered up...
The ANU Old English reading group is working its way through Beowulf, and I'm chewing on the musical possibilities inherent in the language: looking at a couple of riddles from the Exeter Book, and that bee charm which I hope I won't need to deploy, as the garden bees are doing their thing quite contentedly at the moment. Here, courtesy of a contact mic on either side of the box, is a recording of them nibbling and munching away as they tidy up some sticky frames: