Zubin Kanga Piano Ex Machina: Rhythm City Australian Premiere / Tour

Following on from the world premiere in London in March, Zubin Kanga will present my latest work, Rhythm City, in Australia this month. The work is for piano, live video sampler and electronics and is something a little bit different from me; I’ve been in interested in working with video for a while and have found great inspiration working with this medium in tandem with the music.

Performance details below:

10 April: MELBOURNE (Ian Potter Southbank Centre). Booking and Details

13 April: SYDNEY (Sydney Conservatorium of Music): Booking and Details

24 April: PERTH (Studio Underground, State Theatre of WA): Booking and Details

26 April: BRISBANE (Queensland Conservatorium of Music): Booking and Details

Here’s the program note for the work:

Rhythm City is a work that explores everyday sounds by bringing together a pool of short, specially-prepared video clips which are looped and developed in realtime. By framing and isolating these rather mundane actions and scenes rhythms begin to emerge and we recognise a form of music. All of this is wrapped up in a type of ‘video-game’ control; the pianist can ‘play’ and manipulate the videos on a midi keyboard while responding to them in the piano part which involves musical ideas inspired by or directly transcribed from the clips.

Also, check out this video of me mucking around with an early version of the software that I built in Max MSP especially for this piece. It uses some gorgeous footage of various household and urban scenes shot by Matt McGuigan of Hospital Hill: