The film is directed by Stuart Parkyn, whose previous short film credits as producer include Jerrycan (Jury Award – Cannes Film Festival 2008), and The Saviour (2007 Academy Award Nomination).

Listen to some of the musical highlights from Voyeurnet here.

Here is a slideshow of some more images from the recent Naada project at Darpana, Ahmedabad that I wrote the music for.

Below is another new sketch from the Naada project I am currently working on in India (see this previous post for more of an introduction).

Like the previous track, it takes natural, 'ambient' sound as its starting point and gradually develops into a musical piece. In this case the original sound world (or 'Naada') is rain. It also takes as its inspiration a story from Hindu mythology of the saint Swati hearing the very first music as raindrops fall from the sky onto a pool of lotus leaves.

Naada Sketch 2: Rain/Swati/Nine by rustyjoe

The piece moves from the sound of a gradually softening rainstorm to more discrete raindrops, which then eventually develop a 'tonality' and become gong notes. I chose the sounds of gamelan to reflect the sound of falling rain, and the resultant piece is in a big 9-beat rhythm pattern (see if you can count it out). It also plays with an even bigger 6-beat rhythm that can be played across the 9 by counting groups of 3 quavers. Using Indian Carnatic rhythmic structures helps with the process of developing new work with the dancers at Darpana who are predominantly Bharatanatyam dancers, and for whom Carnatic Rhythm is a mother-tongue.

There is a missing part which is played live in this piece, featuring the ancient South Indian Master Drum, the mridangam. This represents (along with the gongs) the 'first sound' of the Swati story, exploiting the mridangam's amazing ability (much like the tabla, its north Indian cousin) to make water-like sounds.

Max/Ableton/Sound Design Nerd alert: The process of modulating the sound from raindrops to pitched percussion/gong sounds was done using the new 'Corpus' plugin as an insert effect in Ableton Live. I basically tuned the settings for each raindrop sample with the dry/wet mix at 100% until it became a gong-like sound with a clear pitch and percussion envelope, and then automated for the plugin to move from 100% dry sound to 100% wet sound. Pretty simple effect really, but not possible without the soundshaping possibilities of fab Corpus plugin.

Akin Soundtrack Highlights Combo by rustyjoe

Above are some highlights from the soundtrack for an as-yet unreleased short film that Akin (Gemma Turvey on piano along with myself) have created the music for in the last few weeks. It's so unreleased that I can't tell you much more about it, other than that it is being produced in Melbourne. It features some of my favourite sounds including gamelan and bowed piano (incidentally on offer as great boutique sample libraries from soniccouture.com). Enjoy.

Akin_LittleRadioMix by rustyjoe

In January of this year my dear buddy from Melbourne, Gemma Turvey, came to Perth to play a show with me under our duo moniker, Akin. We intended to do more recording together in the time that Gemma was here, but alas, we kind of ran out of time and spent just a day in the studio playing some stuff. Furthermore, we lost a whole lot of the recorded data for a particularly good 30 mins or so of playing due to a dreaded computer crash. The particular piece that we were working on was an 'extemporisation' on Hans Eisler's To My Little Radio, originally a setting of a poem by Bertolt Brecht. Some of you may recognise this melody from the setting that Sting made of the piece in his beautiful song, The Secret Marriage.

We ended up with only about 2 mins of piano recorded to tape in the end. Nevertheless, I thought this was some of the best work we did together, and something about being surrounded by the hustle and bustle of India inspired me to do a remix/reworking of our recording, framed with a kind of subtle proto-electronica (almost sci-fi) feel. I feel I can hear the sounds of technology (including little radios) everywhere I go in Ahmedabad, and I was thinking a lot of the way Vangelis' soundtrack to Blade Runner (now approaching 30 years since its first release) uses radio and sounds of voice transmission in a really beautiful and sad way. The original story for Brecht's Little Radio has a similar melancholy to it, and a poignant reminder of the role that media plays in our lives (from songfacts.com):

To A Little Radio was written by Bertolt Brecht as he reached exile from the Nazi regime in 1933 and listened daily for news of the war.... Prophetically, in 1926 Brecht said, "Radio is one-sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him."

This second example below is another tune that we were working on, and is actually the first incarnation of a tune of mine called 'the seeker', which features in two guises on Taal Naan's Rhythmbred CD. It has a much more jammy, stream-of-consciousness flavour.

AkinJam_Jan09 ('The Seeker') by rustyjoe