Saturday, 18 September 2021 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm
Intro: Serene Ailment Incantation Praxis from cold_storage
The Amplified Elephants Deep Creatures (Heavy Machinery + flash fwd, 2021)
Shipwreck
Dinner
Shore
Diving
Shipwreck & Pithos
Apotheosis
The Amplified Elephants is a leading sound art ensemble made up of members including Teagan Connor, Jay Euesden, Megan Hunter, Helen Kruljac, Robyn McGrath, Daniel Munnery, Kathryn Sutherland, Esther Tuddenham, Natalie Walters and James Hullick.
'Deep Creatures' is a blissful deep dive into a sonic world of freely associated imagination, exploring an interplay of electronic ambient sound, cinematic spaces, vocal work and poetry. This deeply evocative album outlines the abstract journey of a young woman called to the seashore. She dives down to a mysterious shipwreck filled with wondrous deep-sea creatures.
Called to the sea by The Following (performed by The Amplified Elephants) – a council of benevolent interdimensional aliens – a young woman is taken to a sunken ship where she unlocks a giant clay urn unleashing the godlike creature from within. She is transformed by this radical experience.
First single 'Shipwreck' draws the listener on an immersive waterworld journey. Cinematic sequences highlight some deeper dreamlike narrative at play. This ambient field recording washed track marks The Amplified Elephants ascending to the pinnacle of their arresting sonic abilities. Their expression and creative language made all the more ear catching through their lived experience and perception as artists living with neurological diversity.
The Amplified Elephants dive to great auditory and visual depths linking sonic art; video art; deep ocean creatures and their own take on the infinite brilliance of the creative mind. At times ambient; at times oceanic; at times strident with powerful sonic waves.l depths linking sonic art; video art; deep ocean creatures and their own take on the infinite brilliance of the creative mind. At times ambient; at times oceanic; at times strident with powerful sonic waves.
released September 6, 2021
Candlesnuffer apsomeophone
bad snake laugh
money’s dark night
forged baggage 2
voices of the air shaft 2
travel over books roughly
From David Brown
‘apsomeophone’ grew out of love for and, from a listener's point of view, an historical immersion in a tight group of compositions by musique concréte, film soundtrack and Twentieth Century Classical composers. These listening experiences became entwined, at some stage, with my own ponderings round a desire to compose a group of very personally suited recordings, to be utilised in a live context as a proxy ensemble accompaniment to my slowly blossoming and evolving prepared guitar techniques.
Through a compositional process that I would loosely describe as ‘aural sculpture’, I extracted snippets of sound and short musical passages from these adored compositions (the list of composers borrowed from includes Béla Bartók, John Cage, Pierre Henry, György Ligeti, Tōru Takemitsu and Edgard Varése). These small sonic extractions I then processed heavily, augmented spatially and timbrally and began to arrange into fragmented groupings, making correlations pleasing to my ear. This transfigurative process became a long drawn out undertaking, soon enriched and complicated by the systematic and responsive addition of other fragmentary sounds generated through the use of my own guitars, stringed instruments and electronics. And…., on the layering and editing went as I meandered towards a final point of sonic sculptural satisfaction. As a group of odes, each of the final compositions on ‘apsomeophone’ focuses on one or two of the aforementioned, inspirational listening antecedents.
Fifteen years later, the compositions throughout ‘apsomeophone’ still hold a warm grip on me and, though distant timewise, I still feel saturated with all the minutiae of the compositional processes, a feeling akin to being immersed in a supportive body of warm water. It’s a record that I’m really attached to and remain entwined with to the point where the working methods which gestated there have become the norm for me. It’s a heavily pored over record, where somehow nothing is out of place, and I believe it’s a record loosely in the mode of its predecessors.
Released September 17, 2021
