The Fire Sermon was released a few months ago - a collaboration between me and Agatha Yim from Polyphonic Pictures, supported by the Australian National Academy of Music. We took one of my favourite pieces ever (Einojuhani Rautavaara's The Fire Sermon, his second piano sonata) and turned it into a really beautiful, very unsettling audiovisual work - or as someone I met recently said to me, "kind of like visual poetry." Yes!! I love that concept!
I've done a Q&A with ANAM about this video, Agatha has already written up a couple posts about the behind the scenes of creating this, they're worth reading! Even though I was literally there as the other half, I felt like I was learning about what was happening behind the scenes reading them!
So really, I don't have much more to say. But I wanted to talk a bit about how much I enjoyed this process and why!
When we were first starting this project, I was really clear that I did not want this to be what you think of when I say 'music video'. I really didn't want it to be just a cool video of me playing the piano. Instead, I wanted something that was an artwork in its own right - I kind of thought of this project as extending Rautavaara's amazing work into a new artistic dimension, like we're building on a tradition and drawing from a lineage he's left for us.
[experimenting with fabric and ping pong balls, trying to turn the piano into some weird living, breathing thing]
When I'm interpreting music, I tend to think pretty abstractly. I'm often trying to relate sections or phrases to feelings and experiences, less so concrete places or things. So, when Agatha and I first chatted I really struggled with articulating my literal vision. It was more about "this feels like xyz" and "this expresses xyz." I didn't have the experience with or vocabulary for visual language - but that's the whole point of collaboration isn't it? We fill in the gaps of each other and come together to make a stronger whole. And Agatha was great and patient with my abstract rambles - when she showed me images of fabric suspended in air and draped, I was like "YES that's exactly it!"
And on collaboration, last month I did an incredible 16-way collaboration for the annual ARTS8 collaboration. It was probably the most transformative and enlightening artistic project I've ever done because I realised that across all these different artforms, we're all trying to do the same thing, tell the same stories, express the same feelings. I always knew this, but I really got it, this time first-hand. It's a very very VERY special thing to collaborate, and that's why I loved this project with Agatha. I think we created something special and hope you do too.
[Agatha getting the perfect shot of our beautifully draped piano]
My biggest thanks to ANAM and Agatha, but also Ben Howell (grip), Nathan Ellul (audio engineer), and Louise Turnbull and Jack Overall who gave up some of their time to but alfoil on every window in the space we shot in. Took me 9 hours...
Anyway I'm going kayaking now!
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