walkabout V by Bradfield Dumpleton

Walkabout V is the fifth in a series of semi-ambient electronic albums created during the Tasmanian covid lockdown in 2020. Each album is developed around realtime recordings of my body moving through space/time along various local bush and beach walks in SE Tasmania. Electronics have been added to create a meditative, dimensional journey.

In the state of virus lockdown, the simple act of walking can take on a different significance. On these recordings, walkabout is describing a sense of ceremony, walking the landscape of the self. Each of these albums takes me deeper into a layer of my psyche and offers reflection on particular themes in my life.

The walk recorded on walkabout V is one of my local favourites. We call it the Fossil Beach Walk because it begins at a beach where the rocks are spangled with tiny fossils of ancient shell & plant life. The walk snakes along the low coastal cliffs and bush that mark the contours of the tidal Huon River, emerges about halfway at another small beach strewn with clattery pebbles & large bleached driftwood logs, then eventually arrives at a third beach, a secluded bay, sheltered and flat sand, home to thousands of soldier crabs. The walk offers many textural variations, in many senses.

The experience of 'walking on fossils', in which the vastness of the eons comes into my focus underfoot as a physical sensation, delivers me into a very different sense of time & scale, a deep dreaming. The throbdrone of the barge passing at the beginning of this piece becomes the otherworldly growl of the didgeridu becomes the living hum of the river, the pulse of the surrounding landscape and the ancient thrum of time as existence spreads outwards through space. For me, this feels like a walk into the 'consciousness' of Time.

Another very personal layer to the story of this recording was reconnecting with Kushala Prem, an old friend with whom I shared many deep explorations of consciousness throughout the 90s, when I lived in Melbourne. In fact, the concept of the 'walkabout' series began with me remembering his skill with the didgeridu, while I was doing the Sugarloaf Echo walk used in 'walkabout I'. In imagining Kushala's didg combined with the sounds of my feet / breath / the land, I reconnected with the shamanic dimension of our friendship. Over the following month or so, while Kushala prepared a recording to send me, I focused on creating the first four albums and the overall concept deepened.

I'm really excited now to include Kushala's didgeridu textures on this album, as a visceral backbone to the themes of deep Time & ancient consciousness, and I'm looking forward to exploring his didg more in the 'walkabout' series. In the last section of this album, I've slowed his recording down to suggest the moandrones of whales in mating season, a prehistoric synaesthesia of OceanMind and Space...

Almost all the music on the walkabout albums has been played on the qwerty keyboard of my laptop, with sounds generated using Spitfire Lab's Soft Piano & the amazing Surge synth plug-in.

Rhythms of life, forward motion.
A psychogenic Bark Fugue.
Walk the (black) Dog, and reach for the Star.
(Siriusly.....)

A library of musical sketchbooks, mapping my various evolutions from 2005 to next week. Dedicated to exploring sound for its own sake. Many diverse delights here for the patient & attentive listener.

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