Badlands by Thibaud Kessell

For me these songs are the most directly personal expressions of myself as a musician. This music was inspired by my community around me, generous friends and teachers whose music struck me unlike most I’d heard before. These compositions emerged from actual memorable feelings, explorations and focussed listening to the sound of the piano.

My background as a producer probably influenced some of the sounds and textures in these pieces. In other music I find it more difficult to express myself honestly, as I find the complexity of a feeling or thought is often paradoxical or layered. I think this music conveys some of the feelings that are familiar to me most easily.

I am so very grateful and fortunate to have exceptional players and my best friends playing on these recordings. My relationship to these people in the real world makes improvising with them very comfortable. All of these compositions/improvisations are far richer for their presence and patience with me. When I first met these people, I was in awe at how they could create these musical impossibilities on stage and I never even considered the fact that I would play with them. In fact, Ashley, Jack, Tom and Izzy have all given me free lessons in the past and I have learnt a lot from them (not just about music). Most of the writing and rehearsal process was me asking for forgiveness due to my inability to play the pieces (“yeah I’ll be able to play this in a few months I hope”) while the players in this group gave the music a beautiful sound.


Scrambled Signal

This trio improvisation uses the broad timbral capacities of each instrument to emulate the fluttering and enveloping sounds that appear in certain types of electronic music.

I’m really interested in trying to emulate certain characteristics of digitally manipulated sounds such as warped field recordings, but with an acoustic ensemble.

In addition, I think while experimenting with prepared piano in the past I have struggled with the permanence of affected sounds - how do you only add blue tack, chains or cymbals to certain keys at the right time? In this song I attempted to blend the non-affected piano with prepared piano.

Some of the preparations included: a heavy singing bowl sliding against the strings, chains, blue tack and cymbals on the strings, twine with rosin being pulled back and forth around the strings. Ashley and Dave responded really beautifully with their own very tactile sounds.


3 Phillip Ave, Seaforth

This piece was initially composed using a scale I’ve made up. I have a system for creating new and interesting scales that typically sound unassuming played up and down but are a great portal into harmonic progressions. Simply building 7th chords off these scales (by skipping a scale degree between each chord tone) often sounds very interesting. I’ve used a blues progression within the framework of one such scale as a starting point for this composition. This piece reminds me of one of the places I grew up. It was a bit of a dump (sorry Papa). On one side was an abandoned warehouse, and on the other, we would often hear yelling and arguing. One of the boys from this neighbouring house beat me up on my front lawn, and another neighbour accidentally fired a shotgun round into our backyard. Despite this, I absolutely loved this house, and some of my favourite memories as a child were had there (thanks, Papa!) This song is a container for the nostalgia felt for something dark but beautiful remembered from a young age.


Peacock

The crux of this piece is a polyrhythmic figure cycling through some broken chords. I deliberately composed something that was, at the time of writing, too hard for me to play and improvise over. This would hopefully lead me to learn new skills that would be required to play it. Despite this, I wanted to create something that doesn’t alienate non musician listeners through complexity. I hope it is listenable and enjoyable, even if it is challenging. I like to think of this piece as having three melodies at different speeds: the bass plays the longest or slowest melody, changing with each repetition of the others; the vocals and trumpet play the slow melody with the drums; and the saxophone and piano play the faster melody.

The most interesting and challenging thing about this piece was figuring out how to treat the harmony when improvising. There are three chords within each bar-length cycle. As the chords are broken into two halves, the improvising can change depending on how they are perceived. Notes can change based on the initial change of chord as a whole, or alternatively; depending on only the half of the chord that is occurring at that moment. This gives many more sonic options at much smaller time intervals.

It is worth mentioning that my interest in rhythm was cultivated and inspired by Simon Barker and the music of Matt Mitchell, The Pen Club, Chloe Kim and Marc Hannaford among others. In addition, my friend Jacques Emery actually came up with the idea of practicing the polyrhythm by adding different chord changes within the cycle. The chords I came up with at the time ended up being used in the piece much later.


Make Peace

This first half of this song uses composed harmonic changes that repeat and grow slightly whilst keeping a basic skeleton of notes as a through line. The singers are singing written parts, while the band improvises within the structure. There is a juxtaposition between chaos and tangibility. The second part of this song is simple and melodic, and to me feels like an arrival to some sort of acceptance or perspective shift. Sometimes it is difficult to come to a mutual feeling with someone no matter how much it would help you both. I can definitely say making peace with that person is always harder and more important.

"documenting a new wave of creative music"

run by jacques emery.

operating in so-called Sydney on the land of the Eora nation.

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