In Australian art and literature, a prevalent binary opposition emerges from works classic and contemporary, a dichotomy that permeates reality as much as fiction. In Maluga, a spatial fixed media work for five channels, explores notions of bush VS city. Often poets, artists and musicians explore the pervasive nature of the city as it etches away the beauty of an ancient omnipotent bushscape. Sometimes the soft and docile manmade city-limits are tested by the harsh reality of an unforgiving desolate wilderness. Maluga (the subject) is a resurrected traditional mangrove, a reborn spit of bush in the middle of Sydney’s suburbia, a fantasy of a lost living forest in historical Australia. Surrounded by the urbanized cacophony driven by business and industry, In Maluga presents a juxtaposition between a living serene bushland and a bustling city.  The bird calls of Australian natives and the clang of a mechanized modern piano are two central samples that represent the bush VS city idiom. The audience is transported to and from a ‘happy place’, a gentle collage of nature’s orchestra and the ‘foreign’ harsh crack of industrial noise. Synthesized and manipulated sounds represent both calamity and tranquility as the listener is thrown between these opposing settings, common in a contemporary human habitat. 
This work is set in five channels, mixed in protocols with sounds manipulated using RTCmix.


In Maluga

For Dance - Fixed-Media (2008)

Commissioned by project HAMMER AND NAIL
For Tape
Premiere: Hammer and Nail 2008, Buskirk-Chumley Theatre, Bloomington 19-20 April 2008 [Choreography by Richelle Steiner]

WhirlyWind - [Phase Elemental]

BurningBush - [Phase Elemental]


In Driftwood, the performer is tasked with weaving the saxophone through a tapestry of manipulated saxophone sounds. Echoing from fixed sounds to live performance and back, Driftwood seeks to build connections between the instrument and its latent sonic content. 

Driftwood

Shortwave - Soundwave reflects a love I had for playing with radios when I was younger. I remember enjoying the sounds between the channels far more than the actual programmes. The radio like sounds in the piece became a frame for me to take that love further by pushing them to their limit creating a far wider palette than I had as a child. With that palette I have retained the playfulness I used to twist the dial and move the aerial with and then painted on a far grander canvas than I could have imagined at that age. 

The title is also a passing reference to the 1980's cartoon series Transformers. Soundwave is a character for the bad guys (the Decepticons) whose role is reconnaissance. He often transforms into radio like contraptions in order to communicate with the other Decepticons or spy on the good guys (Autobots) conversations.

shortwave - soundwave

The inspiration for `Rise from Slumber' came from a desire to move away from episodic structure. The piece consists of a system whose elements are reactive to one another. At times certain elements come to the fore before collapsing back into the system. The title reflects the gentle rising and falling nature of the material.

Rise From Slumber was realized in at the University of Sheffield Sound Studios in 2011 as part of an MA in Sonic Arts. It has has performed at the Queen's University of Belfast's Sonorities festival and also at Staffordshire University's NoiseFloor festival both in 2013.

Rise from slumber

"Alone in the long grass, with the distant murmer of the splutter of waking machinery. 
Or the rapid patter, of dancing feet"'

Awareness is based upon a poetic phrase uttered by a female voice. The spoken phrase occurs twice within the piece, both times 
in different contexts. All of the other material is entirely abstract, any semantical relation to the text is coincidental. 
Awareness was realized at the University of Sheffield Sound Studios in 2011 as part of an MA in Sonic Arts.

Awareness

Ripple focuses upon drama and tension. Tense metallic tonal material combines and opposes rapid dramatic gestural sounds in order to create a piece in which one is constantly on edge.
Ripple was realized in 2012 at the University of Sheffield Sound Studios as part of an MA in Sonic Arts. This piece was performed at the Sound, Sight, Space and Play festival at De Montfort University in 2013.


Ripple

"Surround, with tears of violets, I sing to you... eternal sound of blooming"
The second of a series of short dances.

Edictine Dance No 2

Unlocking the Keys (2021) is a fixed media Ambisonic work that explores three dimensional sonic space. The title serves as a metaphor for searching out (i.e., “unlocking”) the potential of sounds created from recorded piano sources, which start out abstract in nature and fully reveal themselves in the middle of the piece.  While the ideal listening experience for this piece is a periphonic sound system (a three dimensional configuration of speakers such as “dome” or 8-channel “cube”), the version provided here (stereo) preserves all of the musical material, mapping it down organically to a two dimensional listening space.

Unlocking the Keys (2021, Ambisonic electroacoustic)

Mark Oliveiro, a Sydney native, Doctor of Music and Lecturer in Music Composition at the Australian of Institute of Music, and is a composer with diverse extra-musical interests. Whilst notions of narrative, programme and theatre, have always been a stoic component of his music; Oliveiro offers an exploration of the quintessence of ceremony inherent in all human expression. 

An obsession with history, mythology and ancient literature, renders Oliveiro’s work riddled with themes from archaeological study and obscure urban legends, alike. His music has been described as; “epic”, “unashamedly ritualistic” and “atmospheric” with “Dreamtime overtones”. At present, Oliveiro has an interest in exploring, by way of conceptual abstract and musical aesthetic, the notion of reconstructing lost or imagined performance traditions. Dance and movement, theatrics and technology, language and social media, are just some of the non-musical solutions most apt for the ever expanding, contemporary composer tool belt. 

With a keen and equal interest in music of the acoustic and electronic medium, Oliveiro’s music has been represented at national and international conferences and festivals hosted by: the North American Saxophone Alliance, the World Saxophone Congress, the International Horn Society, the Australasian Computer Music Association, the International Computer Music Association, the Society of Electroacoustic Music in the United States, Electronic Music Midwest, the British Trombone Society and many more.

Oliveiro is a graduate and distinguished alumnus of the Sydney Conservatorium, the College of Music and the University of North Texas and the Jacob’s School of Music of Indiana University. His music has been commissioned by the International Horn Society and the Meir Rimon Commissioning fund, the Australiasian Art Music Fund, the Settimane Musicali di Stresa e del Lago Maggiore, Chronology Arts, Pictures on Silence, as well as numerous professional individuals. 

Oliveiro is an active Disc Jockey and Music Educator.

Andrew Reeman has completed an MA in Sonic Arts at the University of Sheffield. During this course he wrote several acousmatic works and developed various pieces of software to aid electroacoustic composition. 

I am a composer equally at home in the electroacoustic studio as I am working with acoustic instruments. My recent music features sonic collisions both in the use of disant sound materials and instrumental forces. These collisions inhabit my own real, surreal and imaginary sonic landscapes.

I've been generously supported in the pursuit of my Masters by Ms Christian Duff, the EMI Sound Foundation via the RSAMD trust, the Ropner Trust and a Dewar Arts Award


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