Notes from Anthony Cooley - Guest curator of Wild Life
So the song wildlife was written and recorded in brief sessions in the earlier of this month and sat on a digital shelf for a couple months till I had the idea of sending it to a couple friends to see if they could listen to the piece and either come up with something new based on what the themes/mood of the piece was. Or if they had anything they’d made sitting in the lurch as wildlife was that they felt was thematically and emotionally relative to the piece.
Upon hearing the initial results and talking to the absolutely amazing Claire from Dog Park who green lighted the idea, I endeavoured to contact some more friends and players in the Melbourne noise/electronic scene to see who could be keen.
One thing worth mentioning, I feel a lot of the time compilations like this can be kind of stapled together in a inorganic way that doesn’t really have a flow to it, so collecting and curating this release I definitely had that concern in mind, but ultimately what connects all the pieces and people involved isn’t the obvious tones, or even the working methods.
For my piece for example I played a ms-20 and a drum machine and then reamped the results roughly 100 times through various pedals to get the sounds I made, and its personally inspired by this and that.
For the other artists like Ghost Skull or Sectoral or John Stevens, they all have a completely different way of working and different perspectives on things, and whilst I might not make music about the subjects they wrote about or concepts that inspired to them because these things aren’t a part of my life. The pieces are entirely related, Ghost Skull for example was directly inspired and created his piece solely after hearing mine and is effectively him trying to transmit similar emotional moods in his own realm. Blasarius made his piece by resampling mine, some of the others raided their own shelves for work they felt could tie to this piece. I can’t thank them enough for the hard work they put in.
It’s probably worth noting that contrast and juxtaposition between more melancholic and aggressive sounds was an objective goal in assembling this curation. But anyway, whilst some pieces on here are softer pianic music, and others closer to harsh noise. The communal factors that tie all of this together to me, feels like a much more accurate and personal representation of what ties us all together in spite of how completely isolated and individual we can feel. The deeper infrastructures of our births and deaths and pains and contemplations can be felt and expressed in entirely idiosyncratic means, but ultimately they’re just the barks roars and howls of animals in the same zoo as one another.
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