Ten from Ten = the End

The final album release from Paul Foster and I as Cwtch, Ten from Ten is a retrospective of ten track highlights from our ten years of making music between Wales and Australia.


The story of Cwtch as I have found it...

One night in April 2007, I was bored out of my brain in a bedroom in Brisbane, Australia, and found myself dispiritedly connecting to the internet via a snail-paced dial-up modem. I was looking to find some new music that might settle my raging restlessness.

After spending some time doing searches, I stumbled on a music site called Last.fm. It was free to join and offered free streaming and some downloading of eclectic sounds, from mainstream to DIY of various kinds. I've always loved music, with a taste that spans an eccentric range of styles, but had previously never been able to afford to own a substantial collection, and so I signed up. Over some hours that night, with growing excitement, I discovered an encyclopedic musical wonderland beyond my wildest imaginings. It was the start of a big shift in my life.

Cut to a few months later. By this time I had gathered from Last.fm a large and growing collection of free mp3 downloads, mostly electronic and independently-made. In addition, I had met and been in regular contact with many of the independent musicians who, like me, now called Last.fm their virtual home.

It was around this time that I met on the site a musician in Cardiff by the name of Paul Foster, also known as Dementio13. While I was happily being a fan-girl to the many independent artists I'd encountered at Last.fm, Paul was prolifically releasing in digital form his sophisticated, original sounds, elusive of fixed genres, or mixing them up with aplomb. It was also around this time that I realised many of the musicians I knew were sorely lacking vocalists. Since childhood, singing had been a big part of my life, and so I decided to make available some self-recorded vocalising, to pretty much anyone who wanted it. Paul was quick to take me up.

When he sent over his first track with my vocals, Pixiegraf, I almost fainted with joy at the sound of it. Trying desperately to be cool in a way I've never been, I 'casually' suggested I'd like to make another track with him. To this he responded that he wanted to make many more tracks with me. Thus, a music duo was formed. We called it Cwtch.

Over the next decade we released in digital form three albums, five EPs and three singles of the multi-genre music that had naturally arisen from the meeting of our creative selves. The way the music happened over the net between Australia and Wales was surprisingly simple. I recorded vocals, all improvised, often with words straight out of my head to the audio file, sometimes around the words of poems. Then, mostly without discussion, Paul would build songs around the vocal parts I sent him, and send back to me completed tracks, EPs or albums. We'd then upload them to Bandcamp and other sites, offer them on a pay-as-you-like basis, and voilà, new music publicly released.

I am making this sound quite a bit easier than it could possibly have been. Paul still had to invent and produce his original music around the voice files I sent him, a special kind of challenge compared to the more usual other way around. I still had to discover and edit the fragmented melodies from my improvisations, sing expressively and mostly in tune, and in most cases find the words. This was all a joy. Paul was usually involved in re-arranging the lyrics directly from the voice-audio files, mostly phrase-by-phrase, almost always doing a much better job of it than I. We also had some longer, more personal communications over the years, getting to know each other as kind-of-close but far-distant friends via the collaborations. But in essence the music itself arose almost wordlessly between us. For me there has been something rare and pure about this near-silent musical language we found. It couldn't have happened any other way than online.

Last.fm was originally an independent start-up and it was then that the site was at its best. Its massive success led to it being bought by big corporate interests. From then on, as I saw it, rapid deterioration ensued. I deleted my account there long ago. Still, I will always remember it fondly as the place that launched my biggest musical adventure.

Receiving Paul's finished tracks was always a surprise, and so many times an emotional experience. It is emotional for me now that this meaningful project we've shared is coming to its end. A bittersweet collection of feelings is upon me. But in my world, film-making has been the primary creative focus all of my adult life, with the exception of these years singing for independent musicians. Film-making has once again come to the fore over recent years and is increasingly wanting more time than I can fit in my personal clock. Paul's reasons relate to time demands as well. His main and ongoing musical project has always been solo, and he works days in an increasingly demanding senior teaching job. We haven't released anything as Cwtch for two years, meanwhile continuing to contribute to each other's individual projects all the way to now.

We fully intend to keep on collaborating on our other projects in music and film, but the time has come to complete the circle on Cwtch, giving ourselves and listeners a sense of closure. So here it is, our final release, Ten from Ten, a retrospective of ten tracks from the many, highlights from our ten years as Cwtch.

Huge thanks to the writers who have been part of the ride. Ten from Ten includes lyrics adapted from original pieces by Travis Cooper, Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, Juanita Alvarez and James Brush. Other writers who have contributed their words to our music include Nigel Wells, Neil McCann, Adrian Carter, Reconsiderate and Gunda G. The remix artists who have created wonderfully different takes on our sound are so much appreciated as well. Further thanks to Matt Hetherington for the interest he expressed in hearing a collection of our best tracks, which inspired the creation of this album.

Above all, my endless thanks to Paul, beyond what words can say, for the profound musical meeting I have found with him, one of the great creative experiences of my life. I await with keen anticipation what we might do together next on our other projects.

Finally, as I see it, the cycle of music creation is not complete without an audience listening, possibly the greatest art of all. Deepest gratitude to all who have appreciated and responded to the songs we have created over the years as Cwtch*.

* Cwtch (sounding something like 'kutch'), is a Welsh word with no literal English translation. It might approximately be understood to mean a hug, or a safe place.

Videos: Half Measures, I Don't Own Anxiety, Poetry + Video, Rodeo Days

Several months have gone by since my last update here. 2019 has so far been the biggest year of my long creative life. Writing about what I have been doing has taken a low priority, but I'm glad to have now found some space and time to be back in the blogosphere with notes about the four videos released so far this year.

Half Measures

Full credits
Read the poem

Patrick James Errington's beautifully written, moving poem, Half Measures, was the script for this film. The project began life as a response to a call for entries to the Oxford Brookes Poetry Film Competition in the UK. The competition offered film-makers five poems to consider for adaptation. I chose Half Measures for its spare and direct writing style, along with a subject that had personal resonance from my experiences in childhood. The film took about a month from start to finish, working approximately full-time. My first consideration was a voice to speak the words. Happily, my good friend and collaborator, Matt Hetherington, agreed to do this. Matt lives about a half-hour's drive from my place, in the same general region of Australia. As well as having a great voice for poetry, he is a marvellous poet himself. We recorded a few takes on my home computer set-up, with him reading the poem in his deep, rich voice, and the film was off and running. The next step was to find a piece of music to accompany the voice, and the overall tone of the film. I began by listening to the recent album, The World of 'If', by my long-time music collaborator in Wales, Paul Foster, aka The Night Programme. On hearing the last track on the album, Barrel Organ, not listed as an official part of the release, but included as a hidden bonus to those who downloaded it, I felt I'd found my piece. To my amazement, when Paul's music file was laid out in my editing software along with Matt's recordings, there was a near-perfect fit of timings and beats, as well as harmonies between the notes of Matt's voice and the key of the music. The soundtrack was decided. For the moving images in the film, I went to the subscription-site, Videoblocks, that has a vast library of high quality, royalty-free footage for inclusion in film projects, each clip around 15 seconds long. Some film-makers have a distaste for 'stock footage'. I have no problem with it at all. For me, it is just one option among many that I employ to make poetry films, embracing the spirit of copyleft and creative commons, sometimes sourcing work in the public domain, as well as continuing many collaborations, mostly over the internet, with poets, musicians, makers of moving and still images, and voice artists from around the world. In fact, I find it a more difficult and interesting challenge to invent ways to bring together disparate elements from various sources in a way that feels coherent and organic, than working to plan with each element executed as envisioned in advance. Thankfully, Videoblocks is now giving the usernames and locations of contributing videographers. Shots in this film are from: Vadim Key (Belarus), bafan4u (Slovenia), Sergey Gribanov (Russia), barselona dreams (Russia), dapoopta (USA), Justin Tierney (USA), Kamila P (Poland), Oles Ishchuk (Ukraine), Pohodzhayproduction (Ukraine), Stock Media (Germany), and WeAre (Ukraine). Several long, happily-obsessive editing sessions later, the film was complete. The results of the competition were announced a week after the cutoff date for entries, a miraculously short waiting time compared to all other film events I've ever encountered. At this point I was over the moon to learn that my film had been awarded second place, with fellow film-makers, Gabrielle Turner (UK), taking first place, and Jane Glennie (UK) taking third place. Congratulations to them both.

I Don't Own Anxiety

Full credits
Read the poem

In 2017, I followed a series of videos appearing during the month of April, also known as National Poetry Month in the USA, a celebration that is global in various forms as well. These interesting pieces were being published daily by the Visible Poetry Project, based in New York. In mid-2018, I happened to see a call for film-maker submissions for the 2019 VPP series. I sent my application that same night. A few months later, I was delighted to have been selected as one of 30 film-makers from around the world to participate in this year's series. The process firstly involved reading a series of poems from 60 writers, and returning a shortlist of three poets I might like to work with. VPP soon announced that I was to collaborate with my top choice, the well-known US poet, Kelli Russell Agodon. Kelli and I then started communicating directly, and she sent me a larger collection of poems, three of which I felt drawn to adapt to the screen. I vacillated between two of them for a little while, until Kelli suggested I 'go with my gut'. At this point I knew the poem of choice would be I Don't Own Anxiety, But I Borrow it Regularly (eventually shortened to I Don't Own Anxiety for the film adaptation). I straight-away knew who I would most like to ask to voice the poem, and so I contacted poet and film-maker, Cindy St. Onge, with whom I've been fortunate to have prior collaborations. Cindy's readings of the poem were recorded by Eric Sorenson, both of them in Portland, Oregon. Eric had quickly responded to my call-out on social media for a technician in that city to assist with recording Cindy's voice. As always, Cindy's readings of the poem were sensitive, articulate and well-modulated - a joy to receive and work with them. VPP allocated a producer to our project, Alina Sodano, who monitored progress through a series of rolling deadlines leading towards the film's release date in April 2019. Alina was instrumental in securing the music I most wished for our film, a piece entitled Blames and Revelations, by Matt Howes & Dan Slatter, licensed for our project via Premium Beat. Footage for the film was sourced from royalty-free subscription site, Videoblocks, including work from their contributors, Vadim Key (Belarus), WeAre (Ukraine), ProStock (Slovenia), Oles Ishchuk (Ukraine), glowonconcept (Thailand), and Sergey Gribanov (Russia). Editing is my primary area of interest and pleasure in film-making, which accounts in large measure for my easy embrace of 'found media', such as may be sourced on licences like royalty-free, creative commons, copyleft, and public domain. Sourcing media in this way gives me legal permission to adapt, remix and re-create it in my non-commercial videos, each fragment given new life in the new contexts I create. As with Half Measures, written up earlier in this blog piece, the editing challenge for I Don't Own Anxiety was bringing together the diverse written, vocal, musical and visual elements, to create a film that, in its final form, felt organic and whole. Our film was released on 28 April and will continue to be distributed now with the other films in the 2019 series by the Visible Poetry Project.

Poetry + Video Premiere

Full credits

This is a mini-documentary shot by Nigel Wells, and edited by me, to record the world premiere event of the Poetry + Video project, at The Garden Gallery, Murwillumbah, Australia on 4 May. In addition to screening the video program itself, the event included two marvellous live poets, Matt Hetherington and Bronwen Manger, and an interesting end-of-night Q & A. The boutique venue booked-out a few days before the event, and we couldn't have hoped for a better audience: open, engaged and curious about this hybrid form of video and poetry that most who were there would never before have seen. Poetry + Video has been my major project this year. It is a touring program I have curated of 25 video poems from around the world, surveying diverse contemporary expressions of the form. A wide range of approaches includes: screen adaptations of page poetry, prose poetry, poetry from found text and media, animations, poetic cinema, text-on-screen, and spoken word. Next stop in the tour is Kathmandu in July, with more screenings to follow into 2020. The program is easily accessible to almost any location in the world via USB stick. No screening fees are involved for independent operators with little or no budget, and completely negotiable to those with funds. The primary purpose of the project is to expand awareness of video poetry, screening diverse and high quality work in as many places as possible. Any proceeds from screenings will be shared among the contributing artists, in a spirit of co-operation and collectivism. Read and download the brochure for venues here, or simply send us an email, and feel free to pass it on.

Rodeo Days

Full credits

Rodeo Days is about my Australian ancestry and identity, employing archival footage of 20th century rural life, given vibrant expression in a hybrid of experimental film, spoken word and music video. It is one of many internet collaborations over more than a decade with electronic music producer, Paul Foster, aka Dementio13 (among other monikers), in Wales. My father and his brothers and sisters lived through desperate poverty during a childhood in the Depression era of the 1930s. Their father abandoned the family, leaving their mother to take care of all six children alone and without work. As the four boys approached early adulthood, they took to the rodeo circuit, travelling wide distances between events, a life on the road. Talented horsemen, they became well-known as rodeo champions. Rodeo was powerfully enticing to poor country men, for its promise of status they were sorely lacking, and because of the money on offer. Prizes at rodeo events were sometimes 20 times the average wage for a rural worker. In the 1930s, crowds at these events could number up to 65,000 people. Newspaper reports record the many broken bones sustained by those rough riders, and worse. An oft-repeated family story recalls my uncle riding buckjumpers with a broken arm in plaster. The heroism of these men who were otherwise in the lowest strata of workers in society, was sometimes accompanied by alcoholism and family violence. Rodeo Days brings together my experiences of family life in my childhood, my father's memories of his rodeo days, and impressions about the history of anglo-Australian society and my place in it. The original video was made in 2011. In 2019, I have completely re-made it, with the benefit of another eight, highly productive years of video editing experience, and more advanced technology. It is a piece I feel particularly close to, for its personal content, as well as my own voice and words forming part of the soundtrack. The release of this video is in the lead-up to the final album release from Paul Foster and I as the music duo, Cwtch, a ten year collaboration via the internet between Wales (Paul) and Australia (me). Entitled Ten from Ten, the album will become free to listen and download from our Bandcamp and Soundcloud sites on 24 July, the day we both celebrate our birthday.

So far this year, there have been six screenings of my videos at international festivals and events. Multimedia Poetry Festival, London School of Economics, UK, screened Anatomy. Experimental Program, North Bellarine Film Festival, Australia, had a reprise session at Deakin University, screening The Sea. Newlyn Film Festival, UK, screened Misery. Cadence Video Poetry Festival, USA, screened Dictionary Illustrations, Misery, and Poem for Rent. Uprooted Poetry Films Program, Bristol Poetry Festival, UK, screened The Last Days. Poetry + Video touring program, Australia, screened Misery. Online publications so far this year have included: a piece I wrote in Moving Poems Magazine, USA, about judging the first Atticus Review Videopoem Contest; a piece by Guido Naschert about my video, Dictionary Illustrations, in Poetryfilmkanal magazine, Germany; publication of the video, 7 March, in ooteoote, Netherlands; publication of the video, The Last Days, in Rochford Street Review, Australia; and my review of Dave Bonta's Winter Trees videohaiku series, in Poetry Film Live, UK.

Until next time,
Marie

Videos: Misery, The Sea, Nightlight Ghazal

Working process notes on the three latest videos completed...

Misery


Full credits

Sarah Sloat creates hand-made visual art pieces that are also poems. She does this by using various techniques to 'erase' most of the words from pages of Stephen King's novel, 'Misery'. Her 'erasures' leave only scattered words around the page, forming small poems. To these, she adds found images, related to the poems in associative ways that might recall surrealism. With Sarah's permission and ongoing feedback, I have here selected a number of the visual poetry pieces and adapted them. The video of 'Misery' attempts to construct a fragmented narrative, or new poem, from the juxtaposition of the selected visual poetry pieces. It focuses strongly on the image components of Sarah's 'Misery' pages and creates a new form in motion with them. Not a strict 'presentation' of Sarah's visual poetry, the video is my response to their inspiration. Music is by Gurdonark, whose Creative Commons music I have been following for about eight years. Other videos I have made from Sarah Sloat's poetry are Dictionary Illustrations and Nightlight Ghazal.


The Sea


Full Credits

Sidney Irvine and I met on the web as fellow musicians in about 2008. Eventually we decided to form a 'cyber-duo', which we called PIXSID. I provided vocals for the music. Sid wrapped his experimental hip-hop sounds around them, and finalised the music production. Via email, we produced two albums, 'Atoms Apart' and 'Deliria Tang'. The music track for this video is 'The Sea', one of my favourites from 'Atoms Apart'. It is based on a poem by Juniper Roan, with their permission. For the image track, I animated and visually fragmented some superb images of sea and ocean from the royalty-free site, Unsplash. The full list of photographers is here. Then I fragmented the images further by jump-cutting to the music beats. In this way, the overall piece became a downtempo music video, fused with videopoetry and abstract art.


Nightlight Ghazal


Full credits

After making 'Dictionary Illustrations' some time ago, I was interested in further collaboration with poet and artist, Sarah Sloat. Through web searches I found her poem 'Nightlight Ghazal'. The piece struck a chord in me. I appreciated the wit, articulation and soul of the poem, and related to its subject. I contacted Sarah to ask permission to make a video of her poem, to which she agreed. For the vocal track, I approached videopoet, Cindy St. Onge. We had worked together previously when I put together a video for her poem, 'St. Umbilicus'. I appreciate the expressivity, intimacy and intelligence of her readings. After reading Sarah's poem, Cindy agreed to take part and sent me voice files to work with. For images, I turned to Carol Blyberg, whose wonderful photographs are published on Creative Commons licence at Flickr. Music is by Sidney Irvine (aka Dj Sid), an acid-jazz track called 'Paper Hearts'. Visually, I split the screen to lend a sense of disorientation in internal spaces, which is how I imagine the woman in the poem. I otherwise treated the still images simply, giving subtle motion via delicate zooms and dissolves. The intent was to evoke a kind of phantom woman, whose voice inhabits these interior spaces.

In festivals and events recently, my 1995 short, 'Maidenhead', was screened on original 35mm with the feature film, 'Desperately Seeking Susan', at the Australian Centre for Moving Image (ACMI), in Melbourne's 'Federation Square'. The films screened together twice as part of ACMI's 'Wonderland' exhibition, exploring various incarnations of the famous novel, 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'. This was a particularly exciting screening. It also coincided with several of my earlier short films on celluloid, including 'Maidenhead', being accepted into the ACMI archive. Among other things, this will mean I can finally upload some of my earlier shorts to the web in due course, once all archival processes are completed and I receive high quality digital files. This should happen sometime later in the year. Roughly at the same time as the ACMI screenings, film-maker, David King, included 'Orphanage' as part of an independently organised screening of shorts at 'Longplay', also in Melbourne.

Videos: 1000 Rubies, Human Resources, St. Umbilicus

In the past couple of months, three collaborative poetry videos have been completed...

1000 Rubies


Full credits

'1000 Rubies' is based on a music and poetry piece by Adrian Carter (Sheffield, UK), for which I provided spoken and sung vocals. The music was first released in 2008, on an EP of the same name, still available at the Internet Archive. This track has had a special place in my heart over these years and, revisiting it recently, I found myself beginning to make this video with it. In its final form, the piece is a hybrid of music video and poetry film. The images are from Unsplash, a website for highly creative photography from around the world, all made available for re-use on public domain licence. I selected and juxtaposed the images for their associative resonances with the words, and arranged them in an order to tell a kind of abstract, gestural narrative. I built up a visual motif in this video around the colour red, relating to the rubies of the title. In editing I added movement to the stills through zooms, reversal of framing, and jump cuts on the beats, like heart beats with the music. The one moving image sequence is from royalty-free site, Videoblocks. This was quite a time intensive project to make, mainly because I worked with each of the large number of stills individually. The video forms part of a group with my own sung and/or spoken voice on the soundtrack, including One Dream Opening Into Many, Poem for Rent, 7 March and I Drove to the River.


Human Resources


Full Credits

'Human Resources' is based on an erasure poem of the same name by Dave Bonta in the USA. Erasure poetry is the process of creating poems by selecting words from pre-existing texts. The original text here is sections of a CIA document from the 1980s, concerning mind control techniques. Dave's piece, original excerpts and erasures both, first appeared in 'The Other Bunny' journal online in March 2018. The video is made up substantially of this text on screen, overlaid on a delirious blend of movie images from the Prelinger Archives. I chose to 'mash up' two different films for this background. The first, and most visually recognisable, is 'Duck and Cover', a famous documentary film from the 1950s containing advice on how to take cover in the event of a nuclear blast. The second film is 'Destination Earth', an anti-communist animation also produced in the 1950s. Both films were 'doubled up', making four superimposed layers, sped up considerably, with some parts appearing in forward motion, others in reverse, and some images rotating so that they appear at odd angles throughout the piece. The rapid melee of images is designed to express the hallucinatory effect of mental confusion engendered by mind control. The music is a psychedelic piece by The Night Programme (aka Dementio13 and aka Paul Foster), another artist I've collaborated musically over the net for about a decade (he's in Wales, I'm in Australia). The track is entitled 'Cxxx2', from his album, 'Backup 010318'. The poem and video seem timely in this era of rampant fake news and unabashed propaganda.


St. Umbilicus


Full credits

'St. Umbilicus' is from a poem by Cindy St. Onge, and is one of my shorter video pieces. As well as a poet, Cindy is a maker of videopoems I admire. She also gave her voice to the soundtrack of this video. This is the second video I've made from Cindy's poetry. The first was 'Double Life'. The collaboration was closer on 'St. Umbilicus' and grew out of personal chats we had recently on Facebook and via email. These led to me expressing an interest in collaborating further, to which Cindy agreed. The poem is about the navel and its bodily reminder of our connection to our mother. To express this, I chose a very close, still image of a navel to be a 'frame' for a series of central images featuring mothers and children. The still image, which rotates slightly throughout the piece, was found on creative commons licence at Flickr. The artist is Linnéa Sjögren. The moving images contained within it are from 'Scenes at the Beach Club', a 1927 home movie from the Prelinger Archives. I selected historic images here to emphasise the timelessness of the theme. Music is by Chris Zabriskie, his 'Prelude No. 12' from the 'Preludes' album.

The videos continue to travel to festivals and events, and to find space in online journals. Since my last blog entry, 'Poem for Rent' screened at the Newlyn Film Festival in the UK. 'Solar Therapy' appeared in the final issue of 'Gnarled Oak' journal. Dave Bonta wrote a piece on 'Human Resources' that appeared on his site, 'Via Negativa'. Brisbane-based 'Bareknuckle Poet' journal featured 'Orphanage'. 'Atticus Review' featured three videopoems: 'Poem for Rent', 'Everything sleeps but the night' and 'First Grade Activist'. Very grateful for the interest here in Australia, and internationally.

Videos: Everything sleeps..., Orphanage, Don't Talk About It

Since my last update here a few months ago, I've put together two new videopoems and a music video. Some notes on the making of them...

Everything sleeps but the night



Full credits

Recently I've started going to a monthly poetry night, 'Alternator Poetry'. It's held at Currumbin on the Gold Coast, Australia, within driving distance of home. Through our mutual interest in this event, I've come to meet poet and musician, Matt Hetherington, and to collaborate. This is the second video I've put together incorporating his poetry. I'm writing about it first, because it was the closer collaboration between us. To get the ball rolling on this one, Matt sent me over a selection of audio via email. I was immediately drawn to the poem, 'Everything sleeps but the night', and Matt's vocal performance of it. It also came with an ace musical soundscape, composed by Melbourne producer, Miles du Heaume, and Zaziz (Matt himself in another guise). After more initial discussion by email, I set to work on an image track, first sourcing stock footage from the royalty-free site, Videoblocks. I went for night-time shots and interiors, layering different shots together like collage. A few of the image components were stills sourced on Creative Commons licenses from Flickr. One key shot was from mskrzyp via the Mazwai Creative Commons video site. I selected the images for associative resonances with the poem. I put them together in editing and added fx, aiming for an abstracted narrative, in sympathy with my perceptions of the poem's content. After I'd completed a first draft video, I sent it to Matt. He gave helpful feedback and I continued into further drafts of the video, refining the visual metaphors and the way they melted together into a flowing and complete piece. I sent the video back to Matt and, after a few more suggested changes, it was complete.


Orphanage



Full credits
Read the poem

Jumping back now to the first video I made with Matt Hetherington's poetry. I saw him perform for the first time at 'Alternator Poetry' and, afterwards, went searching on the net for more of his writing. Up came an arresting voice recording and poem, 'Orphanage', published at 'Qarrtsiluni'. At this time I'd not personally met or had contact with Matt, aside from seeing him perform the one time. As I've sometimes done before, I decided to put together a video with the poem 'on spec', ready to keep the project just between us if Matt didn't like it. I found footage from a 1954 marriage guidance film called 'Who's Right?', at The Prelinger Archives. I cut this together with Matt's voice and poem, along with a music track ('Massive Ambient Face') from Steve Kelly aka SK123 in the UK (by permission). The cutting together of music and voice came first in the process, followed by the cutting of the visual narrative. With the images, I selected only those parts of shots where the characters were not speaking. I refined this to moments when there were minimal gestures happening (eg. the turning of a head, standing up from a chair, spilling the contents of a glass, entering or exiting a room). I tried to construct an abstract narrative with these fragments, and paid a lot of attention too to the visual rhythms of these gestures, cutting visual movements, to movements in the sound, and to words and phrases in the poem. I chose to use a split screen, partly to maximise resolution on the low-res images, and partly because I felt it suited the 'he said/she said' narrative structure I was working with. Once I had satisfied myself with the editing, Dave Bonta (editor of Qarrtsiluni for the time it operated), was able to put me in email contact with Matt. I then sent Matt the video. He made some comments and I made a couple of minor changes. Then the piece was complete. During this communication we agreed to collaborate more closely on a new video, which became the one mentioned above, 'Everything sleeps but the night'.


Don't Talk About It



Credits

Steve Kelly, who I've already mentioned above for the music in 'Orphanage', has a number of musical identities on the net. One of them is Douglas Deep. For his latest album release under this moniker, 'Cytokinesis', Steve asked me via email to put together a music video for one of the tracks, basically giving me free rein to select as I pleased, and an open book on what to do with the images. I tried first of all with the title track of the album, but all my efforts led to a creative dead end there. It sometimes happens with videos. I have quite a number uncompleted. I look on them as practise for the better pieces. After that, I took a long break and tried again with this, the first track on the album, 'Don't Talk About It'. It's a great electronic dance track, one that I can happily hear over and over, as happens with video editing. I went to Videoblocks and sourced multiple versions of vintage and contemporary film/video 'countdown leaders'. I shuffled the shots around, slowing some down, speeding up others, to fit with the bars of the music. Then I started building up some image superimpositions. I played around for quite some time with this process, adding some fx to make the words and numbers that appeared in the shots more abstract. This relates to the theme of the spoken word fragments in the track, which are about listening, not talking. This is the video that finally emerged. I sent it to Steve for any suggestions. He liked it in its current form, and here it is. The whole 'Cytokinesis' album is available to hear and download at douglasdeep.bandcamp.com.

There have also been a number of videos at festivals and events over the past few months. 'Anatomy' screened at the Juteback Poetry Film Festival in the US, and at the MiX conference at Bath Spa University in the UK. 'Sometimes the Water' also screened at the Juteback festival. Both will be screened again at a Juteback encore screening on 7 October. 'Dictionary Illustrations', 'One Dream Opening Into Many' and 'Joining the Lotus Eaters' were screened again as part of the Ó Bhéal touring program at the Clare Island Film Festival in Ireland. On the net, my bio-filmography has been updated at the Melbourne Independent Filmmakers site. Candida Baker profiled me for Verandah magazine. Moving Poems featured 'Everything sleeps but the night'. Gnarled Oak featured 'In the Temple' and 'Death Meditation'. Writing Without Paper featured 'The Last Days'.

There's been exciting news about selections for forthcoming exhibitions too. I'll save that news for next time. Thanks to all involved in these projects!

Videos: I Drove to the River, In the Forest, Kitsch Postcards

Process notes on the video projects I've been involved with over the past few months...

I Drove to the River



Full credits
Read the original poem

This video is a bit different to those I've been focusing on for the past couple of years. Like the other videos I've put together over this time, it is based on poetry. But in this case the poem is put to electronic music incorporating my own sung and spoken vocals in the mix. The poem at the heart of the piece is 'God Bless Johnny Cash' by James Brush in Austin, Texas. It is from his 2016 collection, 'Highway Sky'. Music is by Cwtch, the long-standing 'cyberduo' of me and Paul Foster (aka Dementio13) in Cardiff, Wales. This is our first music together as Cwtch for a couple of years, and the first from our forthcoming music release based on poems from 'Highway Sky'. The original poem here was remixed for the music track and video, removing the last line and slightly altering the wording of some lines. We've also re-titled it to 'I Drove to the River', which is a better reflection of the feel of the music and video. These are all things James Brush has given his blessing to, both by email communication and by the release of his poetry collection on a Creative Commons remix licence. The main image - the one that opens and closes the video - is by Dizifilms, specialists in drone footage. I found this via the Creative Commons site, Mazwai. Other footage is from Videoblocks, royalty-free on subscription. The central section of the piece includes several images of rivers, to which I applied abstract fx. All of this adds up to a piece that is part video poem, part music video. At a little over seven minutes, this is the longest piece in duration within the body of poetry-based video work I've been assembling since 2014.

In the Forest



Full credits
Read the poem

Much closer to home, I was delighted when well-known Byron Bay writer, Candida Baker, contacted me recently with some lovely poems she thought might be of interest. She already had high quality voice recordings of her own readings, produced by Sunshine Coast musician and sound artist, Michael Whiticker, and some abstracted landscape photographs to work with as well. An attempt at creating a video poem was irresistible to me. This video, 'In The Forest', is the result. It is, again, a visually abstract piece. The effect of motion from still images was achieved by creating three layers, one static and two slowly zooming in opposing directions, and also by creating multi-layer dissolves between the images. I was struck by the beautiful colours of the Australian landscape that were captured in the original stills and was pleased for their colours and textures to become even more abstractly focused in the video images. The music is by Podington Bear, whose wonderful sounds I have included in videos before. These I've sourced from the many musical tracks available around the internet on Creative Commons license. The bird sounds are from Tai Inoue at Nature Sounds Australia in Cairns, from a download link he shared at Soundcloud with permission to re-use. The email collaboration with Candida Baker was very engaged and a joy from start to end. She and I will be meeting in person for the first time this week, when she interviews me for the online magazine she edits and publishes, Verandah. It's rare that I have the opportunity to meet internet collaborators and I'm very much looking forward to this. The profile will appear in an issue of the magazine in the near future.

Kitsch Postcards



Full credits
Read the poem

Of the three videos here featured, this one, 'Kitsch Postcards' was the most time-intensive to produce. This is despite the fact that it is a straightforward 'still image remix', with static images cut to fit the rhythm of a soundtrack. The poem is by Sydney-based Amanda Stewart, whose brilliant vocal performances are a specialty of her work. The recording was sourced from the marvellous German website, Lyrikline, which publishes poetry from around the world accompanied by voice recordings by authors. The stills in the video are from a large number of photographers, all making their work available for remix on Creative Commons license at Flickr. The full list of photographic artists featured in the video can be found here. What made the image cut especially time-intensive was, firstly, the decision to cut very quickly and precisely to the rhythm of Amanda Stewart's vocal phrases. This led to the really intensive part: finding satisfying, legally-available images to relate to each one of these phrases. The soundtrack is led by Amanda Stewart's vocal performance, underpinned by didgeridoo drone from Frankenflute, sourced again on Creative Commons license from freesound.org. Mixed with this is an edited field recording by Sydney-based, Technai, also Creative Commons licensed. I put together the video in draft form and then approached Amanda Stewart with it to ask permission to release it publicly. I was fully prepared that she may or may not like what I'd done and was ready to view it all as a private video-making exercise if permission was not given. Fortunately she agreed, if I was able to gain permission too from Lyrikline, who own the rights to the voice recording. This was kindly granted and they also helped further by providing a high quality .wav version of the voice recording. As an artist who has most often collaborated internationally, I am finding it very rewarding at present to be involving myself more in Australian poetry.

Videos: Transmission, Double Life, The Meeting Ran Long

Several months have passed since the last news from me here. But the new year has given rise to three new video-poetry remixes. Here are some notes on the conception and editing of them.

Transmission



Full credits
Read the poem

Many of the video poetry remixes I've put together since 2014 have included the wonderful voice of Nic S. Via The Poetry Storehouse and other websites, she has made recordings of poetry available to remixers to freely work into their own creative endeavours. Here Nic reads Ashleigh Lambert's poem, 'Transmission'. For me the poem generated thoughts about the ways so many of us now present our identities to the world via computer and mobile technology. I went to the royalty-free media site, Videoblocks, to find suitable images and was drawn to three time-lapse shots showing the interior of a car as it drives through city streets. I heard Adrian Carter's instrumental track 'Dark Ray' around the same time and started experimenting with putting together the media. First I edited the instrumental and voice together for the soundtrack, slightly rearranging the words for a better musical fit. I then edited the images in rhythm with the soundtrack, transforming them over four-screens, extending their duration and using fx to create something abstracted and kinetic. Once a first draft of the video was done, Adrian made a more skilled job of mixing the voice and the instrumental, slightly editing my original voice placement and adding some new sounds to the mix. I then made a second draft of the video from this new version of the soundtrack. This turned out to be the final video. Adrian has since produced an extended version of the soundtrack that can be heard as a stand-alone music piece here. Thanks to Dave Bonta at Moving Poems for featuring the video on that great site. It will also appear in the next month or two as part of the multimedia literary journal, Gnarled Oak.

Double Life



Full credits
Read the poem

About May last year I read Cindy St. Onge's paradoxical poem, 'Double Life in REM State'. The memory of it stayed with me over several months. Then, searching the Prelinger Archives towards the end of last year, I found a 1940s film advertisement photographed in a noir style that I thought might work with the written piece. The ad also had an espionage theme that I felt drawn to in relation to the poem. I selected key shots and slowed them down, and created two mirrored screens from the single images. I then changed the synchronisation on them so that the femme fatale was seen to be following herself in her mirror world. I wanted too to create a greater sense of 'dream time' to follow the themes of the poem. The music is by Purple Planet, otherwise known as Geoff Harvey and Chris Martyn. It's a track called 'Slowly Creeping' that, along with other music, is available for free use in video projects from their website. For logistical reasons related to available footage and duration of music, I took a lot of liberties with the text of the original poem in this video remix, performing a kind of 'erasure' or distillation. This I presented as subtitles to an otherwise 'silent film' with music. The poet, Cindy St. Onge, is also a video maker. Her wonderful videopoems can be seen here.

The Meeting Ran Long



Full credits
Read the poem

After putting together a first videopoem last year based on the poetry of Eric Blanchard, I went exploring more of his writing to be found on the web. I was especially drawn to a prose poem called 'The Meeting Ran Long', published in Literary Orphans. The piece created for me a sense of daydreaming in an empty room in a transitional moment of solitude, evoking a short stream from the unconscious mind. I started experimenting with how I might present this as text on screen and settled on simply deconstructing the written piece into component phrases that might reveal or give rise to new resonances in the unconscious spaces of the writing itself. Once I had transferred all the text to the screen, I cut the visual phrases to an experimental music piece by C.P. McDill, a sound artist whose work I have followed and admired since about 2008. The track, 'Iced Coffee', was sourced from The Internet Archive, where it is freely available for remixing on Creative Commons licence. For the images I went to Vimeo and did some searches on key words in their large pool of videos also available for remixing via Creative Commons. I discovered the work of the Mono No Aware group and selected three hand-processed films by Rachael Guma, Ashley Swinnerton and David Beard. Aside from being wonderful experimental film pieces in themselves, each flowed in a kinetic way that reminded me of the pace of thoughts, memories and images as they flow through a human brain. I put these together with a universal film leader from an old vaudeville show to come up with a first draft of the video. I then sent it to the poet to ask his permission to proceed with a final version. Eric kindly agreed. After a little reworking, this is the video that emerged.

Videos & music: VTOL, Creased, Pollution, Rodeo Days

Today the new Dementio13 album, 'VTOL', is released to the web. It's a collaboration album involving several musicians across continents, making it an interesting detour in this usually solo musical project. Artists involved include Nita Disaster, Douglas Deep, Alone, Snippet, Ian Thistlethwaite and Alun Vaughan. I'm lucky enough to have been part of it too. The whole thing is available to download 'name your price' (including free).



VTOL has already generated some excitement pre-release. John Toolan and Mark Whitby have reviewed it here and here. The track 'Pollution' has been previewed on Dandelion Radio. I've also been swept up in the enthusiasm. Aside from contributing voice to one of the tracks, I've been busily making a few DIY music videos, sourcing old movie footage (mostly) from the public domain.





We hope you enjoy...