Nine final mixes from "Sydney Highrise Variations"

Adam Long and I worked all day and night yesterday on final mixes for our poetry score to The Sydney Highrise Variations.

mp3s

"On its vaulting drum"
Three Fried Men

“Also, it’s a space probe”
Three Fried Men
with Christopher Y. Voelker

“The new city standing on its haze”
Three Fried Men
with Les Murray

“Vanished from the central upsurge”
Three Fried Men
with Les Murray

“Employment and neckties and ruling themes”
Middle Sleep
with Thom Fletcher and Stefene Russell

"In ambiguous battle at length"
Another Umbrella
with Les Murray

“Worldwide breath of catching up”
Three Fried Men

“Skill and the shadow”
Middle Sleep
with Les Murray

“Six hundred glittering and genteel towns”
Middle Sleep
with Chris King and Heidi Dean

A highlight from the session.

"The new city standing on its haze" is built from a crudely recorded guitar tap, of Lij picking out a chord progression in Nashville who knows how many years ago, onto some primitive tape recorder. I dubbed Les Murray's reading onto it - a reading recorded in Long Island City - in the spare bedroom of Matt Fuller's sister in Hollywood.

So this crude recording had music from Nashville, dubbed in Los Angeles with an Australian reading in New York. That still, somehow, wasn't enough. It wanted some city sounds. So Adam positioned one (high-performance) mic out the back door and another out a window.

It rained steadily, so we get more water than city, but that's okay, for a watery poem about a harbour city; in this stretch of the poem, Les yammers about the "ship-chained harbour" and "flooded valley".

Worked for me.