This page records information about performances (including short MP3 samples) of the artists associated at various times with the Is Land enterprise including:

Jkennedy //..// Audible 3 m.chest Omit James McCarthy The Drums + Machines Project
Sleepy Village Ensemble Paul Winstanley Sci-hi Greg Malcolm Tom Rodwell The Smile Plough
Andrew McMillan

The archive reaches back at present to October 1999. Information will gradually be posted going further back and into earlier work of Is Land associates. We also recommend a look at these links for further fragments of Is land past and present. Click photos for enlargement.

Unless noted otherwise the performances have taken place in Auckland.

But first...

AUDIBLE 3 -
J Kennedy - drum machine, md player
m.chest - sampler, cd player
p.h. L’Casta - bass-triggered synth, turntable, fx processor

1. Blenheim - a single continuous drone is reprocessed and supplemented by AUD 3. Drone provided by OMIT(Clinton Williams). There will be more collaboration with OMIT in 2001.

2. Block - a more aggressive and eventful version of the improvisation process employed in 2 previous AUD 3 concerts.

3. Baby Planet Nuclei - all AUD 3 sound is fed into Paul’s digital hall of mirrors. With the fx allowed to drive the piece, it grows a hidden life and yields some unforeseen dynamics.

PROGRAMME NOTES

Greg Malcolm and John Kennedy met in Palmerston North in 1987. They were both playing in rock groups but shared an enthusiasim for non-conformist and improvised music, stirred on by contact with the Wellington free jazz scene of the late-80’s.

Their first concerts as a duo were in Palmerston North and Wellington in the summer of 1987/8. As well as completely improvised music, they played extended instrumentals and also Greg’s performance poetry.

Separate personal circumstances lead to them both relocating to Christchurch in 1988 and forming the group Don’t Make Noise with Paul Sutherland. This group played entirely improvised material and gave more than 20 performances in Christchurch over a two year period.

John also joined Greg’s instrumental rock group One Leg Too Short, who frequently performed in Christchurch and gave two national tours over the same period, until their demise in early 1990.

While they have continued to energetically pursue their own unconventional musical interests, Greg and John have not performed together since then.

"Greg Malcolm’s concert was an exciting melange of sound played on prepared guitars and incorporating other sound effects produced by a tambourine played with the foot, mini fans, e-bow, a second guitar on the floor and even a guitar lead connected to an amplifier ‘plugged’ into the nose.Every sound, every auditory expression had a place and a part in a sound experience which ranged across the spectrum of sentiment from the cacophonous to the incredibly hauntingly melodious, evoking and stirring in turn the entire spectrum of sentiment and emotion. As John Cage said in his interviews with Danial Charles in For the Birds, "why should music be limited? The entire world which must be made into music .... those sounds, whatever they are, are worthy to be heard."

"Greg Malcolm has given every sound a meaningful place in the world, and he has executed this with sensibility, style and humour. He has transcended our slim scope of acceptability and moved music to an altogether new plane in which our limited terms of reference are at once disturbed and readjusted for a truely democratic accommodation of sound.With his friend and guest performer, percussionist John Kennedy, a new interactive dimension of sound was explored, and further extended the versatility of sound, its capacity to create dialogue while remaining spontaneous and free from conventional conversational patterns of music which can be formed in other improvised styles such as jazz." Review from Loud #5

THE SLEEPY VILLAGE ENSEMBLE -
p.h. L’casta - bass synth, fx processor
JKennedy - drum machine, tapes
//..// - reel-to-reel , tape recorder, md player

Bellan was an exhibition of bells and bell-related art work organised byJennifer Matheson. On the last night of the exhibition the SV Ensemble gave a continuous 5 hour performance. Bells from the gallery and sampled bells and related bell sounds were looped, layered, distorted and projected into the space from a tiny workshop in the back of the gallery. A rich and spatially diverse array of ringing rhythms and tumbling tones.

Tom Rodwell - guitar; Paul Winstanley - bass, synth etc

JAMES McCARTHY - sun drum

"James gave a ten-minute performance of exquisite percussion on his visually and soncially stunning Sun Drum. The drum is a large drum in a Japanese Taiko style on a stand with wooden poles protruding ray-like around its shell. Lit from behind, both drum and poles are played. The sounds are polyrhythmic, dynamic and generously offered to excite the audience - the essence of great drumming." JKennedy

AUDIBLE 3 -
J Kennedy - drum machine
m.chest - sampler, cd player
p.h. L’Casta - bass-triggered synth, turntable

St Columba is an old brick church in the heart of trendy Grey Lynn. A somewhat soulful focus to this bustling suburb on the fringe of Aucklands commercial core.

"Multiple PA’s were used. Each player had their own proximate stereo amplification and the entire sound went though a larger system with speakers at the front and back of the church. Gave a very deep, but somewhat disorientating listening situation - where was that sound???

"We played for over an hour with the a improvisation based around a simple process of passing responsibility for steering the course of the playing unidirectionally from player to player. The process comes gradually apart and by the end it is a very fluid situation. Highlights - seagull pile up, ghost radio choir, sentimental subway electronica, leggo contraption with laser drone, creeping organ and fireworks in slow-motion finale." J Kennedy

AUDIBLE 3 -
J Kennedy - drum machine
m.chest - sampler, cd player
p.h. L’Casta - bass-triggered synth, turntable

"The first time we played together. No rehearsal, just the idea of each of us taking the lead role for about half an hour, in an improvised performance. 1. "Never Look Up" was Marc’s piece which was a live remix of the source cd’s of sounds from his gallery work and subsequent cd-r release of the same name. Re-layering or re-assembly would be a more accurate term for the light touch Marc employed, letting the wide array of sounds play breathe and bump against each other while Paul and I scattered punctuations and commentary into the mix. 2. Slow Learner vs. Big Laughing Dust combined mine and Paul’s segments and here we got into what I have come to descibe as the "parallel sound steams approach". All moving in the same direction sometimes independently but always with momentum maintined by the dynamics of convergence (tones reflecting, pulses merging, or unisons of sometimes sharp transition) and divergence. There is a 20-minute core in the performance that is my favourite music from the groups so far. Over an untracable broken robot pulse, Paul’s hypnotic tone loops unfurl and entwine the music, diving and twisting like wrestling a snake towards a long decaying closing section.

"Another nice thing that happened was that I had at the last minute scattered these small Balinese playing cards around the performance space. Afterwards an audience member explained to me some of the rich iconography on the cards from various eastern sources, which until then I had been entirely unaware of." JKennedy

John Kennedy - drums and drum machine; Marc Chesterman - drums and sampler

OTHER INSTRUMENTS ETC. Telefunken Cassette Recorder; Roland 660 Drum Machine; Craig Reel-to-reel Tape RecorderFostex 4 -track; Peacock; Dictaphone; Telephone Bells; Sampler; Wok Lid; Chair Spring; Door Siren; Echo Killer; Casio SK1 Sampling Keyboard; DOD Digital Delay; Saw Blades; Boss Graphic Equaliser; JVC Speakers; Bamboo Slit Drum; Ghetto Blaster; Thumb Piano; Record Player; CD Player; Shure SM 57 Microphones; Drum Kits & Cymbals;

RECORDING SOURCES Kids and cans, downtown Christchurch 1988; First and second plays, Devonport May - June 1996; Kids and cymbals, OSCAR in St Albans, Christchurch 1989; Indian rhythms 45; Huia small sounds 1998; Wash tub

Reflections on the Drums and Machines Project

More then three years on from when Marc and I first played together, I can’t remember what I thought a drum-kit duo would be like. I had heard Marc’s Sone recording and liked its restraint and sense of space - this being an unusual quality of expression for music that featured drums! "More of this please" I thought, and off we went.

The machines first entered in the form of my improvisations on drum machine. Marc had been creating and playing samples for a while already and I was very enthusiastic for his sampler to be in the music too.

For me however the most significant machine always has and always will be the tape recorder. Listening back has driven the development of my musical approach for as long as I can remember. This was a natural way for me to go given 1) my love since childhood of listening to records and 2) my very small amount of conventional musical training. Aside from a short but precious period of learning some drum kit rudiments, recording sound has been my main method of learning how to compose music - you know, organised sound (thanks Mr V.).

My recordings have included a terrible amount of my own playing - on my own and with others. Most of these tapes never see daylight, but more and more of them are leaking back into the music I create now.

Marc and I have a number of strong commonalities - both drummers, both dissatisfied with conventional music approaches, both avid sound recorders. But most important for me is the way we love to listen to, recycle, re-edit, replay and generally mess about with our "sound libraries" as part of the method by which we put together new music. Recording feeds our composing.

So we got quite involved in recording (and editing, re-processing, distorting, manipulating) as an end in itself - the creation of the finished recordings which have ended up as the drumsmachine CD (more info. on how these recording were made is included in the CD booklet).

Our more recent playing has taken these recordings and the processes involved as starting point for a live performance work. As we were mainly playing drums again, a more a drum-based work re-asserted itself. We seem to have made a circle back to those first times we played. And we’ve realised more of the "drum kit duo" concept in the last few months than we did in the previous three years!

But I also hope that we have managed to convincingly integrate into these "post techno" percussion works some of the resonance that we find in sounds stored and later recalled. It is this resonance that is the origin of our invented tradition - from this place where nearly all music seems strange, comes the expressive content that matters most to me. Jkennedy