Marinetti (ACMI screening, & OST CD liners)

Albie Thoms' Marinetti was the culmination of the synthetic environments that the UBU group had pioneered in Australia; festive public 'happenings' that combined the energy and volume of creative rock and jazz with the mesmeric effect of multi-dimensional lightshows. Another kind of culmination: Marinetti records most of the principal collaborators in the UBU film group, like Aggy Read and the Perrys. Uniquely valuable as a document of Australia's late 1960s counter-culture, the soundtrack provides the best indication of the unrestrained liberty that bands like Tully and the John Sangster Underground band - some of whose members perform on this recording - were famously achieving in their improvisations of the period.

This is the sound of the acid-stained Down Underground. Led by the irrepressibly eccentric multi-instrumentalist, John Sangster, the sextet of players included veterans of Sydney psych ensembles Tully and the Nutwood Rug Band, as well as accomplished sidemen from the Don Burrows and Bernie McGann groups. By the time they improvised the soundtrack recording to a screening of the film, guitarist Michael Barnes was performing alongside Sangster for the Harry M Miller production of Hair. Tully mainstay, Rick Lockwood, can be heard on flute, sax, and a raucously untutored violin. New Zealand expatriate, Dave McRae, would further explore the sound of organ enhanced by outboard effects in his later work with UK jazz-prog group, Nucleus, and Daevid Allen's post-Soft Machine Matching Mole; for several years he was musical director for British comedy series, The Goodies. Drummer, Alan Turnbull, was a member of the classic Burrows quartet. George Thompson, on bass, would record again with Sangster in support of Sister Janet Mead's landmark album of inspirational christian pop.

The inital tone of the soundtrack is idyllic in its gentle lyricism, and the naive candour of overheard conversation. Across the next 80 minutes Harry Medax builds the mix - up to 6 additional tracks woven over and around the musicians - towards a crescendo of cacophonous simultaneity... Birdsong and the barking of dogs collide with fragmented needle-drops of The Doors and The Beatles. There are whispered reassurances, anguished shouts, and the wholesale reprise of Thoms and Gerry Dupal's musique concrete composition, De Moon Service, originally realised as accompaniment to sculptor (and computroid, from ABC TV's SciFi series, Interpretaris) Gordon Mutch's film, Hallucinagenia. A moment of Ravel's Bolero, start of reel 3, wryly harkens to one of Thoms' earliest shorts.

Beyond the threshold of conscious perception, Thoms launches his audience into a maelstrom of sound and vision. The group delirium unspooling in the dark is consistent with his notion of a 'cinema of cruelty': the resort to a course of homeopathic madness prescribed by Antonin Artaud. The film certainly has people; 'characters' even, and aplenty - but no actual characters as such. Rather than something as facile as telling a story, the film is a distilled concentrate of lysergic impression, a sacrament of celluloid metaphysics.

(et cetera etc!)

40th anniversary screening, Saturday afternoon at the ACMI. Director, Albie Thoms in attendance. Not for the puny-lobed!

And: premiere release for the soundtrack, on CD from Roundtable - new joint venture of James from Votary, and Jeff from Round and Round Records. Available at the screening this weekend.

Details of launch party to follow...

Shortly: even more unimagined Sangster gems, pried from the archives...

Sven Libaek - Solar Flares (liner notes)

Antipodean tones for mental healing. AD 1974, and launched from beneath the Southern Cross, these easeful midnight notes of writhe-time funk describe a singular document of Australian space jazz. Skipper Libaek navigates starlight spaceflight by that fourfold twinkle; his crew - the brightest luminaries of local session players - stretch out & settle into orbit.

Norwegian-born Libaek was already a young veteran of film and television scoring in his adopted homeland, lending an outsider's ear to striking interpretations of the alien landscape. At the prompting of his publisher, Southern Music, he recorded My Thing, an LPs worth of stock music for their Peer Southern imprint. The licensing sucess of that record led to this outer-space-themed successor.

This album's synthetic enhancement heralded a uniquely Australian innovation: the Qasar II duophonic analogue/digital synthesizer. Sydney inventor, Tony Furse, had designed the modular keyboard unit with R&D funding from the Australia Council, and resource support from Don Banks at the Canberra School of Music. Perhaps heard at its best on the eponymous track 7, the Qasar II delivers not only wobulating funk, but devastating treatments of George Golla's electric guitar lines. Libaek utilised the Qasar synths extensively across soundtrack recordings for the Boney and Inner Space television series; Furse would later partner with fellow Sydney entrepreneurs and inventors on the development of the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument...

(etc etc etc!) ...
So I had to scare up some infos on this synth. Sven remembered only that it was a kind of Fairlight prototype, but the session dates put this quite a few years in advance of the CMI.

I rang Rob Fox (who is a genius, if you hadn't already realised this).

"Australian-designed and manufactured analogue synth. Recorded in Sydney, '74. Probably a one-off model. There's a Fairlight connection. What is it?"

And the Fox: "Hmmm, well if it was recorded in Canberra it could be the Qasar... That one was an analogue Fairlight ancestor, but I don't know of any recordings. Apparently it had a unique sound; something to do with the circuitry [at this stage, I'm thinking: bingo!]... Don Banks also had a Moog IIIA there... And in Sydney, and around that time, all I can think is that it would be an ETI 4600 - which is also the first synthesizer I built myself. They used to sell in kit form. There were a lot of custom-mod varieties, so it could be one of those..."

So I hit the infobahn. ETI 4600 is a fascinating instrument, right era, and a Fairlight link in designer Kim Ryrie. But the epiphany was the title of synth workout, track 7: Quasers. OK! A clue... So, looking around for background on the Qasar, I discover an earlier (non-Canberra-based) model. One of these, near as I can figure, somehow came to be a frequent visitor at Spencer Lee's studio. Libaek's 3 vinyls are perhaps the only commercially-released (and this one, not so commercial at that) recordings made with it.

Here's what it looked like:

"Second variety":

Damned useful website, with infos of Don Banks' EMS & the Qasar, can be found here

Anyways. Its available now, on lobe-enhancing vinyl, from Votary Disk. Limited to 500.

Somehow I wrote the liners (which I like to think are not so shabby) in an all-night writing jag between 2 days shaking at the end of a jackhammer, at the end of a week working on a construction site... I emailed them in, caught a quick shower, wolfed a bowl's worth of cereal & made straight to work for the 7am start.

Delirious with lack of sleep... I remember the foreman giving me some instructions later in the morning: I tried not to blink-my-eyes-open too gratuitously, and hoped my swaying side-to-side was not disconcertingly noticable.

Lunch time. I put a new pair of earplugs in. "Please don't wake me till we're back on". Folding my head into my arms on the table. The power of nap!

So. Quitting time, later that afternoon... Sean Healy pulls up in a borrowed ute: we hit the road & head for the Golden Plains Festival site... So I can install the outdoor cinema. Keerist...!