The Burn That Ukulele! series is one of several projects that have been idling at the edges for over a decade. I haven’t tended to these projects because they all involve retrospective recordings, and my focus has been on creating (ie inundated by) new material. This year however has opened a very different process, one […]
Burn That Ukulele! Vol 2 & 3: Uke Transmissions 2011 – 13 Read More »
(NB: I use the term ‘teacher’ here as a convenient reference, but it might be more accurate to say I was a ‘facilitator of creative learning experiences’. Either way, my central motivation and passion was to share skills, ideas and inspiration with others, through creative play, curiosity and discovery.) From 1990 to 2017 my main
An Overview of My Teaching Life Read More »
Burn That Ukulele! Vol 1 is the first part of a retrospective project that’s been lurking at the fringes for quite awhile. It contains 22 tracks, and at 1 hour 20 mins I guess it constitutes a ‘double album’. My decision to release it now is due to a much larger life process, of revisiting
Burn That Ukulele! Vol 1: Uke Transmissions 2011-13 Read More »
The recordings on Textured Monotonies V have actually been ready for release since Dec 2022, but the many-tentacled beast that is life added multiple layers of entanglement that caused the album to wait in the wings for a bit. Musicking is how I respond to and integrate the process of living, and sometimes the more
Textured Monotonies V (2023) Read More »
The pieces on Burial Grounds emerged as part of the same process that produced Making Peace I & II and Looking For Light, and conceptually they carry elements of the same themes. This album explores how a place (land / house) can accumulate layers of historical trauma, and how the energies of that trauma can
Burial Grounds (2023) Read More »
Looking For Light contains many layers of meaning for me, all relating to my experience of living in a particular place over the months between July 2022 and March 2023. The album emerged at the same time as three others (Making Peace I & II, and Burial Grounds), and all are meditations on the same
Looking For Light (2023) Read More »
My musicking process / continuum is unavoidably autobiographical, always reflecting some aspect of whatever life events my ‘self’ is experiencing at the time. I think of my albums more as creative journals and sketchbooks, drawing and writing in sound. The act is immediate, grabbing snatches of life as it swirls, rumbles, whizzes, grinds and shudders
Making Peace I & II (2023) Read More »
As my musicking meanders across, between, and in spite of, so many styles, and my album catalogue is something of a wild garden, I thought it might be less daunting for some folks if I grouped my recordings into a few categories for easier exploration. I’ll update new releases to the list whenever I remember
A Musical Map: Easy User’s Guide? Read More »
There’s more than a few threads to the creation of this series, but I’d like to start with the coagulent, the binding agent, as it were. A while ago I met a highly intelligent young autistic man with a gift for written language and astute observation. He was also acutely sensitive and found social interaction
Textured Monotonies series I – IV (2023) Read More »
This third sampler in the Rock Samples series has been sitting around for awhile, adjusting its geological shape over time, allowing its various strata to settle. Rock Samples Vol 3 is curated from earlier albums as well as newer albums released after Vol 2 (2019). The pieces on Vol 3 form a geological slice that
Rock Samples Vol 3: More sculpted grit & gravel Read More »
Because, Remember is in part a meditation on memory: its fragmentary nature to begin with, and its unavoidable fragmentation over time. In particular, it explores the memory of a time that my children can’t even remember having with me. As an aging parent, I feel a strong undercurrent of sadness and loss in knowing that
Because, Remember (2022) Read More »
I’m putting these two albums together here as both of them surfaced at roughly the same time, overlapping in their creation in the space of a month or two. Both are continuing a kind of jazz exploration that began on the previous Displacement Ritual album; Angles Of Entry perhaps has a more abstract and agitated
Angles of Entry / Hillbilly Spacejazz (2022) Read More »
A restless ceremonial jazz journey, exploring physical, emotional & psychic displacement. Moods shift in fluid ripples or jagged left-turns, dreamlike, coiling and slithering through moments of harmonic repose, fragmentary riffing and freeform dissonance. Initially recorded over a couple of days, in the thick of a very difficult & distressing house-move, and developed around one meandering
Displacement Ritual (2022) Read More »
In 2013 I began to synthesise a range of teaching techniques I’d been testing & refining over many years, into a process I called thINK Draw Connect Learn, or thINK for short. You can read more about thINK here. The thINK Process includes deconstructing drawing into abstract ‘Elements‘ and modelling how these simple building blocks
SCHOOL OF CARTOON ARTISTRY: Cartoon Workshops Designed To Make You THINK! Read More »
A DIFFERENT WAY TO thINK ABOUT DRAWING thINK is an educational drawing process and a set of creative learning tools I developed as a metacognitive teaching model for my students. It evolved over a lifetime of deep observation of my own drawing processes, and decades of teaching creative thinking via the art of cartoon drawing.
thINK Draw Connect Learn Read More »
Plenty of cartoonists have offered ‘how-to-draw’ workshops on ways to capture emotion in cartoon faces. Often the ‘workshop’ is more of a demonstration or performance – the style is quick and sketchy, a quick fix aimed at entertainment rather than learning, and usually intended to promote the cartoonist’s latest book or other product. Of course,
Creative Communication: Cartooning for Emotional Literacy Read More »
Some of my albums have no particular story, no underlying thematic glue or particular point of inspiration when I’m creating them. I might impose an identity on these albums after the fact, but they really just exist as exercises in sound and composition for their own sake. Crucible is one such. There are, however, two
Once again, a combination of disparate ingredients organically converged to bring about this new collection of musical explorations, Kro Gnosis. I began these recordings immediately after completing the Temple album, which marked a return to actual recording (ie using a microphone & playing real instruments again, rather than collaging existing recorded materials, or generating sounds
The emergence of the Temple recordings began with an unexpected musical gift from my partner Heidi: a beautiful 17-note kalimba (thumb piano). I had mentioned to her quite awhile back that I’d like a kalimba to experiment with, so I was especially delighted when she surprised me with it. I didn’t engage with playing it
After the fun I had frankensteining Asp Burger ReMangled (in which I ‘remangled’ tracks from my 2018 Asp Burger album), I felt inspired to continue this approach of musical cut-up / collage on the album that grew directly out of Asp Burger – namely, Gringo! As I’m still in the gradual process of rehabilitating a
For A Few Gringos More (2022) Read More »
While these two albums certainly both share qualities of atmospherics, spacious soundscaping and ambient textures, they are both stylistically distinct from each other. Part of why I’ve included them together in this post is that they also share the somewhat dubious quality of being ‘rehashed’, even if in different senses. I’ve written elsewhere about cannibalising
Other spaces: Postnebulism / Uncertainty Box (2021) Read More »
More soundtracks to limbo, stasis & suspension – in this case, the grinding halt of a broken wrist, the physical restrictions of doing things onehanded or not at all, the slow process of allowing the body to heal. Coming to terms with not being able to play guitar, maybe for months, maybe not ever. A
Other spaces: One Hand Three Ears (2021) Read More »
It took me many years to get used to drawing on any kind of large scale, especially anything larger than A2 size. Several different experiences helped free me up in this area; in particular, when I began running cartoon workshops in schools, drawing on large blackboards (remember them?) and whiteboards in front of a class.
Murals & public art Read More »
As described elsewhere in this archive, the 90s were a creatively prolific period for me, and I developed simultaneously in many directions, and through many different media. Most of my focus was on the four strands of esoteric art I was developing – Essence Portraits, Power Symbols, Personalised Mandalas & ‘cave paintings’ – but I
Cartoon illustration: Funky 90s Read More »
At various times during the early 90s, in an entrepreneurial effort to generate some income from my cartoon art, I designed and self-published several series of gift cards & cartoon art prints. Self-publishing, in this case, meant spending what little money I had on laminated colour photocopies (not particularly cheap back then), and hawking them
Cartoon illustration: Card designs Read More »
Even as a five year old I was a keen observer of human behaviour, often coupled with a sense of the absurd, so it’s not surprising that caricature became part of my cartooning repertoire from an early age. Comics and cartoons, to a child of my interests, were a form of sociological and psychological text,
Cartoon illustration: Caricature Read More »
Over the years my illustration has often found a home in various areas of health & well-being, with clients ranging from government health services, mental health organisations, educational ‘well-being’ projects through to private practitioners and community arts projects. My empathic nature, my sense of social conscience, along with my personal insights from lived experience (long-term
Cartoon illustration: Health & well-being projects Read More »
In the early 90s I began journaling my dreams, inspired by Jungian dream analysis and accounts of lucid dreaming, as another tool for communicating with my subconscious. I had often found that certain dreams offered important insights or solutions to events in my life, and several times even predicted an event. I developed a habit
Esoteric art 4: Cave paintings (1992 – 94) Read More »
My understanding of mandalas as ‘maps of consciousness’ probably began somewhere in 91 or 92, through the work of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and others; I also learned that the use of mandalas (a symbolic drawing or design within a circle) appears not only in Tibetan Buddhism but in the sacred art of ancient cultures
Esoteric art 3: Personalised mandalas (1995 – 96) Read More »
The previous post describes a period during my mid-20s to late-30s, of self-discovery and transformation , and how these ‘reprogramming’ experiences shifted some of my creative work into more esoteric or transpersonal art and design. My first few years in Melbourne brought me into contact with a number of people involved in the ‘new age’
Esoteric art 2: Personal Power Symbols (1992 – 97) Read More »
In 1990 a very different kind of illustration emerged in my work, and continued to develop throughout the 90s in the form of personalised ‘esoteric’ artworks – portraits, symbols and mandalas intended to reflect and affirm the deeper nature of the individual they were designed for. Before I continue, I feel it’s important to set
Esoteric art 1: Essence Portraits (1990 – 92) Read More »
Often, by way of amusing myself, I assemble my recording experiments around a particular play on words, and the oddly-connected thoughts I encounter while working on the music, as I roll the idea around in my mind. The tracks on Occupy Your Mind have been rallied together under just such a tenuous link, like the
Other spaces: Occupy Your Mind (2021) Read More »
In musicking, as in life, there is never any one particular process – each project seems to emerge with a life of its own, with its own rhythm and breath, with both a sense of self-determination and of the unknown. In being receptive to the music as an entity in its own right, with its
Other spaces: Oort (2021) Read More »
In June this year I was cleverly duped into allowing my bank account to be hacked and the little money I had in there taken. I’m usually more cautious, but these people were sophisticated and psychologically astute, using very compelling explanations in their call. They clearly had no moral parameters guiding who they stole from.
Other spaces: Red Tape Bardo I – IV (2021) Read More »
This collection, Down On The Farm, could never really make up its mind about anything. It just kind of floated in the middle of a paddock somewhere, chewing its cud, gazing at the occasional fluffy cloud in the blue sky overhead…..just hung there, suspended in time, without really knowing what, if anything, it wanted to
Other spaces: Down On The Farm (2021) Read More »
This has been one of those albums that I’ve sort of snubbed a bit since recording it, but on revisiting I can appreciate it better – both its sonic flow and its significant position in the evolution of my recording process. In 2016 I was reaching the end of a ten-year obsession with playing solo
Other spaces: rain river rain (2016) Read More »
