Any Here Is Home is the first album in the Tasmanian Primitive series: new acoustic guitar recordings made on the fly as I navigate living ‘Unhomed’, transplanting myself from one house-sit to the next, a kind of liminalism in motion.
January’s Big Water Country opened the door to musicking again after a long break, and showed me the potential for recording on the move ie that being transient doesn’t stop me from continuing my creative Work. In fact, it has just opened up new creative parameters. On that album I set up a temporary studio and included a few other instruments. For the Tasmanian Primitive series (as the title suggests), I’ve stripped it back and simplified the process.
Central to the series is my daughter’s small Tanglewood acoustic travel guitar, a really gorgeous instrument, very expressive & textured, full of delightful buzzings and rattlings, handles cranky grunt as easily as tender sparkle…my companion on the journey. Interspersed through the music are field recordings from each environment I visit, and a smattering of electronic bleeperies let out to roam the landscape.
After being forced into homelessness in Oct 2024, rents being beyond my reach & rather than sleep in my car, my creative response has been to become a house & pet-sitter within my local area. These recordings are musical snapshots of this way of moving through time, and moving in and out of other people’s worlds. Most are recordings made on my phone, spontaneous & raw, ranging from pure unrepeatable improvised play, to other more structured or sculpted pieces. I record so I don’t have to remember anything I play; I don’t perform live so there’s no need. Most of these took no more than a morning or afternoon to find their shape, often less – of necessity as much as creative impulse. I’ve kept the editing quick & minimal to stay as true to the original moment as I can.
Some pieces are simply creative exercises as I explore the guitar in Open C tuning (aka Open Sea / Open See tuning!), some are more directly an outgrowth of my mood and the energies of whichever house I’m in. All of them reflect some aspect of my experiences, as I learn to shape my life in this new way.
The series title Tasmanian Primitive is a reference both to the immediacy of these recordings, and to the vast musical mycelium of acoustic guitar music connecting back to what came to be known as American Primitive, itself a synthesis of other roots. American Primitive is a style of eclectic, self-taught acoustic guitar music that emerged in the 60s via John Fahey et al, mixing raw roots, blues & folk stylings with elements of classical and other flavours. I’m not trying to emulate that style, but certainly the spirit of the raw instrument, sometimes bluntly rhythmic and minimalist, sometimes lyrical, and always aiming to capture the intimate textures of the instrument.
It’s an approach to playing that’s authentic to the moment, and I feel the music as earthy, connected more to Nature, as having a rural heart. It’s a natural reflection of the region I’m house-sitting within – the upper half of the D’Entrecaseaux Channel, in the rural SE of Tasmania. The Channel is a body of water between Bruny Island and mainland Tasmania, stretching about 55 km from north to south, and steeped in the energy of the original peoples, the Neunonne. These days the region is a picturesque mix of pastoral farmland and coastal bush, dotted with a couple of country towns, a village, and a few other small settlements and hamlets. Lots of birdsong, open sky above, the infinite moods of the water, bushwalks, waterwalks, innertalks…and the hills are alive with the sound of tractors, lawnmowers, chainsaws, excavators and other mechanical wartages…..
After my 3-week stay at Coningham (where I recorded Big Water Country), I had a series of short house-sits, each for only a week. They all involved pets, and I was busy with a number of other things (like generating income to feed myself), so there really wasn’t time to set up my recording gear and settle into anything. One house involved minding 3 very gorgeous but energetic & unpredictably barkable dogs, so any kind of recording was entirely out of the question there.
However, I was still feeling inspired by my previous creative burst. The main ingredients being: my daughter’s guitar, my newfound interest in open tunings (in particular Open C), and a very deep dive into the musical rabbit warren of ambient country / ambient americana / american primitive and several other peripheral intersections of these musical styles….lots of acoustic fingerstyle guitar, drifty pedal steel guitar sounds, clean tremolo guitar sounds, desert drones, contemporary lonesome cowboy music, and much more…(* see list of artists at the end, if you’re musically curious).
And as many autists will testify, there’s nothing quite as deep, thorough, richly complex and multidimensional as an autistic ‘deep dive’ – this is dedicated research, for the sheer hungry pleasure of being curious and loving to discover new connections in something you’re passionate about – dynamic patternmaking. For me, musical research is like being shrunk down and injected into the mycelium system of a vast forest – every subset of a musical style offers up new sounds and new portals to peoples’ lives – I learn about the individuals who make the music, I learn about their place in time, how their tendrils connect forward / backward / across in musical history….I love it. This latest enquiry introduced me to a lot of really creative guitarists I hadn’t met before, and has reinvigorated my relationship with acoustic guitar, just when I thought I’d exhausted my interest in it.
The opening track, The Yum Of The Summer Thrum, acts as a bridge between the Big Water Country album & place, and the new series, the continuing journey.
In Tassie, it’s not often that we have a sense of a long or full Summer – after the stubborn Winters here, Summer usually feels all too fleeting, and the actual percentage of hot sunny (swimmable) days can be pretty low all season. This Summer though was Golden. In my 25 Summers here, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten as much swimming in (the water gets pretty cold in these parts). Since I’ve been homeless, Coningham Beach, and its accompanying coastal bush walk, have become something of a Spirit Place for me – that is, I feel very connected to the land there, and all Summer it has been where I go to refresh and reset.
I had some field recordings left over from my time at the Coningham house, so I collaged them together for the first track rather than waste them. It begins with bird chatter from around the house, over the sounds of a brief Summer storm after a few days of heat wave, which dissolves into the thrum of cicadas en masse (recorded on a bush walk). Drifting across the whole piece is some faux pedal steel guitar I recorded on an app, then reconstituted beyond recognition. The piece may sound out of context with the rest of the album, but it acknowledges my time at Coningham as the gateway to this new musical and personal journey.
Tracks 2 – 5 were recorded at my next house-sit, a humble country cottage further south down The Channel, in a place called Gordon. I was minding two geriatric pets – a deaf Boxer dog, very slow but occasionally sparked into a playful galumph, and her lifelong companion, a very talkative & near skeletal Siamese-ish cat with a voice like a V8 engine. They had grown up together, the cat thought itself a dog, and they spent most of their days nuzzled into each other, asleep.
Almost all the compositions in this series are played in non-standard tuning. I began using the tuning DGCGCD on Big Water Country, and so continued exploring this on the Gordon recordings. These alternate open tunings offer various delights: drone strings help build rich sustained resonances with other strings, often creating a very full sound, and you can find some really sweet chords & melodies just using one or two fingers, much easier for my left hand which still has somewhat restricted movement since I broke my wrist a few years back.
I’d been listening to quite a bit of American Primitive guitarist Glenn Jones, and revisiting the Leo Kottke album 6- And 12-String Guitar, and the influence of that tradition comes through most in The Drooling Dog and Persist And Adapt. Both were really just experiments to see what variety of styles and patterns I could find in this tuning.
One significant aspect of house-sitting is that you enter into someone else’s private space, and into the energy field of their lives, their personal soup. This involves considerable trust on their part, and in return I bring my utmost respect. I care for the space as I would my own, and don’t intrude. I also have to be careful not to let my energy get tangled up in theirs. This can be subtle and slippery work; where the two mingle (their energy and mine) can also offer resonances, reflections and insight relevant to my own process. Each new setting has reminded me of something particular from my past, physically or metaphorically, a theme that’s given me useful food for thought.
In the Gordon house, there was a soup thick with love, loss, grief, aching tenderness, and the profound strength needed to keep going in the face of devastation. The young father & son living there had lost the woman who was the heartbeat of their family unit only a year before. Inhabiting their space, I felt their grief, the intensity of their bond now as the survivors, and I felt her presence constantly. There was very little evidence of her in the house, but when there was, it was just too beautiful and heartbreaking, like her last To Do list left on the whiteboard in the kitchen, joyous and alive in her playful handwritten flourish, her living hand. Each day I felt watched by her but not threatened, in meditations I sent her Light, I understood she was guarding the sanctity of their home, and I took care. And in my own story, I was still grieving the loss of my companion and soulmate of nearly 10 years – not by death but separation and complete, unexplained silence – and I was feeling how palpable the lingering presence of someone you love so deeply can be, the sheer absence of them can seem almost solid, weighted. And despite the differences in our stories, at the heart they share the theme – the presence of an irretrievable loved one, magnified by their absence, and how to live yourself forward. All these themes were present when I gave names to the tracks Gone But Always Here and Persist And Adapt. The joyous birdsong in the former is from one of my walks down to the creek on the property – as I stood silently among the trees, listening and recording, I felt as if their precious person had become part of the place, and was singing through the birds, the fields, the trees and the sunlight.
In moving from house to house, from one private energy bubble to the next, I’ve also been reflecting (again) on the sheer scale and complexity of humanity. Each time I enter someone’s bubble, I’m acutely aware of how each of us exists within a very private story, our own universe, interconnected at some level but really so utterly separate as well – and realising that at some point we have to just let people live their own stories, to find their own way. I chose the title Each In Their Own Story after reflecting on this, and on my natural urge to offer others help, which can also turn into over-giving if out of balance…an unhealthy dynamic I had to recognise in my last relationship.
Tracks 6 & 7 were spontaneous improvisations recorded at a small cottage in the village of Woodbridge one afternoon, on my phone, with a second guitar part added to 7 later. I had tweaked the guitar tuning from DGCGCD to CGCGCD as I preferred the bass drone as a C note.
At this house-sit I was busy focusing on other things so really didn’t play much guitar, but these two popped out towards the end of my stay. I enjoyed being at the cottage, but didn’t feel any particular connection to it, so just focused on my own stuff that week. My time there was pleasant enough, but what transpired at the week’s end was the only real negative experience I’ve had yet, and reminded me that this job of house-sitting can be a Pandora’s Box of variables.
There was meant to be a cat. I was warned, by its anxious owners, that it was a highly anxious cat around strangers, and would likely hide in their bed for the first few days. No surprises there, many people own rescue animals these days, most of whom have been traumatised by prior owners. The (anxious) owners also emphasised that I was to ensure that the cat NEVER left the house – keep the doors and windows closed at all times. The cat had an enclosed area along the side of the house, a ‘cat run’ with a cat flap and litter it could access. Other than that, it was to remain inside.
I changed the cat’s food & water each night in case it emerged while I slept, but by day 4 there was still no sign of activity. I tried texting the owners but they were walking an overland trail for the week and had no reception. What to do? Should I look in the bed and risk terrifying the cat further? That evening, I heard a loud meowing, I was very relieved and tried to locate it in the house, to no avail. Until I realised the sound was coming from OUTSIDE THE BACK DOOR. How did it get out there?? I immediately open the door and in strode the (purportedly anxious) cat, straight to me (the stranger it had never met), boofed its head affectionately a few times against my leg, purred like an engine, seemed in rapture at my patting it (I wanted it to know I was happy it had returned), then headed for its bowl and vigorously wolfed down the lot. The cat had no collar, and I was so taken aback by this clearly not-anxious, not-timid, openly affectionate animal that I wondered if it was actually someone else’s cat who had drifted in. This doubt dissolved when the cat, after stuffing itself, took itself straight into the owners’ bedroom and curled up on their bed. All was well! However….
The next morning the cat was gone. I wasn’t going to roam the village streets calling for a cat that doesn’t know my voice, so I decided to let it go and see what happened. That evening it returned when I was outside watering the garden. Again it greeted me with the utmost affection, wolfed down its food, and this time headed straight out the catflap to her cat run. I figured she must have found a hole in the wire somewhere to escape, and she clearly WANTED to be out of the house. I tried watching her in the cat run, to see if she’d reveal the hole, but after about 30 mins I had other things to do. And later that night, it was clear that she was gone again.
I texted the updates to the owners in case they got reception again. The following evening, the cat returned as before. I stopped being concerned as there seemed to be a pattern, and the cat was looking so healthy and pleased with itself that I figured it was just out partying. My admin self wondered if it had been spayed.
On the morning of the final day, as they were preparing to return from their camping trip, the husband phoned and very abruptly asked me how the cat was. His wife hadn’t seen the texts I sent her because her phone had run out of battery, and they had told me that hers would be the only contact phone. I was having a difficult morning with some other things when he rang, so I was already a little rattled by my day. The fact was, in accord with the pattern of the last few days, the cat was…NOT THERE. I could feel the tension in the husband’s question, and I began to explain what had been happening so he had context. He didn’t want context. Every time I began, he cut me off, and in the space of a minute, his tone had escalated to disproportionately aggressive.
I was in no mood for that crap first thing in the morning, especially when I had done nothing to warrant it, and especially in what should have been a formal exchange. I matched his tone and told him to back off so I could explain. Eventually he shut up and listened. Afterwards I was deeply upset by the interaction, so I packed and got the hell out of there, heartily sick of dealing with other people’s inability to manage themselves intelligently. His wife (a psychologist!) texted me later to thank me and ask if I wanted to meet up for a cuppa, no doubt to smooth things over, and strengthening my impression of her as the acquiescent in their relationship dynamic. I replied that I’d enjoyed my time at their house, but her husband’s aggressive attack was completely unwarranted and I wanted no further contact. Which sounds decisive and confident, but it still took me a bit courage-mustering.
I always look to ‘what is the learning in this experience?’. When I first met the husband to discuss the house-sit, there were signals that I definitely noticed but let slide. Other people would no doubt call them ‘red flags’. His manner had a kind of background shadow of condescension, which I generally interpret as bitterness covering pain, as with cynicism and sarcasm. In our conversation he had inferred a past of mental health struggles, for which I certainly have compassionate understanding. When I was deep in my own depressive process, combined with my blunt Aspergan communication because I was simply not coping and needed to conserve energy, I know that my manner could appear unnecessarily sharp, and seem like an attack.
But the primary signal was his handshake. I don’t shake hands unless it’s invited, and I don’t generally go around judging people by their handshake style. It’s just a formalised gesture of connection. But if someone deliberately offers their hand, and it feels as limp and lifeless as a soggy dishrag, I do wonder why they offer it in the first place. A sense of social obligation? A cynical power play? Surely they’re aware of their hand? His hand felt so soggy, so bereft of vitality, the touch so clammy, I felt it as a slithering, and my immediate impression was: passive aggressive. Followed by: suppressing trauma. That’s certainly what seemed to surface in his phone call, but of course I’ll never know and nor do I want to now. Each In Their Own Story…
I reflected on all this when I came to naming the two singular moments of music that anchor that particular house-sitting experience. Mice Away, Cat Can Relax inverts the suggestion of mice playing when the cat’s away, because in this story, this particular cat didn’t follow the script handed down by the Owners (the anxious mice). In their absence, the cat seemed liberated and happy. And as much as I love animals, especially dogs & cats, I gave up the notion of pets early in life because of that ethical question, that can even apply to our notions of children: to what extent do we ‘have’ them to satisfy our own projections, our picture of ourselves?
The naming of Black Dawg is far less complex. When I reviewed the recording, it sounded a bit like a hillbilly swamp deconstruction of the riff to the Led Zeppelin song, Black Dog. Dawg is hillbilly for ‘dog’, and if you play it backwards you’ll find ‘god’. There’s a tenuous suggestion toward the ‘Black Dog’ of depression, but after examining the lyrics I think the Zeppelin song is really just about primal sexual yearning….like so many great blues songs.
- For list-lovers: some musicians and bands I’ve included in my VERY loosely-defined Ambient Country playlist – Austin Cash, Barry Walker Jnr, Bobby Lee, Bruce Langhorne, Caleb R.K. Williams, Chuck Johnson, Cowboy Sadness, Daniel Lanois, Dave Heumann, Field Works, Geir Sundstol, Glenn Jones, Golden Brown,Hermanos Gutierrez, Howard Hughes Suite, Ivonne Van Cleef, Jim Wallis, J.R. Bohannon, Lake Mary, M. Sage, Laurel Premo, Leo Kottke, Lone Mesa, Loren Connors, Marisa Anderson, Michael Grigoni, Michael Scott Dawson, Nathan Salsburg, North Americans, Old Saw, Peter Kris, Pullman, ringo, Royal Arctic Institute, Ry Cooder, Scott Tuma, Steve Roach & Roger King, SUSS, Talk West, Tapes & Tubes, Western Skies Motel, William Tyler.