Walkabout I – VII (2020): Motion in lockdown

Walkabout (I – VII) is a series of seven semi-ambient electronic albums created during the Tasmanian covid lockdown in 2020. Each album is developed around realtime recordings of my body moving through space/time along various local bush and beach walks in SE Tasmania. Electronics have been added to suggest a meditative, dimensional journey.

In the state of virus lockdown, the simple act of walking can take on a different significance. On these recordings, ‘walkabout’ is describing a sense of ceremony, walking the landscape of the self. In making each of these albums I was drawn deeper into layers of my psyche and offered reflection on particular themes in my life.

In March 2020, Tasmania went into official Covid lockdown, although our household was already voluntarily self-isolating.  We’re fortunate to be living in an isolated rural area, in the bush, away from neighbours.  Also, from my Aspergers perspective, self-isolation is my preferred state – I deliberately withdrew from society several years ago after a breakdown, and spend almost all my time at home, focusing on my work in solitude while the rest of the family are ‘out there’, at work and school.

I soon noticed online how lockdown was impacting on musicians around the world.  The imposed creative limitations of lockdown clearly brought about different creative processes for a lot of musicians.  Personally, I work with limitation as a matter of course, often out of sheer necessity and in other ways deliberately self-imposed.  I find limitation pushes me into new forms of creative thinking.

In lockdown, the first limitation I experienced was the loss of my daily solitude.  Having the rest of the family at home immediately restricted my sense of creative fluidity – that is, in the course of a day, I move around the house, and in & out of my creative flow, according to impulse.  From my Aspergers perspective, having an environment completely free of any human interaction = freedom from external expectation = complete sense of spontaneous self.  Also, in practical terms, having other human noise in the house prevented me from recording any live instruments, as I don’t have the luxury of a personal, sound-insulated studio.  So I had to find a way to adapt my creative process. Two factors were key to how I managed that: synthesis and walking.

Online, as the lockdown deepened around the world, some plug-in developers made their music tools available as free downloads, to help musicians continue creating from home.  Generally I can never afford these sort of extras (I don’t even use MIDI), so this was a fantastic opportunity to add to my pallette. Unfortunately a lot of them required a MIDI interface, but by digging deeper I learned that Reaper had a built-in Virtual Keyboard option, using the qwerty keys on the laptop, providing me with a rudimentary alternative to an external MIDI keyboard.  Two free plug-ins became pivotal for me: Spitfire Audio’s Soft Piano samples (and later, some cello samples) & the amazing Surge virtual synth plug-in.

I am not a ‘keyboard player’, nor do I have any technical understanding of synthesised soundwaves, so everything about using the plug-ins was starting from scratch – a Quixotic but rewarding learning curve, and exactly the sort of creative toybox I needed for the situation. Having new tools always offers a sense of discovery and frustration, both of which require creative problem-solving, which in turn keeps me creatively interested. These new options enabled me to continue making music at home, on my laptop & headphoned, regardless of everyone else being at home, even in bed if I felt like it.

The second factor, walking, was pivotal: in a sense, my usual mode of solitude became inverted, in that I had to leave the house and go for a walk to be alone (and hope I didn’t encounter other people in the process).  This created a very different context for my walking, sharpened its focus and my relationship to it. 

On this particular visit, as I fell into a meditative stride, I attuned to my senses: the pulse of my footsteps, the sound textures as my soles contacted various surfaces, the variations of wind, the stillness or movement of trees, the swell of the earth around me. In the surrounding bush I noticed several distinct varieties of eucalypt, all in seasonal stages of bark-shedding, and the patterned colours were so vivid I began to photograph them with my phone. The rhythm of my footsteps, and my attunement to the bush around me, became the drone of a didgeridu, which became a memory of an old friend from Melbourne, Kushala, with whom I had shared many transformative personal journeys and who has a deep sense of the didgeridu as an interdimensional extension of the shamanic.

Often I will create a collection of recordings around an existing visual image, rather than the other way round, as an image is often an anchor, or container for how I explore a theme musically. The photo abstractions of the tree bark, when viewed as a grid on my phone, looked to me like they belonged together, as a set. All these layers of the walk, the photos, the recollection of Kushala’s didg-playing and my shamanic self from another time, the meditative effect of my footsteps in the bush – all converged into a new creative point of focus: a series of atmospheric recordings, each with it’s own ‘bark painting’ cover, each with its own sense of ‘walkabout’.

I began recording these bushwalks on my phone, learning the limitations as I went – how to minimise wind-noise with a piece of sock over the mic, having dud days when the weather changed mid-walk or there was unwanted human or traffic noise etc. Soon there was an added limitation: when the lockdown became a government mandate (not a personal choice), the authorities closed down public walks and threatened exorbitant penalties. Of course I understood the reasons, but in the case of our local walks it felt unnecessary, as it’s rare to coincide with someone else on these tracks, even on weekends. I felt urgently that I must attend the walks to fulfill my creative mission! …and so at times my walking took on an Orwellian tone, a furtive act, a crime – nay, a treason!

The second track, Minim Mouse, uses the same walk, but with the recording reversed. Layered over this is an ambient piano meditation, pensive and feminine, a more intimate portrait of the environment, as a counterpoint to the first track. Around this time, I began experimenting with taking short films on my phone, specifically abstractions in nature, and mostly the dancing abstractions of light on water. This particularly mesmerising footage, seemed to complement the gentle mood of this piece. I remember playing an excerpt of this to my two teenage kids, just as we were about to leave for the bus – they stood so intently, so still, as they immersed themselves in the moment, and we became three motionless bodies in space, attendant, swept…

The first piece in the ‘suite’ features the distorted chainsaw as a kind of industrial folk throb, to mirror the violent intrusions of the afternoon and my cantankerations in response. As I later sculpted the music, it spoke of history, the trees being butchered, the rape of the land, the systematic slaughter of the Tasmanian aboriginals, the blood of the Mother, and the invasion of the human virus.

In the second stage of the piece, after bursting from the raw afterbirth, there is a walk in the bush of ghosts, the Otherworld. Dreamtime darkness, angry spirits, dead warriors watch in silence as we pass. Keep your eyes on the road, stay true.

In the third stage, the Dreamwalker emerges into a new shimmering vista, an open world and an empty mind – Buddha, mined. Quarry: the absence, the gouged bowl of stone and air, the receptive principle after everything is taken. Quarry: the Hunted. At the end of time, the transcendent object awaits…

Using the qwerty keyboard on my laptop, the notes in the recurring piano theme throughout this piece spell the words ‘i love you’, ‘people trees’ and ‘mothers blood’. The bark image on the cover was chosen for the blood-like effect of the sap leaking down the trunk.

The experience of ‘walking on fossils’, in which the vastness of the eons comes into my focus underfoot as a physical sensation, delivers me into a very different sense of time & scale, a deep dreaming. The throbdrone of the barge passing upriver at the beginning of this piece becomes the otherworldly growl of the didgeridu becomes the living hum of the river, the pulse of the surrounding landscape and the ancient thrum of time as existence spreads outwards through space. As I shaped this album, I imagined I was walking into a flow of Time as ‘consciousness’.

Another very personal layer to the story of this recording was the process of reconnecting with my old friend Kushala, whose didgeridu textures feature on this album, as a visceral backbone to the themes of deep Time & ancient consciousness. In the last section of this album, I’ve slowed his recording down to suggest the moandrones of whales in mating season, a prehistoric synaesthesia of OceanMind and Space…

My original vision of the project included Kushala’s didg-playing, but by the time he was able to send me a recording of his playing, I had already moved through the process of, and released, the first 4 albums.  This was perfect as it enabled me time to familiarise myself with the synthesiser plug-in, so when his didg recording arrived I felt well-primed.  On Walkabout V his playing is the centrepiece.  On this walk, I also began experimenting with filming parts of the walk on my phone, and later created a video to accompany the album.

The bay was a bowl of stillness, the water barely lapping at the sand. Before recording, I waited for a large bargeboat to pass as it made its way upriver. The Huon River is wide and the big, slow boat was a long way out from the beach. As the presence of the boat dissolved around the point, the air became still again and I commenced recording my waterwalk; but halfway along the beach the first ripples from the boat’s wake started to hit the shore, and in a short time they gained intensity and volume, crashing loudly at my feet even though the ‘waves’ were only a few centimetres high. I was surprised by both the incredible delay and the force of displacement involved for the ripples to travel so far from their source.

In this context my reflections moved gently to consider Death, in the sense of Passing…how a Life passes through the fluid field of time, what ripples are left when the Body, the Being, dissolves – the album’s single track, The Wake, is a meditation on the movement of energy, how the ripples form and spread beyond the source, contacting other surfaces, other lives, then folding back on themselves to melt into the vaster space. In the second half of the piece, there is an imagining of the lifeforce leaving the body, swirling wingbeats, angels and the dreamlike distortions of a fading consciousness, the Sirens beckoning, the Lynchian bardo orchestra….and perhaps a resolution into…….?

Originally I intended a series of 9 Walkabout albums, purely because I had settled firmly on a “set” of 9 bark images as the album covers.  As it happened, the Tasmanian lockdown was lifted earlier than the mainland, by which time I had created 7 Walkabout albums (as well as the unrelated Self Isolator and Solaris Beach Party albums); but as a matter of principal I didn’t want to continue the series if the context had changed (ie no more lockdown restriction).  In my autistic sense of things, having the lockdown lifted made my conceptual frameworks irrelevant and to make any more Walkabout recordings would be inauthentic.

And so the series remains a set of 7, and completes itself where the series began, in my mind at least, featuring Kushala playing didgeridu – on the seventh album, with its theme of Initiation, the end is the beginning, the ouroboros – the eternal serpent dreaming.