Fragments

State Archives, top floor of one of those endless stacks

From about 2023 onwards a lot of what I’ve been doing has been concerned with various projects involved with interpreting archives. Using them as a jumping off point for speculative ideas, turning them into music, turning other things (landscapes, conversations, emotions) into archive like shapes. The historical referencing and fragmentary poetics in what I do goes way back but the explicitly collection focused turn x into y so we can experience z is sort of a new way of thinking about it.

Late this year John Cheeseman and I took on the boss level of physical archives the State Archives Collection as researchers in residence. At the first meeting at the site at Kingswood we were guided for hours up floors and across vast expanses of physical media going back to the early colony. It was and continues to be overwhelming because we are approaching this collection not as researchers often do, saying I need to find this particular document or box of files that I found mention of in your catalogue related to a sanely focused inquiry. But because as the late Ross Gibson would say we are driving in fast with all the windows open. Keeping an eye out for the connections that might emerge, heading down into the baffling dark depths on purpose.

Clearly not the most efficient way anywhere but what we are firstly searching for is a way in. Something that reveals an unexpected thread we can follow into other connections. Even the building itself is possibly evocative thread in a low rise brutalist way. All the windows are west facing, the reinforced eastern walls anticipating the impact of a nuclear attack on Sydney CBD 40 kms east. Nothing says our records can outlive you and we will use them to rebuild society in a future post nuclear hellscape more clearly.

Drawings by the 1960s government architect of the nuclear bunker

Back in 2023 there were two projects that started me down this road. Residency commissions from both the National Trust and Casula Powerhouse/Sydney Festival where I was presented in both cases with a sprawling archive and asked if I wanted to make something with it. In both cases it was a shape I took from something else that provided a structure to inhabit, the way in.

Requiem for Badgerys Creek -2023, Chris Caines

In the case of the Badgerys Creek with CPH I was presented with an oral history archive that had been recorded in the 90s, hundreds of cassettes, with residents of the nearby area where the western Sydney airport is now being finished who at the time were being moved on from land and homes they had occupied, often since the post war migration boom, many of them coming to the country from Europe in the wake of that to start small farms on those fairly inhospitable parcels of land.

There was too much audio, too many pictures (mostly from protests in the 1980s) and in general too much past from the viewpoint of a present where the community and place was now a series of under construction runways. Just to the edge of the airport boundary the community church St Johns still stood, though it’s hundreds of graves had been dug up and re-interred to a nearby lawn cemetery. Visiting the church and then the new graves site (complete with a picture of the original church) brought home the grief and displacement that was all through the audio archive in voice after voice. So the piece started to take on the shape of a requiem, using the classical shape and chord movements of a traditional requiem building the instrumentation out of granular sample instruments constructed from the voices of the former residents. Though the archive was only 30 years old, the age (at the time of recording) and accents of many of the interviewees made it feels 30 years older than that, voices speaking from a different country in a different time.

Though the built environment had mostly been erased, the 80s protest images provided extensive documentation of the main buildings, shops and streets. I started to develop the idea of representing these buildings as sunken ruins with the viewer seeing them on the floor of a lake as a diver with a strong light in murky water might. Like diving in Lake Jindabyne where my paternal grandmother was born.

The images weren’t useful in themselves but they were useful as guides and I set out to find dopplegangers for them in the towns of central west NSW. Badgerys had been gazetted as a future airport for so long that even inside the Sydney metro basin it had remained a rural hamlet locked in the early 20th century. I found near identical churches, houses, shops and roads in Carcoar, Blayney, Kings Plains and Kandos. Scanning them with the basic lidar scanner in my phone to produce these broken ruined structures that loomed out of the depths to accompany the voices of the absent.

The Storm At 20 Mile Hollow had a less complex gestation. National Trust NSW has the oldest remaining colonial house in the Blue Mountains that I was invited to respond to in some way as a resident artist. Happily the Woodford Academy director/historian Kate O’Neill had meticulously pulled together and indexed all the historical documents relating to the house and grounds going back to the indigenous histories of the site and of the original colonial Inn when the area was known as the 20 Mile Hollow built on the new road west across the dividing range.

I immediately zeroed in on the owners of the original Inn from the 1830s because that is a fascinating hinge point in the colonial period before the first Bathurst goldrush and because there was so little material to go on from that time. The threadbare remnants including biography detail of the Inn owners, the Pembertons, some land, sale and legal records and letters to the Colonial Governor, asking for land, asking for certainty, asking for release from imprisonment for stealing building materials as things got desperate. It was enough though from these characters to build profiles and start writing for them as semi fictional/mystical archetypes. Though I never explicitly used it, the way in here was through the mythic shape of The Tempest, specifically the film adaptations, the Inn as an Island, a Caliban in the murder suicide story of the neighbor, Frances Pemberton as a type of Prospero. In the early development period this formed an elemental dramatic shape that helped me find the voices of these three people and enabled me to write monologues for them that felt to me like true voices from the period. I found some historical linguists who were attempting to perform the accents from this period of time and frankensteining a number of these together as training material in the machine learning tools from back then I made some models that produced the voices in the video above.

Though full of magic, death and colonial bureaucracy at times while presenting the work subsequently it worked a little too well as a fiction. With questions from the audience about how I had recorded the characters (from the 1830s..) and where they could now read the journals of Frances Pemberton popping up frequently.

It also ended up as an intro into the practice of using machine learning models, especially custom built ones, as an extended mode to build from inside a project. Rather than the prompt, generative model that was common at the time and in many ways even given the explosive growth in available models since then, still is.

Pic by Sam James

Back in late October I played a new Live AV piece called Logue at a theatre in the Blue Mountains in a show put together by Miriam Williamson. I’ll often head into making something without an idea of where it comes from and trust it’ll work itself out during the process, or maybe I’ll understand it after the fact. The mechanics of proposals and funding however often mean you need to state with some degree of detail what a project is, what it means, what it does, how it works aesthetically long before you really know any of those things. And to a certain degree over time I’ve internalised that process and will tell myself the overarching ideas and concepts as both a way of rehearsing what I’m going to say about the work in those contexts and also I’ve come to understand, as a way of having a polite internal fiction that the unbridled chaos of the process can actually hide inside while it gets done.

But even given that leeway, this project was on another level of fragmented meander over quite a long period of time. It was eventually called Logue to reference monologue, travelogue, dialogue, epilogue. All the Logue things that it came over time to contain. Built entirely from field recordings, 3d lidar scans of buildings, landscapes and people taken mostly during travel and residency trips from 23 to 25, at first I thought it was a semi traditional poetic travelogue. Albeit one related to more abstract ideas of visual music and rhythm, where both places and the subjective states of perception they evoked were played musically, counterpointed with a voice I would write to speak/sing as performance alongside.

Manang – Chris Caines 2025

In the upper Himalaya earlier this year, dreamy from continuous low level hypoxia I wrote endless fragments for this, as well as collecting quotes and asides from half remembered books and articles. I took the field recordings from there and from the collection, tuned them to fundamentals and moved them through an arc of key modulations to generate an overarching tonal narrative. Yet coming back home after that, the piece remained for the most part a series of fragments in folders. It began to sink in that this was a result of the deep fog that the process began in, the origin story had set the tone from the outset no matter what sense I tried to impose after the fact.

Even the streets of Siem Reap align to the temples

In 2021 still deep in Covid conditions I started work on a commission for a long quad screen piece for a public screen site in Sydney. This was based on a fascination with the deep time of the axial precession, the 26,000 year cycle also known as The Great Year after Plato. More than the achingly slow polar movement itself the trigger for this was how the phenomenon had been tracked by early civilizations obsessed with astronomy. In particular I had a memory of seeing a documentary on late night TV as an undergrad about how the Angkor Wat site was built as a map of the processional star shapes from 10,000 years prior to its construction. Clearly this fell into the category of mystical conspiracy theory and when it re-emerged from memory decades later I could find no mention not only of the program but even of the general speculative idea in any of the exhaustive literature searches I conducted. Nevertheless in mid 2023 in a delulu is the solulu style side quest I landed in Siem Reap to explore the sites and find what I might find by being on the ground.

Exterior 3d scan view burial chamber Angkor Wat

This was the start of the scanning and collecting over the next few years in between other projects and significant life events. And also the start of working out how to play this collection that presented like some sort of grounded instrument, part photo archive, part ruined spatial record, part metaphor for the incomplete and patterned interpolations of memory. The voice narratives fell by the wayside as texture and pattern took over and it became the more musical set of sequences it wanted to be. Not that I gave up any of those earlier plans easily, every release of one structure into another looser one had to be negotiated like an existential tussle between sense and nonsense.

Still from Logue sequence

A main screen section recording from that show is below and the soundtrack is released on all the streaming places titled Logue Live. In a week or so I’ll play it for an audience here in Greece for a second public outing far removed from original context and expectations.

I’ve been dipping in and out of this book for months (ever the student) particularly because it contains breakdowns of the poems translated without ornament character by character from the Chinese symbols. While I’d read and enjoyed books of translated classical Chinese poetry many times before, the raw direct glossing directly into an English word character by character without any poetic overview of the whole has been a revelation.

In recent years I went at one point down a deep shan shui wormhole because of the very long history of text/image relationship ideas and perhaps I picked up more than I was conscious of or was drawn in that direction by similarities to my own work. Because looking now at these more literal translations, the similarities to the writing style I’ve developed over the last while for both voice and text in video works is striking. The poems work very cinematically in the sense that they are constructed as a linear collision of images, throwing up associative linkages between characters (and the image ideas they contain) like edits in an Eisenstein film. The Tang dynasty era writing is particularly stark, like this:

1. Wang Wei’s “Deer Enclosure” (《鹿柴》)

空山不見人，
但聞人語響。
返景入深林，
復照青苔上。

Literal translation (character by character):
Empty mountain / not see / person,
Only hear / person speech / echo.
Returning light / enters / deep forest,
Again shines / green moss / on.

Or this:

2. Li Bai’s “Quiet Night Thoughts” (《靜夜思》)

床前明月光，
疑是地上霜。
舉頭望明月，
低頭思故鄉。

Literal translation:
Bed front / bright moon light,
Suspect is / ground on / frost.
Raise head / gaze / bright moon,
Lower head / think / old home.

And this from some of my still ongoing live/linear video work:

Skin
 
The hill slopes toward the water. As it did on that night.
The soft interiors spacious and quiet. Nobody walks by.
Navigating solely by taste and smell. Background hum of nerve endings. Long seconds of maritime air. Seep slowly into the car and sink to the carpet.

Our voices tumble to meet it. All instructions, accommodations and apologies.Almost the end of the calendar. On a balcony above the roar. Almost softer than was bearable. At one end of the train line. Always in the deep grass. Always close to the turn of the tides. Always dancing in front of the police cars. Crossing town for a word. Always marking out new distances. Pacing out the perimeters.
 
Reverb was never more welcome. Never closer or fuller.
Steam revealing shapes. Water diffusing every touch.
Every variation of pulse and pace. Nothing left except rhythm.
Nothing remaining except surprise. A cliff overlooking the sea.
The size of the map was surprising. At first it seemed small.
Surface area continued to unfold and unravel. Too large for wonder.

Voices tightening through octaves. Call and slow response.
Sympathetic muscles resonating. Out of the range of hearing.
Straining for telepathy. Among the storms of sensation.
Understanding blood noise. Like a song.

Obviously evoking the concentrated stillness of writing in 890s China while sitting in a wooden studio in the hills around Xi’an during a late Spring full moon remains an unreachable or at least aspirational ideal. But for me at least there is a lot to learn in the starkness of these vivid juxtapositions and how they speak to contemporary writing in sound and image.

Doubtless I’d been staring very pointedly at the old drums fitted with ancient yak skin and equally ancient wood when our monk chaperone (partly motioning) asked if I’d like to hit some. There were small frame drums and ones large enough to crawl inside standing and hanging all around the small temple space also housing hundreds of brightly painted busts of past lamas and thousands (it seemed) of Tibetan scrolls in nooks and cavities reaching to the ceiling like loculi in a catacomb.

The monastery is reputed to be 800 years old, situated on a hillside above the present day village of Braka in the Manang Valley in the Himalaya. Old enough to reach back past the newer more streamlined and abstract surfaces of modern Buddhism to the unruly, uncanny past where mythic monsters and hellish underworlds co-existed with starburst visions of heavenly bliss. Awed by the sacred weirdness of the place I hesitated, although it was a living temple in use and these drums were being struck in service and ritual it was also a living museum and these instruments were old.

Would I be doing something utterly gauche and insensitive using the sticks and beaters lying everywhere to strike these drums I desperately wanted to hear? And perhaps worse record them to add to my collection of field recordings for use in something (who knows what) in the future as samples, as textures? Was it any different to taking a picture when you’d been giving express permission to take that picture? It felt like it, these weren’t a surface you could take in at a glance, an image memento or document of a place. These were the signature sound of the place, resonating literally with the walls and voices that had chanted and sung in there.

Did I hesitate long? Perhaps a second, before I had my phone out and the voice notes app up recording seven of different sizes and shapes. Glorious resonant complex tones, the dryness of the high alpine air had crystalized the skin and wood into unique hypnotic voices, gnarled and strange with age.

Later in the studio editing and tuning them in the sampler they gave themselves to braiding together as simple tonal melodies, the soft attack and huge tail of textural body in the sounds meant a little went a long way. They weren’t acting as drums or percussion per se but as almost synthesized textures too complex to layer or form into chordal harmonic shapes. They are still sitting in my library and I still feel uneasy about using them not primarily through any fear of cultural appropriation, though that is of course present. But more that inside a larger work or composition they’ll dissipate in an example of contextless attribution decay lending the energy they contain without bringing any attention to themselves as markers of a place and a history.

A lot of what I’m doing over the last couple of years encounters this concern, things collected from specific places and times woven into visual and sound compositions that decontextualizes them in service to the extreme subjectivity and aims of wherever I’m headed at the time with the piece in question. There doesn’t in my mind seem like there is a blanket attitude I can take to this way of working similar as it is to the way memory and influence themselves work in building a more general approach to art making. Except to consider the aesthetic ethics on a case by case basis.

So the drums for now sit in a folder tempting me to use them until my attitude shifts in one direction or another or enough time passes that I start to feel the charge they contain getting buried under new layers of working and experience.

Our residency village Ngawal by moonlight.

We were on the way to Chame after leaving Besi Sahar, in our convoy of three jeeps, to spend the first night acclimating, when we realized we wouldn’t make it there till late. Amar, driving one of the vehicles called some contacts and soon we were pulling into a smaller village and setting up shop for the night at another lodge. That night in bed I had a classic altitude headache and woke up to find the first peaks of the Manang Valley sloping down below and above us. We reloaded all the trucks after a standing breakfast still feeling jangled bodily by the ride the day before and returned to the bumpy dirt road for another twelve hour journey.

This really felt like the Himalaya, the air felt thin, the trees were visibly struggling and the low oxygen was starting to make things feel dreamlike.

We kept going for another few hours before one of the trucks developed an overheating issue needing an improvised solution and we walked on with our daypacks until they worked it out and caught up with us.

Soon we were following the river as the valley climbed, crossing and re-crossing on tiny wooden bridges and rickety steel ones across blue icewater.

The rockfaces got sheerer and steadily steeper before a terrifying cliffside switchback ascent up onto the high pass where we were to live for the next month.

The night we arrived in Ngawal the overnight fell to -15c quite a bit colder than the averages I’d dutifully looked up at home. At 3650m the shortness of breath and difficulty sleeping were immediately felt, I suspect too a mild hypoxia made clear thinking a challenge at times. We unpacked into our rooms and studios and settled in for the duration, our diverse international cohort getting to know each other slowly.

This element was an unusual experience for me, though I’ve done quite a few residencies around the world they are often solo enterprises. I’ve made many friends on those trips and sometimes had friends, family and partners along with me but going with an unknown group was a new thing. Happily this group was an extraordinary bunch, many of us influencing each other as we went, having some memorable conversations and shared experiences. I don’t know whether it was luck, the self selection factor of choosing to go somewhere so remote, the group curation of Jo and Amar or all of the above.

We were so together daily in our little lodge, in our village of 150 people three hours walk from the next “town” that the group dynamic needed to work for us all.

In no particular order, meals, chats, and sharing with Hema, Frank, Jake, Jess, Jo, Nir and Emma were always a warm and hilarious pleasure. We were so bound together in one remote place with limited facilities and resources it often felt like the tales you hear about people wintering together on Antarctic bases. Emma and I in particular started a lightning round of projection, music and performance collaborations working in the best aspects of that mode where you produce things neither would come up with alone.

On returning to Kathmandu we’d luckily missed the worst of the burning season air pollution but it was still a shock after the alpine purity. I’m slowly acclimatizing now to being in another hemisphere on another (small) mountain where the world isn’t turning toward summer but turning toward the darkening cold. Thanks Manang Arts for that odyssey.