PROJECTS

Safety Bay Primary School Sound Playground 2017 - 18

In 2017-18 I worked on building a sound playground installation at Safety Bay Primary School. I based myself at the Rockingham Regional Environment Centre - Naragebup, where I was generously given access to their workshop where I could access a range of tools (radial saw, welding equipment, drills, hand tools etc). Indigenous artist, Peter Farmer also worked with the students designing images for tiles used as a pathway through the installation

Over the next six months I worked alongside a volunteer team to realise this nautical-themed installation. The project was conceived with SBPS Music Teacher, Sally Queally, who worked tirelessly over a two-year stint on initial funding applications through to the 2018 launch. Together Sally and I made a successful application for funding to the WA Department for the Arts, including both an educational (in the class) component, followed by the instrument making phase, site preparation and finally, the completed on-site construction. The students kept sound diaries to record their visual and practical ideas. They envisaged a nautical theme - a skeletal boat with sails, portholes and submarine communication vents. A selection of their drawings became the basis for my instrument designs. Throughout I was supported by both the school and members of the school community (parents and friends) - during the instrument making, site preparation and installation phases. Without their incalculable support this project would not have been possible. I'd also like to acknowledge engineer and friend, Clive Jarman who did the drawings for the "sail chimes" frames.

Tura New Music Artist in Residence = Dampier Peninsula 2014 & 2015

In both 2014 and 2015 I worked as musician in residence for Tura New Music based on the Dampier Peninsula north west of Broome in the Kimberley, WA. In the first residency, my work was mainly schools-based, working between two schools, one in Lombadina, the other just a few kilometres up the road at One Arm Point. There is little access in this region for formalised music lessons, nor a regular music teacher, so my approach was to introduce ways of listening and playing together within a compact time period (a little over a week at each school).

In addition to the instruments I brought with me and with very limited music resources available, I was able to pursue simple rhythmic and melodic ideas, playing in small groups and exploring composition through stories offered by the students. I ran a few instrument making sessions too making tuned "ground tubes" (different lengths of rainwater pipe stuck against the ground), "fufu pipes" (film canister clarinets), "strawboes" (oboe made from a plastic straw), and panpipes (made from 13mm polypipe with endcaps). At OAP school with staff and student support we also built a thongophone using the metal frame of a disused library book trolley - a one-of-a-kind mobile thongy!

At the culmination of my residency students at both schools performed as part of the visiting Tura Resonance Kimberley Tour (featuring William Barton, Steve Pigram and Mark Atkins).

In my 2015 Tura residency in neighbouring Lombadina and Djarindjin communities, my focus was to build a musical instrument playground to be based at the Catholic primary school in Lombadina. As this was a community music project, I worked alongside indigenous trainees at the Kullari Regional Communities Inc (KRCI) workshop in Djaradjin where we had access to welders, cutters, drills and hand tools. The materials for this project (aluminium tube and strap, steel cross-section and pvc pipe) was donated by KRCI, but we also used scrap materials from the local dump when needed. We had a month to design, construct and install on-site our sound playground and we started from scratch. This was a fantastic collaborative project in which the key was the sense of ownership all the participants (the makers and the students) felt at having created something unique in their school and in the Kimberley.

As well as building instruments, I also worked with local musicians and bands and on NAIDOC Day a couple of those bands featured in the festivities, as did children from the local school I had been working with. An amazing project that I will look back on with great fondness!

Dryandra Primary School - Thongo Duo

My residency at Dryandra Primary School in 2015 was facilitated through The Song Room, an organisation that promotes music and arts in less privileged schools. The idea of this thongophone, resembling a rib cage or boat hull, came out of a meeting with interested parents. This installation is located in the school's early childhood area. The onsite construction help by my old uni friend, Dave Bosisto was also greatly appreciated!

Wheel Rim Zumbalaphone

The Glades is a community near Armadale, south east metro Perth. The Awesome Festival contracted me to do a series of instrument making workshops in 2014 with children over six consecutive weekends, and to also devise a concept for a sound installation to be located in a local community recreation area. I began first making a few sketches of what I thought could be a "wheel rim marimba" or, in more simple terms, a large metal xylophone. In sourcing out the wheel rims from a local tyre repairer, I quickly discovered that most of the rims I tapped had discreetly different pitches, so I searched for the widest range of sounds I could find.

I also liked the idea of the wheel rims on metal stems resembling a poppy field, so I then took my rudimentary sketches to my friend and master welder, Robbie Lang (Fibonacci Centre, Fremantle), who then took on the welding of the stems to the base plate. With Robbie, I worked out the best way to isolate the rims from the stems using rubber washers in order for the rims to best resonate. He also inadvertently gave me the name of this instrument...

Belmay Primary Sound Garden, 2012

In 2012, visual artist Calvin Chee and I were commissioned by Musica Viva to design and construct an interactive sound garden featuring six different sound installations within an interactive playground space at Belmay Primary School, Belmont, WA as part of a federal and state-funded AIR Grant project. As a musician and instrument maker, my part not only involved the making of large musical instruments, but also engaging students in both the design and playability of those instruments.

So while the project resulted in a clearly tangible outcome – a set of six sound sculpture installations located in the grounds of the school – there was an equally important parallel process of classroom musical development that underpinned this project and shaped the manner in which the resulting instruments were designed, constructed, and located in the school grounds.

For much of 2012 I was was based at the school working with students developing a framework around to how this sound garden would take shape and how student visual and imaginative ideas might inform the outcome. Over two terms each student kept a "sound diary" of ideas and sketches. Combining a group of primary and high schools students, Calvin gave them each the challenge of creating a small maquette, based on chosen student sketches. These small models then became the basis of our designs.

Over this project Calvin and I worked with students from four school campuses in the area, including special needs education, students from a language learning centre and manual arts students and staff at the local high school. The high school manual arts students contributed hugely in cutting and welding sturdy instrument frames, tweaking design ideas and helping with site preparation and installation. This was great collaborative project.

Sound Sculpture, Gravity Discovery Centre, Gingin

Time Coils 1 & 2 | Mark Cain

The Gravity Discovery Centre: https://gravitycentre.com.au/

Scale is always a challenge in art. For years I've been exploring the sound potential inherent in industrial plastic tubing or polypipe, the kind used by plumbers, electricians, agrarians and budding high jumpers. In this project I had the opportunity to work with a 1.2 kilometre coiled length of 110mm diameter polyethylene pipe which, in its coil form, became an imposing tubular entrance to the exhibition building at the Gravity Discovery Centre in Gingin, WA. The two ends of this giant coil meet within one metre inside the building.

In its simplest conception, a tube of this length acts as a kind of time capsule. A noise made by striking a membrane attached to one end of the tube will, travelling at the speed of sound [nominally 330 metres/second], take just under 4 seconds to be heard at the other end of the tube. So in effect, at the far end of the tube, one is listening back to the past. The resultant acoustic delay elegantly illustrates the notion of travelling backward in time and has parallels with the ripples made by a stone thrown into a still pond. In physics there are many examples of "cause and delayed effect", including, of course, Einstein's now recently proven theory of gravity waves themselves.

To accentuate these delay effects, there are located along the length of this vast coil a series of regularly spaced tiny microphones that pickup and transmit to amplified speakers, sounds as they pass through the tube. The listener will hear multiple repeats as his or her original sound source 'pingpongs' from one speaker to the next in a series of graduated delays, finishing with the original unamplified sound at the other end of the coil. A 'miniature' version of this instrument comprising a 200 meter coiled length of 65mm polyethylene tubing is also on display as an accompanying exhibit inside the Gravity Discovery Centre in Gingin. Its shorter delay cycle offers an interesting point of comparison with the larger instrument. The two coils can be 'played' interactively or independently of each other.

As a child I'd put my ear to a conch shell and listened with amazement to that mysterious 'sound of the sea'...now I can put my ear at one end of an unfathomable hollow coil and listen with equal incredulity into the past. .

Specifications: Time Coil 1 materials: 110mm [pn 8] polyethylene pipe length: 1.2 kilometres [coiled] Time Coil 2 materials: 65mm polyethylene pipe Time Coil 2: length: 200 metres [coiled].

A C/P V C

"AC/PVC : Doing more for Music than Bach did for Plumbing"

AC/PVC - Youtube

In the three brief years of AC/PVC's existence [1987-1990], the group made quite an impact on the Perth contemporary music scene. Founded by Broken Hill-born musician, builder and visual artist, Peter Keelan and myself to present a new work for the 1987 Evos New Music Series (organised by Tos Mahony) AC/PVC was, in every sense, an experiment. I played woodwinds and flutes and together with Peter, who specialised in Andean flutes, panpipes and percussion (and had a wonderful eye for sketching and making things) we collaborated to build a seeming orchestra of instruments made exclusively from PVC plumbing, electrical and gas pipe, including accessory fittings, ABS air-conditioning ducting and other industrial plastics.

Why PVC pipe?
At first blush, it's indeed an odd choice. The material is functional, but unremarkable and something we tend to bury or hide away during house construction or regional planning. De riguer for plumbers and electricians it's not typically used by musicians. However, from a musical perspective PVC pipe is like an analogue of bamboo or the wooden and metal tubing used in conventional instrument making around the world for aeons. It's recyclable, relatively cheap and versatile. There are many different diameters and virtually an endless array of auxiliary fittings, many of which are fancifully sculptural when viewed in a musical, rather than plumbing context. PVC is also extruded in different colours. Its cylindrical shape is its essential musical asset - an internal characteristic shared by many wind and percussion instruments around the world both past and present. But perhaps, most importantly for AC/PVC, it was the Lego-like construction of this pipe (and its fittings) into the imposing sculptural shapes of our instruments which added an otherworldly, visual and theatrical dimension that captivated audiences. These were bits of humble plastic pipe transformed. The architecture and sound palette of these instruments confounded their origins... and it was the audience ‘inner-child’ that revelled in this musical playground of new possibilities and imaginings.

AC/PVC was an intended one-off event that just took off... quite unexpectedly. A Fremantle concert in a rarefied new music series presented by Evos Music in 1987 at the Princess May Theatre led headlong into to a hectic schedule of community music residencies and regional schools and festival touring that lasted three intense years of constant work. It was an idea that caught the public's imagination and generated its own momentum.

For Peter Keelan and I the challenge had been how far we could take the idea of exclusively using PVC pipe and plumbing paraphernalia as a performance concept? Appearance and stage theatrics are one thing, making good music with instruments that stay in tune is quite another. Each instrument presented its own unique challenges. How to extend the range of wind instruments, how to achieve the best timbre and tuning from each... how to adapt factory mould fittings to these instruments and manage to get them in tune and, of course, how to devise exciting music from this very different sound palette, whilst trying to maintain a compelling visual whimsy that we both shared.

To that end Peter was an inveterate illustrator. He and his sketchbook were inseparable and many of AC/PVC's visual ideas had their genesis in his drawings. Many an entertaining and occasionally blasphemous caricature of a band member (inordinately often, me) found its way into that sketchbook!

Back to the issue of tuning and how to build adjustable tuning mechanisms to deal with significant shifts of temperature? For our chromatic sets of thongophones (we named thongchen and bass-thongy) we designed adjustable tuning sleeves placed at the ends of each tube to cope with the extremities of summer and winter temperatures. Simply sliding the sleeves back and forth would lengthen or shorten each tube and hence the tuning. To achieve this, rubber o-rings were inserted into tiny grooves inside each sleeve to better aid their adjustment.

Sometimes a great visual idea would throw up a whole set of unexpected playing challenges. For instance, in building our large three-way digeridoo (or trigeridoo, as we called it) we did not expect that each player would experience air back-pressure resulting from three players blowing simultaneously down extendable tubes that merged together in a three-way inlet pipe fitting. Peter’s invention, the trigeridoo sorely tested our endurance in performance, but it did captivate audiences! It was just such an absurdly fanciful idea! In a show at Turkey Creek (Warmun) during our Kimberley Pipedreams Tour in '89 (Evos Music), our audience - children and adults alike - were so surprised and initially disquieted by entrance of the trigeridoo, they literally began to flee their seats, only to return laughing heartily with embarrassment at their reaction. The absurdity of this instrument spoke its own language to a culture already so deeply immersed in a digeridoo tradition.

Over time new challenges arose. How to make chromatically tuned percussion instruments to meet the skills of new players who joined us with keyboard percussion skills. For marimba specialist, Paul Tanner, we experimented with four-mallet thongophone beaters and building a three-octave chromatic xylophone in which each note, a varying length of thin-walled pressure pipe, was compressed in profile to an ovular shape in order to improve its resonance. Nonetheless, it took a percussionist with the unique skills of Ron Reeves to bring this instrument truly alive. There was no text book to explain this or many other discoveries we made. These were just accidental eureka moments that surprised us with their success. Another was our trombone made from clear polycarbonate pipe, replete with funnel bell. Not a eureka moment perhaps, but entertaining to watch a fine local trombonist like Andrew Raymond challenged (if not humbled) by a less than scientifically accurate instrument approximation of his beloved instrument – no doubt he's still scarred by this encounter.

Other instruments deserving mention are the A-Frame Marimba and Rondrum. My idea for the A-frame marimba came from hearing randomly falling lengths of thin-walled rainwater pipe coming adrift from my car roof rack and tumbling onto the grass of my front verge. Hearing a variety of beautiful pitched thunks, I decided to experiment by hitting the outside tube walls with a beater. The results inspired me to construct an instrument whereby the individual tuned pipes could be laid horizontally against both sides of an upright four-legged PVC A-frame, longest and lowest tubes at the bottom, highest and smallest at the top. Having such a frame enabled two, three or four players on either side to play facing each other, striking the tubes with padded polypipe beaters.

The Rondrum was built by Peter from a large curved section of plastic welded ABS air conditioning ducting. This, amongst other reject sections of welded ducting, he discovered abandoned on a property - though reportedly wearing a balaclava at the time… The resulting drum, named after our much-loved colleague, Ron Reeves, who played it brilliantly, this drum typified Peter’s ingenuity and ability to teach himself any skill, including In this case, plastic welding.

… Oh No, Not the Crumhorn!

Then there's a story about a "crumhorn" workshop in Albany. Local Mt Barker farmer and musician (bassoonist), a white bearded avuncular, John Bush, entered on the first morning of our instrument making workshop/residency with the intention of making a... crumhorn... I think it's fair to say that not every day you get a request like this at a community workshop. But not every day you meet someone like John, who was John enthused with this idea. To compress the story, after much agonising, we didn't pursue the crumhorn idea. But staying left field, we made a consort of three different sized PVC clarinets instead - to perform a renaissance pavane and galliard in our Albany concert (with John, his daughter, Caryn Bush and fellow clarinettist, Basil Schur). In later years I did manage to make a crumhorn of sorts, though in truth not a distinguished instrument. Some might say this of the crumhorn itself - something of cut-de-sac in wind instrument invention, now consigned to the annals of Renaissance history.

The glue for AC/PVC was humour. Often it ran thick in our suburban Innaloo (a pun in itself, given the nature of our instruments) workshop with liberal doses of the absurd. Peter and I shared complimentary, if different, skills (and humour) and it was this heady mix of the practical and the instinctual, the scientific and the intuitive that generated sustained creative bursts between us. The combination of humour, imagination and Peter’s laudable construction skills all came to the fore in our 1989 Feats Underground concert at the Fly By Night Club, Fremantle. it was his preposterous idea to construct a transparent waterproof tent on stage, housing an internal sprinkler system (inspired by his sketches) into which we would enter to play our grand finale piece. The musicians entered the tent dressed in raincoats and raincaps to play an ensemble of thoroughly water-soaked instruments, including a two-meter high bass rondrum with transparent plastic head along with the aforementioned A-Frame marimba, as well as a miscellany of small plastic wind instruments. The combination of the skilfully located lighting and water ricocheting off the players, the large drum and marimba as we played, created a truly startling visual effect. If you can Handel the pun, this was true Water Music...

Because of a busy touring schedule, in sometimes remote areas, we set ourselves other construction challenges, such as, how to create locking mechanisms to assist with assembling and disassembling some of our larger instruments. We needed durability, so we engaged our friend, model-builder and engineer, Clive Jarman, to design tensioning, clamping and quick-release mechanisms that he machined for us. These are the challenges you face when turning a one-off event into a touring concept. Clive's inventions, adaptations and tweaking were seminal to this latter phase of our instrument building and assisted the setup and pack down immeasurably.

AC/PVC staged four major concert events (amidst many smaller shows) during our short tenure. The opening two Evos shows, AC/PVC in Concert, were staged at the Princess May Theatre, Fremantle, November 6 & 7, 1987. In this show Cain and Keelan were supported by mercurial Indian percussionist, Kupusamy Raman, and contemporary dancer/choreographer, Jean Tally. The second, New Executions, comprised a week-long season at the historic open roofed Roundhouse jail, Fremantle, April 5 -10, 1988, in collaboration with Tally’s and Philipa Clarke’s Still Moves Dance Laboratory and percussionist, Ron Reeves.

This show almost didn't happen. During rehearsal two representatives from the Health Department did an inspection of our stage setup and insisted that we have a second exit in the building. The Roundhouse, being an historic jail, only has one entry and exit. Short of using the historic canon adjacent the building to create a second, this was an impossible demand that nigh threatened the closure of our shows. It was only thanks to Ken Posney, then Community Development Officer with the City of Fremantle, that a solution was found... wait for it... to create a scaffolding ladder over the 5-meter high Roundhouse limestone wall - an absurd, costly and totally unnecessary fixture constructed to appease two power-drunk government health officials (thanks again to KP for accessing the funds). Happily, those shows were a great success, despite the occasional late-night drunk seizing the opportunity to attempt scaling the scaffolding.

Our third concert series, Feats Underground, was held at the Fly By Night Club, Fremantle, September 29 to October 2, 1998. This was an augmented group with Ron Reeves, singer and percussionist, Kerry Fletcher, drummer, Aiden D'Adhemar (Martha’s Vineyard) and Broken Hill painter, Clark Barrett, creating real time Hokusai canvasses and Blue Poles revisions during the concert. Our staging also featured the aforementioned transparent waterproof tent and overhead sprinkler system designed by Peter.

The final concert, AC/PVC at the Ozone, December 9, 1990 presented an augmented line-up with percussionist members of Nova Ensemble: David Pye, Neil Craig, Paul Tanner, Amanda Dean and trombonist (yes, that trombone! ), Andrew Raymond.

AC/PVC held artist in residency projects in Albany/Denmark, 1988; Wanneroo [Limestone Connection] 1989, Northam 1987 and toured the Pilbara & Kimberley, Pipe Dreams Tour in 1989 with Still Moves Dance Company (Jean Tally, Beverley Greig and Claudia Alessi), including a performance at Kulan Island, for which our instruments were packed into two light aircraft for the trip across from Derby). AC/PVC also performed at the Darwin Bouganvillea Festival, 1990. Between 1987 & 1990 AC/PVC performed in many, many schools and communities around the state. A huge thanks to all the musicians who performed with AC/PVC including Ron Reeves, Paul Tanner, Dipaunka Macredes, Kupusamy Raman, Andrew Raymond, Gary Ridge, Pepe Fiore, Kerry Fletcher, Aiden D'Adhemar, Alan Murphy (formerly a member of The Village People), among others and the many folk who came to our workshops and participated in our community performances.

It seems apocryphal these days that vastly more people know/knew of AC/PVC than ever saw our shows... "I remember AC/PVC !!"... It's comforting to know that those memories linger, but there is also something in a good name... I think!

AC/PVC: Doing more for music than Bach did for Plumbing!

What reviewers said...

"In all my long years of concert going, I have rarely come across a group like AC/PVC, who not only clearly derive immense pleasure from their performance but succeed in communicating that to their listeners"
Neville Cohn, The West Australian, July 1989

"...an enegetic and rhythmically vital performance"
Lindsay Vickery, The West Australian, September 1988

"In the skilled and imaginative hands of Peter Keelan, Mark Cain and Ron Reeves, the orchestra of PVC tubing has an astonishing range of mood and sound"
Terry Owen, The West Australian, 1988

"It was a wonderful array of imaginative sound by three musicians who were as entertaining as they were technically skilled."

David Hough, The Australian, April 1988