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• Chris Cree Brown: Artists Prepare - documentary; video 

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Breathe was commissioned by Irish flautist Bill Dowdall and features the sounds of him performing on both bass and sliding headjoint flutes. The other sonorities are vocalisms made by a young Italian visual artist, Alice Grassi, I met while we were both Associate Artists at the Atlantic Centre for the Arts in Florida in 2010. I was taken with her lilting voice and made many recordings. Breathe is an amalgam of breath, voice and flute sounds in a sensuous and suggestive interplay. It is included on the Atoll CD Breathe, new notes for flute from Ireland & New Zealand (ACD 111).

• Eve de Castro-Robinson: Breathe; video 

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• Eve de Castro-Robinson: Breathe 

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While making this piece, I was enthralled by my daughter’s experimentation with language, at the age of nineteen months. Recognisable English words were freely mingled with streams of idiosyncratic verbal utterance, and while meaning was often obscure to adult ears, patterns of words and sounds were repeated in a way that was clearly linguistic. The title of the piece is one of these patterns, which she used frequently, and which I am still unable to translate. To me, such playfulness suggests musical processes. Almost from birth, the toys which most held her attention were those which made sounds. In response to this, I had recorded a collection of the toys which had most fascinated her around the age of seven months. Nearly a year later, the sounds finally accumulated into a musical shape. I can only dream of recapturing for myself the inventiveness of a young child, but the observation of the child’s manipulation of sound and meaning leaves its traces in my work.

• Philip Brownlee: Cat, Dog, Pie; audio 

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• Philip Brownlee: Cat, Dog, Pie 

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• 4th Generation: Lilburn Electroacoustic Music Studios 

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The materials of this piece have appeared in a variety of contexts. Originally they were one strand in Amalgam’s Simia ex machina, a cross-disciplinary performance piece. The show was concerned, in somewhat abstract terms, with the relationship between people and machinery. There, the network of tensions between the spontaneous and the fixed, between live performers and pre-recorded materials, was an important aesthetic dimension. There is also a duo version for drums and acousmatic sound, in which both performers improvise freely to a loosely predetermined framework. Some of the energy of this improvisation remains in the fixed version. There is also a dialogue between the organic and the automatic, between intuitive expression and mechanistic musical processes.

• Philip Brownlee: Ex machina; audio 

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• John Elmsly: In Memoriam: Rainbow Warrior; audio 

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This piece is dedicated to my grandmother, Phyllis Collier, whose voice and stories form its core. She talks about her experience of the Second World War from the distance of New Zealand, and her relationship to her older brother, David. We become aware that this is a retelling, a memory, which has been reconstructed many times (and once more by the composer in the studio). It has the obliqueness, the fragmentary quality of distant remembering; the meaning is carried as much by what is not said as by what is. The ambiguous relationship between the sonic and the semantic strata underlines this, as do the shifts between real and imaginary environments. The self conscious artifacts of the recording and editing process – background noise and tape hiss – remind us that this is a construct. Still it is one that touches on one person’s particular experience, and ultimately it is the person, more than the story, that is brought into focus.

• Tendril and Nebula  Year: 1999 

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Birdlings Flat/Poranui is located in the South Island of New Zealand between Christchurch and Akaroa at the point where Lake Forsythe enters the sea. Its main feature is the particularly hostile beach with a heavy swell and undercurrents that have claimed the lives of people attempting to swim or wander too far down its steep bank. The landscape is harsh, bleak and exposed. Banks Peninsula can be seen to the North and East, Kaitorete Spit stretches 25 km to the West and to the South is the Pacific Ocean. The peninsula and spit are both affected by human activity, particularly grazing stock. There is a small settlement, of less than 200 residents, where the sound of the sea is always present.

Material used in this piece was recorded over three visits between November 2010 and July 2011. I have endeavoured to allow the place to ‘sing’ for itself, by re-locating its voices and drawing out their nuances to express its uniqueness. Particular attention has been given to record from perspectives that visitors to this astonishing environment are unlikely to otherwise experience, such as very close proximity, where these voices become hyper-real through the ‘acoustic lens’ of the microphone. The piece seeks to define the uniqueness of the location by examining its ‘sound objects’ in terms of their individual characteristics, as well as by how they fit together and inter-relate when re-combined in different permutations.

• Reuben Derrick: Poranui; audio 

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