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Gail Priest: Everything and Nothing

from After Julia [studio album] by Decibel

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“The reaction to being the first female Prime Minister does not explain everything about my prime ministership nor does it explain nothing about my prime ministership.” Julia Gillard, Legacy Speech, 26 June 2013.
This sentence has stuck with me since that fateful evening back in 2013—as has Ms Gillard’s tone of dignity during its utterance. While her “misogyny speech” is undeniably powerful, it takes a real strength of character to take defeat gracefully. To create this piece, I typed in the above sentence on a standard computer keyboard with MIDI activated, and the resultant notes and gaps (not all letters on the QWERTY keyboard have musical notes assigned to them) became the basis for the melodic material. I then refined these rough patterns into melodic motifs and arranged them according to sonic and semantic intentions. Played by ‘real’ instruments this work sounds very different to my normal digitally manipulated output however behind the timbres my favourite compositional strategies—chance, reversals and decadent polyphony— remain.

Gail Priest is a Sydney-based artist with a multi-faceted practice in which sound is the key material of communication and investigation. Her work spans soundtracks for dance, theatre and video, solo electro- acoustic performance as well sound installations for gallery contexts. She has released several albums and EPs of exploratory music through her own label Metal Bitch, as well as Flaming Pines, and Endgame Records, and has undertaken radiophonic commissions for the ABC. She has exhibited sound installations at Artspace, Tokyo Wonder Site, Performance Space, CAST, and SNO Gallery and collaborated closely with other visual artists exhibiting nationally and internationally. Most recently she curated Rapture/Rupture for the MCA’s ArtBar and she runs the Pretty Gritty series at 107 Projects. She also writes extensively about sound and media arts for RealTime Magazine, where she is Associate Editor. Priest was previously the editor of Experimental Music: Audio Explorations in Australia through UNSW Press (2009).

credits

from After Julia [studio album], track released September 4, 2023
Recorded by both Stuart James and Hadyn Buxton, live telematically between Soundfield Perth and Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance Digital Hub at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia during the COVID19 lockdowns. Mixed by Stuart James.

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Decibel Australia

Decibel is an Australian new music ensemble devoted to the realisation of music where acoustic and electronic instruments are represented. Decibel pioneer electronic score formats for new and existing works, incorporating mobile score formats and networked playback environments.
Both studio albums and live recordings are listed on this site. ... more

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