Just finished a new collaboration with Eugenia Lim on a video piece for her exhibition entitled Yellow Peril currently showing at BUS Projects in Collingwood. A sci-fi meta-narrative, a homage to Jacques Tati’s film Playtime and a non-linear approach to Australian history and personal identity, Eugenia Lim’s new video installation, Yellow Peril, looks at the Chinese history of gold digging at Sovereign Hill.
The process of music creation for this project was really fun as I employed the use of only three instruments; my acoustic guitar which I sampled into Ableton Live to create various five note scale based sample patches that play and loop on each other in a non – guitary / non- synced fashion, a Critter and Guitari Pocket Piano which created pads and more lofi/sci-fi drones and my new beast the Moog Sub Phatty – which I used very sparingly to double some melodic material in the machinery scenes. I blended the musical elements with the existing foley that was captured during the filming on location at Sovereign Hill, giving it over emphasis in some scenes and altering or removing it in others. It was great to make some work with Euge again and her process exploring complex cultural identity and displacement is coming on stronger than ever with this new work.
About the Yellow Peril works, Eugenia says “I’m always interested in how ideas of nationalism or stereotypes are formed,” Lim says. “So this work is taking a really specific context – my Australian and second-generation Chinese context – and looking at the wider political and economic relationship.”
Yellow Peril is at BUS Projects, Collingwood, until the 25th of April, 2015. Check it out if you are in town!