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This section is deigned to answer some of the general questions I've received by students via email. Thanks to Rachel Elberg for formulating the initial batch. Other answers will be posted as they come in.
Firstly, what led you initially from your solo music practice to pursue composition and sound design for film?
I think I got into music around the time I realised the any form of sport was ridiculous - so that was probably when I was 11 or 12. At that time, I got into movies too. But my interest in both fields was naïve and not especially focused. I only became more seriously interested in the two once I was expelled from a college and commenced a TAFE course when I was 15. The teachers there were inspiring, and within a very short time I realised that the arts was something more than mere entertainment. This is a long was of saying that because the importance of art crystalised for me all at once and with such intensity, I perceived all arts as vitally interconnected. This is in contrast to the notion that one embarks on some sort of grand journey for a professional careers since a young age. So to me, music encompassed all its manifestations - from Gary Glitter to Stockhausen to Blaxploitation scores (to take things rattling around my head at that time). Once I started 'doing art stuff' with the art group TSK-TSK-TSK, there was no clear distinction as to what was music and what was film. So after about some years working in that area (1977-1982) I had intuitively formed quite multi-lateral ideas of how sound and image could work together. It wasn't till much later that I 'reverse-taught' myself the more conventional building blocks for what passes as sound design.You have worked consistently as an academic. What role does theory play in your practical work as a composer/sound designer? Do you seek consciously to put your ideas into practice, or do you work more intuitively?
I've never distinguished between theory and practice - between making/doing something and talking/writing about something. I think the opposition between the two is what makes most academic writers (as well as general writers and journalists) disconnected from the materiality of the world they describe, and makes most professional craftspeople tediously precious about their own work. Both streams end up hedged into defensive corners, each flanked by the various anti-intellectual ideas that especially in Australia separate the two. The most important role theory plays in my work is precisely that I don't separate it from my practice. Every score or sound design I do is a theoretical proposition as to what a score or sound design 'could be'. I never want to define anything in the field: rather, I want to ponder how it might be. Similarly, anything I've ever written about someone else's film score or sound design is like a learning exercise for me in that I view their work as a manual for how one might try out making something along those lines. So when I write, I write as a composer and designer; and when I composer or design, I do so as a critical writer. All of it contributes to the pool of ideas for the possibilities that one can do with film scores and sound design.
What elements of film do you believe make it an important contemporary medium?
I hate to appear avoiding answering questions directly, but I do believe that film is at once a most contemporary medium and the most conservative of industries. Its contemporary veneer comes from its grounding in 20th Century modes of collage, deconstruction, multiplicity, mediarisation, and so on. This means that film in general is a hybrid, a chimera; something I've often referred to as being 'Frankensteinian' in that it is an impure assemblage of parts functioning in an entirely new way. Still today, notions of truth, purity, beauty, harmony, and so on, define the dominant definitions of art. Those terms are not part of my vocabulary, and film is a beast that in my view does not endear those terms - even when the film tries hard to do so (be it Love Story or Babel). The most amazing thing, though, is that the forces that are pulled together to make a film seem bent of restricting any artistic integrity. Its financial investment, its exploitative prerogatives, its authorial supremacy, its factory demarcations, its industrial guilds, its commercial marketing (especially art houses and festivals), its nationalistic dogma, its humanist altruisms - these all are modelled on the production of a Wagner opera rather than an exposition of Frankenstein's monster. This, however, is the crux of film: that such forces can end up producing unexpected results which go against the very grain of their creation and production. In the end, the visceral, material experience of a film becomes its own life force despite all that occurred to make it and what myths are claimed of its 'auteur'. This is the heart of 'film as Frankenstein's monster'. It's an enigma that continues to make film contemporary.
You have a strong background in sound design and composition. To what extent do your thoughts on sound affect the directorial decisions you make for your films?
As suggested earlier, it's hard for me to separate the soundtrack from the image track. I've used and abused various terms for this molecular merger of the two - 'audiovisuality, 'cinesonic', etc. - and they're all attempts to highlight the inalienable fusion of the two. I've been fortunate to have perceptually developed this 'inability of separation', because it helps me never forget the act of listening while watching, and vice versa. When it comes to making my own films and videos, I think my background in sound design and composition affects my directing in terms of rhythm and space. When working with an actor, for example, I am probably more focused on the performance of their voice - its presence as an instrument - than I am with their face alone. And when I'm working with an editor, I'm very conscious of what's not in the frame and how space is conjured by the image. Having said that, I think that I generally do better scores and sound designs for other people's work rather than my own - which is why I maintain working in this field. This is because there's something that happens when you're setting up a dialogue with someone else which is akin to being in a band. You contribute something based on your response to someone else's contribution, and the spark for that is something that's hard to generate on your own.
In your sound design/composition practice, how does your work process affect the product?
I think my work processes are very influential on my outcomes - mainly because I'm trying to be as lateral and open-ended as possible. This is not to say that what I do is 'radical' or 'avant-garde'. In fact I quite oppose those notions, because to be 'radical' or 'avant-garde' is to be quite historically determined by arguments and debates that were important prior to WWII in Europe. Being 'lateral' and 'open-ended' means that one has to be quite conventional sometimes. The critical divisions that currenrly exist to prop up 'high art' films against 'low art' films, or 'mainstream' versus 'indepentdent', or 'commercial' versus 'avant-garde' are all specious divisons based on unimaginative surface readings of films. This is especially so when it comes to considering the soundtrack, which is why many of the films I write about come from both sides of those divisions. What's most important, though, is the whole context that enables a particular process. Sometimes the most 'radical' thing for a film might be to score it with cover versions of Spandau Ballet songs. Or maybe the best thing for a children's cartoon series would be to score it with Penderecki. A film is capable of taking on such unlikely contributions to its final form. The hard work is finding director, producers and writers who wish to explore those options. Fortunately, they're around. One just has to be patient in finding them.
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