Vic McEwan
Composition, Sound Design and All Thing Aural.
I have created this page to extract out elements of my projects that focus on sound, composition and audio experiments.
A lot of my projects require me covering many roles from director, video projection artist, performer, installation artist, producer, as well as sound artists.
My beginnings were in sound and I think about the sound around me for the majority of the day, so I thought it only fitting to compile sound related projects and experiments here. you can read more indepth info about these entire projects throughout the website.
Box of Birds - Composition for the Dequincy Co dance performance held at Performance Space at Carriageworks in Sydney between Nov 20th and Nov 25th 2013. This performance which explores madness, marginalised existence and incarceration was inspired by a series of photos from the NSW State Library collection of female inmates at Gladesville Psychiatic Hospital in the 1940's.
The composition was created using homemade instruments made out of wire and metal which I called "Objects of Confinement"; these were bowed, struck and touched.
Also used in this composition were recordings of lunar radio emmissions picked up by Nasa probes and live clarinet was improvised each night.
Yenda Rain - As part of a year long project working with the community of Yenda, NSW exploring the ongoing recovery from the 2012 flood events that devastated the town, this composition was created as an experiment into a new technique that I call Site Specific Composition.An online survey was created via Survey Monkey (a free online survey generator) and community members were invited to fill out the survey which had questions about the practical consequences of the flood. Each Question had 8 multiple choice answers.Each answer was assigned (without the respondent knowing) to a note in the key of F# Major.After all surveys were filled out, each answer was transcribed into a series of notes that became the music you can hear here,
On November 9th 2013 this composition was played in a local park with the Fish Rider image (pictured here) being projected from high in the air down on the the sand in a kids playground.What resulted was an evocative installation witnessed by several hundred people.
Grapevine Trio - Continuing my long interest in creating music from infrastucture, and poetry from practical objects, this recording came out of a discovery that if you pluck the wires in a grapevine they sound somewhat like a double bass and if you bow them, the sound like something else all togehter.
After this discovery, I assembled Sarah McEwan on Drums, Jaren Bianchini on Sax, Cheyne Halloran on lighting and live recording and Darrin Baker to film this snippet of what was a 40 minute improvisined recording.
Yenda Clothesline - From the kitchen of a house I was staying in, I could hear this strange melody from outside. I went to investigate and found a frame for a clothesline, unstrung , resting on the ground and leaning against the house. As the clothesline was just a frame, the wind was blowing through the holes and making different notes. I believe this phenomena is called 'thrumming'
This recording is untouched/processed (just a hi pass filter).
Sunrice - As part of a much larger project at Sunrice I created this opera written by conducting interviews with workers in the rice mill. This was performed live with the melody constucted by local musician Fiona Caldarevic.
The accompanying video footage was projected live onto the front of the large Rice Mill.
To watch a 16 minute video of the project including footage of the live opera performance, click here. To see the images that were projeced with a quick voice recording done in rehearsal, watch the video to your left.
Sunrice - In the initial stages of the SunRice project, I spent a week onsite with collaborating artist Mayu Kanamori. We were there for the first rice harvest of the season.
Mayu documented the harvest with video and photography whilst I made an accompanying soundtrack made entierly from sounds recorded at the Rice Mill and Rice storage sheds.
Postcard from Berlin - Sound recorded entirely on a walk to the Mauer Park Flea Markets in Berlin. "Instruments" include a towel rack, an old lady pulling a trolley on cobbled streets, an electrical street box and a fence railing. Recorded into an iphone 4s and edited 3 hours later with just the inbuilt speakers on the laptop to listen through.
Video - Made 6 hours later experimenting with triggering image manipulation via sound.
Trailer - As part of the Grong Grong Creative House, a one week intensive arts lab, I created an instrument out of a trailer and wire and performed to an audience during the final exhibition.
Dance Diaries - Composition for a short danc film about "home" made by dancer/choregrapher Linda Luke and Film Maker Martin Fox.
This film was made with local residents of Narrander all aged over 70y.o
Roadside Frequencies
Safety Bollards
Grace Before Meals
Box Freezer Romance
Reverberate
100 Notions
Hook
Uncovered