Colin Black
" … amongst the most significant Australian creative artists of his generation, a composer/sound artist who has created a significant body of important work in a relatively short time, work which spans installation, sound art, fìlm, radiophonic works, and beyond, with many of these works having gained international attention." - John Davis, CEO Australian Music Centre, 25 February 2011
Internationally acclaimed composer/sound artist Colin Black won the prestigious Prix Italia Award (2003) in the category Best “Music Radio - Composed Work” for composing and producing his major work The Ears Outside My Listening Room. BBC Radio 3 described this work as "a haunting evocation of Australia", while the Prix Italia Award’s International Jury Report states that it, "... lived up to the claim … that here was a patchwork sonic quilt that can be passed down the generations."
In 2009 Black was commissioned by Deutschlandradio Kultur's Klangkunst to create a feature length sound art work from field recordings made in East Germany entitled Kilian's Antipodean Dream. Prior to this in 2008 Black was invited by Czech Radio’s rAdioCUSTICA program to create Soundprints: The Prague Pressings for broadcast. Black's sound installation Alien In The Landscape: The Extended Enviro-Guitar (XEG) was selected for the Australasian Computer Music Conference 2008 which was held at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (Australia). In 2007 Black composed and produced a major musical/soundart hybrid work entitled Longing, Love & Loss for performance and broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation network. He also created the Butter Churn sound sculpture installation for the Wilsons River Experience Walk in Lismore's Heritage Park. While in 2006 Black was commissioned by Deutschlandradio Kultur's Klangkunst program to create a major radio art work entitled Alien In The Landscape.
In previous years Black was commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to co-produce & compose two major audio/musical works with a Greek theme for their Olympic programming. Black’s sound installations include the Parramatta Heritage Centre’s Parramatta: People & Place exhibition and for the NORPA 2004 production of The Flood Black created a dynamic multi-site soundscape and the Starcourt Theatre Space sound installation “Floodscape”. A finalist in the Australian National Digital Arts Awards ‘98, his experimental composition 118, 120 122 was exhibited at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art. Black's works have also been selected for performance at events including En Red O 2000 music festival Barcelona Spain, the Festival Synthese Bourges France, Rencontres Musiques Nouvelles, Lunel France, 60x60 Pacific Basin Regional Concert Los Angeles USA, Zèppelin 2004-Festival de Arte Sonoro Barcelona, Spain, Hipersonica 2004 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, The Literature Sound Barrier 2002 in Wien, Austria, Sydney University's Live Wires concerts '97, '98, and Melbourne's Extatic Concert for the Next Wave festival '98.
Black is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of Sydney and a recipient of the University of Sydney Postgraduate Awards (UPA) Scholarship. He is also a graduate of the UNE Contemporary Music Degree and was awarded an Honorary Graduate Diploma of Musical Directing and Composing for TV from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS). He has presented research papers at the 2005 Vital Signs conference (RMIT University’s, School of Creative Media, Melbourne), 4th International Mobile Music Workshop (Amsterdam 2007), Sounding Out 4 – An International Symposium on Sound in the Media, (University of Sunderland, UK 2008) and the 4th Media Art Scoping Study Symposium (Melbourne 2009). Black has also been invited to talk about radio art and his work on London's Resonance 104.4FM, at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Technische Universität Berlin, University of Sydney and the Victoria University of Wellington.
Black’s work has been selected for broadcast and podcast on stations including Deutschlandradio Kultur, the BBC, YLE Radio, Sweden’s Sveriges Radio as well as many other European stations and in South Africa, New Zealand and numerous times across Australia.
Internationally acclaimed composer/sound artist Colin Black won the prestigious Prix Italia Award (2003) in the category Best “Music Radio - Composed Work” for composing and producing his major work The Ears Outside My Listening Room. BBC Radio 3 described this work as "a haunting evocation of Australia", while the Prix Italia Award’s International Jury Report states that it, "... lived up to the claim … that here was a patchwork sonic quilt that can be passed down the generations."
In 2009 Black was commissioned by Deutschlandradio Kultur's Klangkunst to create a feature length sound art work from field recordings made in East Germany entitled Kilian's Antipodean Dream. Prior to this in 2008 Black was invited by Czech Radio’s rAdioCUSTICA program to create Soundprints: The Prague Pressings for broadcast. Black's sound installation Alien In The Landscape: The Extended Enviro-Guitar (XEG) was selected for the Australasian Computer Music Conference 2008 which was held at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (Australia). In 2007 Black composed and produced a major musical/soundart hybrid work entitled Longing, Love & Loss for performance and broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation network. He also created the Butter Churn sound sculpture installation for the Wilsons River Experience Walk in Lismore's Heritage Park. While in 2006 Black was commissioned by Deutschlandradio Kultur's Klangkunst program to create a major radio art work entitled Alien In The Landscape.
In previous years Black was commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to co-produce & compose two major audio/musical works with a Greek theme for their Olympic programming. Black’s sound installations include the Parramatta Heritage Centre’s Parramatta: People & Place exhibition and for the NORPA 2004 production of The Flood Black created a dynamic multi-site soundscape and the Starcourt Theatre Space sound installation “Floodscape”. A finalist in the Australian National Digital Arts Awards ‘98, his experimental composition 118, 120 122 was exhibited at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art. Black's works have also been selected for performance at events including En Red O 2000 music festival Barcelona Spain, the Festival Synthese Bourges France, Rencontres Musiques Nouvelles, Lunel France, 60x60 Pacific Basin Regional Concert Los Angeles USA, Zèppelin 2004-Festival de Arte Sonoro Barcelona, Spain, Hipersonica 2004 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, The Literature Sound Barrier 2002 in Wien, Austria, Sydney University's Live Wires concerts '97, '98, and Melbourne's Extatic Concert for the Next Wave festival '98.
Black is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of Sydney and a recipient of the University of Sydney Postgraduate Awards (UPA) Scholarship. He is also a graduate of the UNE Contemporary Music Degree and was awarded an Honorary Graduate Diploma of Musical Directing and Composing for TV from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS). He has presented research papers at the 2005 Vital Signs conference (RMIT University’s, School of Creative Media, Melbourne), 4th International Mobile Music Workshop (Amsterdam 2007), Sounding Out 4 – An International Symposium on Sound in the Media, (University of Sunderland, UK 2008) and the 4th Media Art Scoping Study Symposium (Melbourne 2009). Black has also been invited to talk about radio art and his work on London's Resonance 104.4FM, at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Technische Universität Berlin, University of Sydney and the Victoria University of Wellington.
Black’s work has been selected for broadcast and podcast on stations including Deutschlandradio Kultur, the BBC, YLE Radio, Sweden’s Sveriges Radio as well as many other European stations and in South Africa, New Zealand and numerous times across Australia.
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Books by Colin Black
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Papers and Articles by Colin Black
Phenomena (EVP) and the disembodied voice in
mediated space as a starting point to develop a 5.1
surround sound radio art work. It documents the author’s
creative processes and 5.1 production techniques that
include a type of deconstruction of spatiality and
fluctuating relationship with sonic “reality” and fiction.
Moreover, the paper explores the notion of varying
mediated “distance” between the listener and the
recorded voice in terms of both the “length” or
transformative effect of the audio chain and/or
communication system and “time” that can be heard as a
technologically related chronological aspect.
This paper explores the idea of radio art as a media based acoustic art form and argues that the Australian works Journal (1969) by David Ahern and Quadrophonic Cocktail (1986) by Chris Mann are forms of acoustic media art.
Further to this, it asks is there a role for radio art in education?
"
Phenomena (EVP) and the disembodied voice in
mediated space as a starting point to develop a 5.1
surround sound radio art work. It documents the author’s
creative processes and 5.1 production techniques that
include a type of deconstruction of spatiality and
fluctuating relationship with sonic “reality” and fiction.
Moreover, the paper explores the notion of varying
mediated “distance” between the listener and the
recorded voice in terms of both the “length” or
transformative effect of the audio chain and/or
communication system and “time” that can be heard as a
technologically related chronological aspect.
This paper explores the idea of radio art as a media based acoustic art form and argues that the Australian works Journal (1969) by David Ahern and Quadrophonic Cocktail (1986) by Chris Mann are forms of acoustic media art.
Further to this, it asks is there a role for radio art in education?
"
With Creative Commons, Open and Free, and using a free operating system for “microradio” (like Auppix) just about anyone can start a streaming internet radio station. Then with August Black’s “Userradio” and “Streaps”, internet radio becomes interactive, produced by simultaneous multi-site broadcasters and randomised by intervention. Meanwhile major players like the ABC (Australia) are conducting surveys and experiments into new delivery models for radio.
According to the U.S., Bridge Ratings research there are likely to be 35 million satellite radio subscribers by 2010. The forecast for internet radio is an increase form the current 50 million to 187 million users within 5 years. “wireless internet radio represents the biggest challenge – not satellite radio”, Dave Van Dyke (President of Bridge) said. Like Motorola’s recently demonstrated iRadio, it seems to forecast a flood of portable devices (like iPods and mobile phones) with docking ports in every room and car connected to your audio system.
What does this all mean for radio art? Well the latest trend for the ABC (Australia) is to have radio art with a predominate “musical” content to be broadcast unannounced on ABC Classic FM, with no flag ship programme. While “acoustic arts” being broadcast in LoFi AM mono on Radio National. This trend seems to be echoed in the Netherlands with theirs acoustic arts programme, Café Sonoré recently reduced to LowFi mono after being threatened with annihilation. Is there some connection between the rise of independent streaming internet arts radio stations and the decline of major networks support for radio art? Who’s streaming? And is there anyone listening outside the walls of the ‘bunker’?
"The project explored the interaction between the environment and the creation of sound. Extending a guitar string horizontally and attaching to a pole, the movement of the surroundings played harmonious sounds amongst bird song. Named the Enviro-Guitar"
- Leeds Metropolitan University News, 29 September 2009.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ABC Classic FM, New Music Up Late programme, 8 November 2014.
"A 'Play' for Collected Sounds"
Duration 25 minutes
Composed and Produced by Colin Black
About The Work
Inspired by the fictional blind character of Captain Tom Cat in Dylan Thomas’ classic Under Milk Wood, this new sound composition unearths the captain’s secret soundworld that is based both on actual location recordings and constructed dreamscapes. It is a soundworld full of the lyrical, sonic charm of Welsh fishing villages, nuanced from Captain Cat’s melancholic and nostalgic yearning for the past. In a sense we are travelling along sonic pathways into memories that dissolve into acoustic dreams; as in Thomas’ work, ‘the long drowned nuzzle up’ against our ear and tease the living, in this new auditory experience.
In Search of Captain Cat of Llareggub crosses existing borders and genres … it’s a kind of musical work constructed chiefly from sound, but not exactly music concrete, nor is it a radio drama or documentary. It is a sonic painting, infused with the tantalising echoes of Cardigan Bay (West Wales) and the breath of Dylan Thomas’s Captain Cat. In fact after Douglas Cleverdon produced Under Milk Wood for radio in 1954 he stated that it [Thomas’s work] ‘… has no rules determining what can or cannot be done. And though it may be in dramatic form, it has no need of a dramatic plot’ (British Radio Drama 1981: 9). In a sense Black is exploring this possibility in his new work … it has no rules but the goal of developing a language out of sound, from recordings gathered in Welsh fishing villages on Cardigan Bay. Moreover, it is a hybrid audio work that takes the listener into an exotic and imagined composed soundscape, a space where the sea sings.
Some key elements of this work include radiophonic arrangements of sea shanties sung by Gerald Morgan in Welsh, the traditional folk song “Y Wasgod Goch” [The Red Waistcoat] that tells the story of being haunted by a recently deceased lover, as sung by Mr Robert Pierce Roberts and Bach’s “Fuga sopra il Magnificat” that has been augmented with a chiefly stratified texture of the sounds of sheep, the sea and a blacksmith at work. In addition to these, the work contains location recordings from Thomas’ house in Laugharne [Welsh: Talacharn], and New Quay [Welsh: Cei Newydd] (which are believed to be the inspiration for Under Milk Wood), sparse interviews with locals describing New Quay, Welsh maritime historian David Jenkins describing life at sea, archival recordings from the audiovisual archive at St Fagans, National History Museum including Mary Jane Rees’ interview explaining the Welsh myth of adderstones that are believed to cure blindness, sounds from aboard various ships in motion and other coastal locations in Wales. Finally, an acoustic theme that runs through this work is that, in sonic reality, the boats are heard as beached or docked and tethered by ropes to the quay, or attempting to start their motors. It is only in Captain Cat’s dreams and day-dreams that the boats are free to set sail on his emotional sea of nostalgia.
Credits
Produced, Composed, Recorded and Mixed by Colin Black
Interviewees: Gerald Morgan, David Jenkins, Winston David Evans and Yasmin Evans. Sea Shanty Singer: Gerald Morgan Captain’s Voice: Clive Woosnam
Archival recordings courtesy of Meinwen Ruddock-Jones and the audiovisual archive at St Fagans, National History Museum. Archival recordings include “Y Wasgod Goch” as sung by Mr Robert Pierce Roberts and Mary Jane Rees’ interview about the Welsh myth of adderstones.
Location recordings from Wales, edited, compiled and mixed at Frequency Oz (Australia) by Colin Black
Special thanks to: Bernard Clarke, Yanna Black, David Jenkins, Winston David Evans, Yasmin Evans, Meinwen Ruddock-Jones, Ian Heights, Mair Humphreys, Kevin Sumption, Captain John Dikkenberg, Clive Woosnam, Stephen Adams, Peter Gage, St Fagans, National History Museum, Ceredigion Archives, Dolphin Spotting Boat trips (New Quay), The Australian National Maritime Museum and the crew of the HMAS Advance and HMB Endeavour.