WARPS CD releases 2012 – 2015
While my coffee cools (WARPS W22, 2015)
Bolleter’s poems and stories are integrated with music, including that of Ludwig Van Beethoven, Carla Bley, Astor Piazzolla, and Cole Porter, as well as his own. The poems and stories are taken from Bolleter’s collections of poems: Piano Hill (Fremantle Press, 2009). All the Iron Night (Smokebush Press, 2004) and his recent collection Average Human Heart (2015). For Bolleter, the poetry is what is there after the music has stopped. While my coffee cools runs for 35’00” and is ideal for radio.
Frontier Piano (WARPS W 20, 2014)
features the best of Bolleter’s work from 2007-2014. It is substantially devoted to recordings of dying pianos that reside at Kim Hack’s and Penny Mossop’s Wambyn Olive Farm, home of the world’s first Ruined Piano Sanctuary – fifty pianos decaying in nature, with others in sheds, on roofs, and in dams. Each piano in decay is a long-running composition. This album also includes improvisations on ruined pianos from the Alice Springs region, as well as two major works, which include pianos from Wambyn as well as others from Alice Springs and Perth: Terra Nullius and Dominion.
Death comes to every piano,
and dead they sing a different kind of song.
The Music of Chance, 2nd Edition (WARPS W 21, 2014)
Music of Chance is an intuitive project for four string players improvising with ruined piano. Conceived and devised by Ross Bolleter. Improvisers: Rebecca White (violin), Katherine Corecig (viola), Melanie Robinson (cello) and Peter Jeavons (double bass) In the first phase, the string players––one at a time––improvised freely in response to a thirty minute ruined piano track, composed by myself. There was no pre-hearing of these composed elements, and the players had no knowledge of how the others were responding. The resulting four string tracks were combined in the studio by Anthony Cormican to create a “quartet,” comprised of the players’ responses to the original ruined piano track. This is track 01, Blind Summits: a chance quartet
In 2013 I added a further five tracks consisting of recordings of my kitchen and laundry ruined pianos. Each of these recordings was made without me hearing either the strings or the earlier (2011) ruined piano recordings, or indeed other ruined piano tracks recorded contemporaneously with any given track in the 2013 recording sequence. The result is track 02, Shenanigans: a chance decet.
Music of Chance offered the opportunity for the improvisers to play with increasing entropy – either through the use of increasingly inferior instruments (making this a study in gathering ruin) – or through techniques that increasingly obscure ordinary musical functions. These could include, for instance: wearing gloves ranging from relatively skin-tight, all the way to boxing gloves. The players were also invited to devise their own techniques of ruin.
Songs from the Third Watch (WARPS W18, 2013)
Anthony and I collaborated on this CD and in addition to being producer, Anthony was vocalist, arranger and guitarist. I wrote more than a dozen “third watch” songs with lyrics drawn primarily from my own poetry, for Anthony to sing, as well as to arrange. Anthony did a beautiful re-work of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” keeping the vocal line intact but placing the piece – appropriately in terms of the lyrics – in Paris. Songs from the Third Watch enabled Anthony and I to finally bring home my setting of Kenneth Slessor’s 1937 poem “Five Bells” – reckoned by many to be the greatest Australian poem. To accompany the vocal line – which Anthony sang with great skill and feeling – I made use of bandoneon in combination with ruined pianos, digitally altered by Anthony to become “drowned pianos.” In the concluding phases of the creation of Five Bells, Anthony added string parts – subtly recolouring this piece that we developed over more than ten years.
During the closing stages of our work on Songs from the Third Watch, Anthony and I worked on High Rise Piano – an hour-long tribute to my first accordion teacher and mentor Harry Bluck (1915-1991). Harry was a well-known musician, teacher, band-leader, as well as being a musicians’ union secretary in Perth for many years. Harry gave prodigious energy and encouragement to the training of generations of young musicians, as well as helping to establish, among other institutions, the West Australian Conservatorium of Music.
High Rise Piano (WARPS W19, 2013)
invokes the sound world of the music teaching studios of my teen years in the late1950s & early1960s, with their out-of-tune pianos, accordions, trombones, ukuleles, capped off from time to time by Italian opera rehearsals. In High Rise Piano this sound world is re-imagined per medium of ruined piano, pianos on the edge of ruin, and conventionally out of tune instruments.
Bon Marche buildings, the site of the studios, still exists, although the studios are long gone. The text for High Rise Piano draws extensively on the recorded memories of my first accordion teacher, Harry Bluck who rented teaching studios in Bon Marche buildings. Harry was a man of imposing bulk, a great inspirer of musicians, and an important musician, union secretary, and musicians’ advocate in the Perth music scene from the 1940s to the 1970s. Additionally, I make use of text based on my own remembered experience.
Nothing as a Thing (WARPS W17, 2012)
In 2012, WARPS released the musical works of Antoinette Carrier from the 1970s on her album entitled Nothing as a Thing. These works – radical for their time – still speak eloquently to us today. Antoinette Carrier began her creative career as a composer, working with fragmented and spliced magnetic tape and analog synthesizers to produce layered work with fragmented sounds, in combination with live instruments. Nothing as a Thing features these aspects of her compositional work and includes inspired improvisations by trombonist Simone de Haan, among others.