Michael Pulsford

Time, Rupture and Memory

Time, Rupture and Memory is a radiophonic piece I made in 2007.  I asked a series of sound designers and composers what they thought about Musique Concrète.  Musique Concrète is music made from recorded sounds, and it arose once sound could be recorded on things like turntables and magnetic tape.  The techniques of Musique Concrète underlie most contemporary audio production, and I was interested in how similar they seemed to the techniques of film sound design. Time, Rupture and Memory is a composition made from recorded interviews and music.

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Interviewees: David Toop, Philip Samartzis, Philip Brophy, Darrin Verhagen, Byron Scullin, Cornel Wilczek and Jim Knox.

discostation

A great '70s Bollywood track I recorded off the radio when I was in Delhi.  It's a request show on FMGold, a hits-and-memories station.  The song is 'Discostation', sung by Asha Bhosle and produced by Bappi Lahiri.

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Cues from 'Scarecrow'

Here's three cues written for a production of Don Nigro's 'Scarecrow' in the Victorian College of the Arts Directors' Series.

They're all pretty similar.  'Scarecrow' depicts an isolated family going through a series of events which might be repeating endlessly, as though under the influence of a curse.  I wanted to use the same sequence of notes over and over, like in the classic horror films of the 1980s, where the endless repetition of the theme reinforces the sense of hopelessness and inevitability.

Each cue is built around cello, played by William Heuzenroder.  I played all the other instruments.  The ambiguous sounds are all guitars or wineglasses.

The other sounds are clocks and cicadas - 'Scarecrow' is set in a farmhouse full of clocks, sitting in a cornfield.  The text contains no stage directions and all changes of location are merely implied.  At first the director and I experimented with reinforcing this absence of direction, but it made the play seem structurally weak; we changed direction and I started using quiet birds, cicadas and clocks to separate out the various moments and implied spaces of the play.

Scarecrow Cue 31 - 31A by Michael Pulsford  
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Scarecrow Cue 12 by Michael Pulsford  
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Scarecrow Cue 25 - 26 by Michael Pulsford  
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Cues from 'iexist'

Here's three cues from I Must Not Theatre's 2010 production 'iexist', a dance/theatre piece created for the 2010 Adelaide Fringe Festival.  All were written in the rehearsal room while the director and actors developed the relevant sections of the performance.

King Of The Internet is part of a longer sequence of cues which evolves over about 12 minutes.  It contains two pieces of spoken text: 'King Of The Internet', which is spoken by the actor in the final show (so this version was just a guide for me to shape the cue to and isn't delivered perfectly) and 'I Dreamt I Was Made Of Words', which was delivered as part of the score and so is as you hear it.  This sequence of cues is built around sampled instruments and field recordings.  The organ-like sound is actually a processed recording of wineglasses; there's bees and traffic and a classroom in there as well.
 

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Puppet Dance includes another piece of pre-recorded text which introduces a slow dance sequence.  It's built from a field recording of traffic, filtered to make it sound something like a piano.

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Typing Trees is the closing cue for the performance and accompanies a wordless dance sequence.

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The Leafs, in .4 seconds