The collaborative process behind Alluvial Gold with Louise Devenish and Stuart James

In this interview Louise Devenish and Stuart James are talking about making 'Alluvial Gold,’ which exists both as an art installation and as a concert performance. It’s created by Louise Devenish and percussionist, visual artist Erin Coates and composer Stuart James. Erin was not available to join in the conversation. The interview explores collaboration and the challenges of remote collaboration.

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Highlights

• (0:00:00) Making creative collaboration work

• (0:02:01) Explanation of Alluvial Gold and its themes

• (0:05:52) Integration of themes into the sound and visuals

• (0:09:46) The collaborative process and challenges of remote collaboration

• (0:12:56) Physicality and spatial aspects of the performance

• (0:19:25) Challenges faced during the project

• (0:23:50) Playing the space as a percussionist

• (0:28:27) Advice for creatives embarking on a similar journey

 

About Erin Coates

Erin Coates is a visual artist and creative producer based in Perth, Australia. Her work, spanning drawing, sculpture and film, explores the limits of the human body in various environments, influenced by her background in rock climbing and freediving. Erin’s recent work presents hybrid forms merging human elements with Australia's unique marine and estuarine life forms, speculating on potential post-human futures. Her work has been displayed in galleries and film festivals, both locally and internationally, including the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, the Adelaide Biennial, the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art , and The National: New Australian Art. Erin is represented by Moore Contemporary; she holds a masters in fine arts from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada​.

Visit Erin’s website

About Louise Devenish

Louise Devenish is a percussionist based in Australia. Her creative work merges performance, artistic research and collaborative interactions. Louise is a champion of new music; she has commissioned over 50 works for percussion and has performed extensively in ensembles like Decibel and The Sound Collectors Lab. Currently, she is a senior research fellow undertaking an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) fellowship at Monash University, where she also directs The Sound Collectors Lab and serves as percussion coordinator. Louise’s performances, recognised for their virtuosity, are featured on international labels such as HatArt and Immediata. She has been honoured with a Churchill fellowship and multiple APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards, and holds a doctorate in music.

Visit Louise’s website

About Stuart James

Stuart James is a composer, sound artist, and producer based in Australia. He is a founding member of the Decibel New Music ensemble, and a lecturer in the Composition and Music Technology Program at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. Stuart’s interests include spatial audio, spectral synthesis, and wave terrain synthesis. His recent work, supported by an Edith Cowan research grant, explores the potential uses of 3D sound to aid human navigation and the opportunities that emerging technologies present for exploring virtual environments​​. Stuart completed his doctoral research in the field of music technology.

Visit Stuart’s website

Links from the podcast

• Learn more about Alluvial Gold
• Watch a recording of Alluvial Gold
• Read Louise’s article Instrumental infrastructure, instrumental sculpture and instrumental scores: a post-instrumental practice

 Edited transcript of this interview with Louise Devenish and Stuart James

Robin: What is Alluvial Gold?

Alluvial Gold as an immersive installation and performance

Louise: So Alluvial Gold is a collaboration between visual artist Erin Coates, composer and sound designer Stuart James (who’s here in this interview), and me as percussionist, performer and co-maker in the work too. (Louise Devenish – project page)

It’s a work that takes Derbarl Yerrigan — the Swan River in Western Australia — as its point of departure. (Reference: Swan River (Derbarl Yerrigan)) Through our artistic mediums of sound, electronics, percussion, film, sculpture and visual art practices, we’re exploring a series of stories and narratives connected with the ecologies and histories of this river — and trying to bring those mediums together so that each one is shaping the others, rather than sitting side-by-side.

River histories and material themes in Derbarl Yerrigan

I might just add a little bit here to say that, with those stories and histories and ecologies that we took as our point of departure, there are two key things that we really wanted to explore in this work.

The first is to do with a history of dredging of native shellfish reefs in the river. There was a lot of dredging and landscape manipulation that took place in Derbarl Yerrigan during European colonisation and settlement there, that saw these native shellfish reefs be completely removed from the river. The shells were subsequently ground up and used as a source of lime for building materials — so in roads, in mortar, driveways, things like that. Driveways that, before cars, would have been horses and carriages and that kind of thing. That story really resonated with us and led us to want to explore shells and ceramics as a key material in the work.

The second key theme that we really wanted to explore was the impact of pollution — human pollution — in the river, and in particular the presence of heavy metal pollutants in the river, which are affecting the ecology, and in particular affecting the dolphin populations. There are a lot of dolphins in the river there, and the presence of heavy metals, particularly lead, can really affect dolphin skin and their bone structure. This led us to want to explore metal materials as another source of inspiration.

So the river is, you know, a huge part of our lives in Western Australia. The city is built right on the river, we all live and work quite close to the river. Erin, in particular, spends a lot of time in the river. She’s a very skilled free diver, and the river influences a lot of her work.

In the making of this work, we really wanted to try and create something together where our techniques and processes from our different disciplines of visual art and sound were brought together in each component of the work right from the very beginning.

Robin: What’s it like to experience Alluvial Gold?

Louise: So I can talk a little bit about what it’s like to experience it as the performer — kind of immersed in the work — and I suppose we really hope that it feels very similar for audiences.

So Alluvial Gold is quite an immersive piece. There is a blend of different materials and processes that are at play in this work. There’s percussion instruments, there’s instrumental sculptures, there’s field recordings from the river (Derbarl Yerrigan in WA), there’s video projection, there’s a lighting design — there’s a lot going on. So it really is a very rich experience for the senses, and something that I really feel like I am within when I’m performing it — like I’m inside the sound, inside the visuals, and inside the atmosphere of the piece.

I kind of hope that it feels like audiences come below the surface of the river with us. Really, we’re aiming to make it feel like a journey beneath the surface, to experience the underwater world that’s there that we don’t normally get to see as terrestrial humans.

Robin: Okay. How do some of the themes we’ve been talking about end up in the sound and visuals for the space?

Turning shells and casts into instruments

Stuart: The way a lot of the sound materials emerged, in terms of the composition itself, really also evolved through the visual art pieces that Erin was making. She was actively diving in the river, creating video footage, and also making some underwater sound recordings in the process of doing that. The score started to be realised through that process — these different pieces that she had been developing for the exhibition component of Alluvial Gold. (Event reference: PICA – Alluvial Gold)

But yeah, specifically those two kinds of materials.

So the ceramics: what really started with the oyster shells, actually. Through the process of — Erin knew someone in the restaurant business, and instead of throwing these shells out, she was able to get quite a lot of these. A whole team of us were cleaning these off, and she was drilling them to form this big oyster chainmail curtain, which became one of her installation pieces in the exhibition.

But on the other side, while she was doing that, I was exploring the sonic possibilities of these oyster shells — experimenting with, you know, dropping them, or working out their pitch. I was going through hundreds of these, trying to work out: how can we use these musically, and how can the sound of the shells carry the story of what happened to those reefs?

I actually found that the most satisfying thing was to just grab piles of these oyster shells and roll them in the hands. And this became part of the gestural language, and one of the sonic characterisations of the work that comes back at various points.

And the other component — the dolphin and the heavy metals thing — emerged more as a conceptual theme in the work. The score tends to start fairly light, but when it comes, it becomes progressively deeper and perhaps darker.

There’s a movement in particular — the seventh movement — which is titled ‘Death in the mouth of the river’. It represents the deaths of some of the dolphins in the river due to the heavy metal pollutants. It’s quite a dark and pivotal moment for me, in terms of the way I was conceiving that general structure.

The other factor is that thematically, I coupled that with the idea of the dredging as well — this overarching idea of ecological destruction of the river as another theme. And in that same movement, there’s a loud dredging sample that comes in. That’s the loudest, pivotal peak moment in the work.

Robin: Louise, you alluded to how some of the collaboration actually works, and it’s the next thing we really want to explore. Sometimes when people collaborate it’s very much a conceptual process.

Robin: But what you’ve both just explained sounds quite interesting in terms of the fact that we were helping clean off the oyster shells, and then, Stuart, you had them in your hands and started to work with them and hear them. It’s interesting to hear that, because it’s a really lovely moment in the performance where the shells are being tipped out, poured and rolled around.

Robin: Can you talk a little bit about how the collaboration works backwards and forwards?

Collaboration methods for remote making

Louise: Sure. Yeah. So the collaboration — Erin, Stu and I have worked together in different capacities before this project. Stewie and I have made a few percussion and electronics pieces together. We’ve worked together in Decibel New Music — the electric acoustic ensemble, directed by Cat Hope. (Decibel: decibelnewmusic.com | Cat Hope: cathope.com)

Through that ensemble, we’ve worked with Erin when she’s made video works that we have interpreted as scores; or as part of Decibel, we’ve performed music by Cat to be the soundtrack for some of Erin’s film works. And Stu and Erin have worked together a lot on some film works as well.

So we had these combinations of pairs of working together, and we really wanted to work together as a trio.

The collaborative aspect of it was actually really important in how this work developed, because we really wanted to make sure that we were all involved from the very beginning together. What we wanted to avoid was, for example, Erin making a film and then us making a soundtrack; or for us to make a percussion performance work and then for Erin to build a set that sat behind us; or for her to make a projection design. We wanted everything to be very integrated.

So this was our kind of lofty goal. And had Covid not come, had I not moved to Melbourne, had the border not been shut for two years, I think we would have done this probably a lot faster, and often in person.

But because of this necessity of remote collaboration, the collaboration happened in little bits over a period of about two years. Some of it was in person — Stuart and Erin working together in person, and sometimes I was able to get to Perth and do some stuff in person. But there was a substantial amount of stuff being physically posted — like oyster shells being posted across the Nullarbor and back; audio recordings; music notation being sent between Stuart and I — and the work evolving in a different way. There were moments where the ‘collaboration’ was literally a parcel arriving at the door: you open it, you listen, you test something, you respond, and then you send the next piece back.

We had to develop a new way of collaborating together because of the circumstances that Covid put us in. It was both exciting and really hard to do that.

So the collaboration has been over a couple of years, and quite iterative — small chunks at a time. And we had a few periods of quite intensive creative developments in Perth, which were fabulously supported by our long-term presenter-producers at Tura New Music, and in particular Tristen Parr, who we worked with very closely on developing and presenting this work. (Tura New Music: tura.com.au/about)

Robin: Interesting to hear that. As both of you were talking, I was wondering about whether or not it’s what I think of as a sort of ‘response collaboration’, where someone has something and someone else interprets or responds to a score. But it doesn’t feel like that at all. It feels a whole lot more holistic. And I loved hearing about the posting of oyster shells back and forth.

Robin: Stuart, what are your thoughts on the collaboration?

Stuart: I definitely agree. Covid presented some hurdles that made both email and Zoom correspondences even more important.

We had regular meetings online with all three of us, discussing the nature of the work — sometimes very practical, sometimes very conceptual, and sometimes just checking in to keep momentum going across distance. There was a lot of discussion on the conceptual aspects early on, and I think, lucky enough, by the time the music started emerging, we’d already dealt with a lot of the logistical side and explored the musical potential of different directions.

Erin was very keen on the idea of making sculptures as instruments, so there was a little bit of back and forth between herself and myself. We were sometimes in person, but then we had to send those sculptures over to Louise as well, to trial, and to work out how best to hang them.

There was a lot of knowledge exchange, because Louise has had a lot of experience hanging many different kinds of objects as instruments for percussion — knowing where to place the drill holes and where to hang them for ideal resonance. That was very important with the ‘dolphin bones’.

I was very conscious about wanting Erin’s pieces to have significant impact on the nature of the score, and the way that happened was — well, there were a few different ways it was realised.

One of her installation pieces — the chainmail curtain — is featured in the musical performance work, but it’s reappropriated. In the original exhibition it was a standalone piece with interactive sound. It had some sensors built in, and Erin got me to wire those into the curtain, and I adapted the electronics component to become an instrument. So it actually ends up being a performance instrument in the music version of Alluvial Gold.

Another way the sculptures-as-instruments had impact on the score was the dolphin bones themselves. The timbre of them had such an impact for me — so iconic, really. I looked at the overtone structure of these, and that overtone structure became a significant part of — or defined — the harmonic language of the score.

Louise: I feel like maybe we should explain these ‘dolphin bones’. We’ve been so immersed in this work for such a long time, I think sometimes we forget what people might be imagining. I don’t know if people are imagining we’ve dragged some skeleton out of the river or something, which is not what we’ve done in this work.

We’re trying to tell stories that help preserve the natural ecologies of the river, but just for a bit of context: Erin is such a skilled visual artist. She’s an extraordinary illustrator, scrimshaw artist, filmmaker and sculptor. And the dolphin bones that Stuart is talking about are not actual bones — they’re casts from a dolphin skeleton.

During our research phase, Erin managed to gain access to a dolphin skeleton that showed evidence of the bone damage resulting from heavy metal pollution in the river. It kind of looks like the skeleton has been a bit nibbled, for want of a better description.

She suggested casting a dolphin skeleton using bronze, to keep with our metal theme, and porcelain, to tie in with the shell, and to highlight the damaged areas using gold leaf.

We talked about what an instrument that was in the shape of a skeleton might sound like, and how we might use that. So we wanted to use these metal and porcelain dolphin bones as a kind of extension to the core instrument in the performance work, which is a vibraphone — a metal instrument. We thought of using these dolphin bones as a kind of extra register off the top end of the vibraphone.

So in casting these bones and thinking about how they would be hung — and therefore how they would resonate — we had to do a fair bit of research into the properties of vibrating bars in metal and things like that, to make sure that what we ended up with sounded more like a triangle, or crotales, or a vibraphone: resonant metal, rather than an anvil or something that had a very dry metallic sound.

The resulting piece, which I refer to as an instrumental sculpture, is beautiful. It’s absolutely a beautiful piece on its own. And like a lot of the components within the suite of outputs within Alluvial Gold, this dolphin bone instrument can be displayed as a work of visual art in a visual art exhibition, or it can be integrated into the instrumentarium in the performance version of Alluvial Gold. (Work listing: Australian Music Centre – Alluvial Gold)

So I’m really interested in using materials in multiple ways in creating new music: how can we use this material instrumentally, but how can it also be a sculpture or a set or something else? So that idea of instrumental sculpture is another creative line through the whole work.

And it was actually extraordinary in sampling and analysing the pitches of the bones we ended up with, and using those to inform the pitch set that some of the movements of the music of Alluvial Gold are based on. It is very clever.

Robin: Thank you, because I was visualising something that had been picked up on a beach. So there was a little bit of me that had that grim reaction, visualising dead dolphins off the top of it. So, thank you for clarifying.

Robin: That’s an interesting outcome for the project as well, because essentially you built another instrument and learned a lot from that process of building an instrument — a sculptural instrument. It has had multiple different usages as well.

Robin: It’s a bit different to the oyster shells as instruments, because that’s taking something as inspiration and then designing. Are you actually planning on doing other works with dolphin bones?

Louise: Oh, TBD. I don’t know. We have our next performance of Alluvial Gold coming up very soon, and we’re hoping to give more performances and to work for a while yet. So I think we’re probably going to want to explore them in this context for a little while, and then who knows what might come after that.

Robin: It sort of alluded to my next question. There’s always a learning experience in creative work — ups and downs. Did you have any challenges that you needed to get over, apart from the Covid remote collaboration?

Stuart: I think this work has probably been one of the most challenging pieces I’ve been involved with. I can’t speak for other collaborators, but I agree with you.

When you go into a project, it’s never really clear what that final outcome is. And especially with a collaborative project like this one, that outcome is part of the evolution of the work.

I should mention that this piece has undergone a couple of revision stages, which allowed us to review the technological implementation, and how the score is actually presented to Louise as the percussionist performer. The initial approach I took ended up being far too complicated. I think I was looking for the most flexible option, but it turned out to be very, very difficult.

There’s been a lot of review of the actual technology that drives the electronics, that drives the score, that drives how all of these things integrate. And especially to make this tourable, it was important that this was as simple as possible. Even the end product is far from simple — there’s still a lot going on — but it’s certainly a lot more manageable than it was in its original form.

Louise: Yeah, definitely some huge challenges brought about by the remote nature of all of this. And I repeatedly through all of this was just so thankful that we had worked together before, that we have a really good relationship, we know each other.

Even when things were really difficult — or it was hard to understand where the other was coming from because we were doing it over the internet — there was an element of trust there that allowed us to push through some real challenges.

And I think, possibly for Stuart and I, in some ways we did make it hard for ourselves, because we were trying to experiment with an awful lot of things all at the same time. There’s the experimenting of even just making a new work, but then experimenting with these new instruments.

Then we were talking about how best to notate this in such a way that brought in improvisation, graphically notated material, traditionally notated material, and material that had to be coordinated with a fixed electronics track or follow a particular timescale — you know, all of these things.

So there were lots of layers of unknowns, which was really challenging to manage. Ultimately, the fact that we were able to develop this over a really long period of time and test things out — we wouldn’t have been able to do it in any other way, I don’t think.

Scoring, spatial audio and playing the space

Robin: The way you’re physically — I think about it as a percussionist, you’re always playing the space. How does that link back to the scoring? Because I’m really interested to hear how the scoring ended up as well.

Louise: In terms of playing the space, are you talking a little bit about the physicality of moving between these instruments and installations?

Robin: Yeah. Because as a vibraphone player, a percussionist has a very different experience around space to someone who’s got an instrument that’s closer to them, to their body, or an extension of their body. There must be something about thinking about that spatially.

Louise: Yeah, sure. So I suppose there’s a physical space question and a sonic space question.

On the physical space side of things, sure — there was some logistics that we really had to work our way through. Particularly because Stuart and I got quite excited about bringing in ceramic bowls and crotales and the vibraphone and the bones and all of this stuff, and then trying to work out: if we’re going to use all of these things integrated with the vibraphone, how are we actually physically going to get around them?

So there was a lot of problem solving around that. I recorded a lot of material and sent it back to Stuart, and improvised on different chordal structures, or scales, or adjectives that Stuart sent through. And that then informed the pace of some of the material: like the actual getting around of the instruments, but also the resonance of the instruments.

And that links, I think, a little bit to the concept of sonic space. Performing a lot of these instruments is really informed by the resonance of these instruments in the space, and the resonance between the acoustic instruments and the electronics, which are dispersed using a quadraphonic array in the space.

So there’s a lot of listening and engagement with space, for sure. It’s a really key part of the acoustic properties of the work, which then informs the performance practice of the work.

But Stuart is an expert in spatial audio, so I should let you talk about—

Stuart: Definitely. And the physical aspects too, if I can respond to that: it’s challenging in some ways, because you want to be able to visualise how something’s performed.

I think it’s very important as a composer to write material that is idiomatic for the instrument — that falls under the hands relatively easily. And then there’s on the other extreme: virtuosity as well. If something is physically unrealistic, it’s not really virtuosity; it’s just not really scoring well for an instrument.

So I really wanted to ensure that this work needed to display a degree of virtuosity, but on the other hand, being 45 — or close to 50 — minutes long, it needed variable timescales.

Those experiments with Louise and the back and forth were very shaping for the work. We were experimenting with all sorts of things. There was a rotating mallet gesture I couldn’t let go of for one of the movements. Ultimately it didn’t end up in the final version, but we were experimenting with all kinds of different physical approaches to the instruments.

And then the sonics: the real challenge with the sonic space for me was not really knowing exactly. With the dolphin bones — the bronze cast dolphin bones — I didn’t have an opportunity to hear them until quite late, because the casting process was also down to a contracting company. Until I really knew, it was difficult to commit to something, and that was a little bit nerve-wracking.

But on the whole, things came together, and the uncertainty became part of the energy of the process. I’m very, very thankful for the collaborative back and forth — it really helped the process in realising the final work.

Robin: To wrap up: what’s your greatest advice to other creators embarking on a similar type of journey?

Advice for creatives making interdisciplinary work

Stuart: I think allowing for time. When you’re working with others, communication is absolutely paramount — and I’m not always the best communicator myself.

But really, it’s allowing that opportunity for everyone to have their input into the project, and really being interested in what everyone has to say and offer. I find that very valuable.

What someone else is willing to contribute to a project is often so different to what you would do personally. I find collaboration a really valuable experience. I find it infinitely interesting what other people have to say in that process — you know what your own self tends to think, but not what others might.

Louise: Yeah, I would agree with that. I don’t feel like I’m an expert in collaborating, or maybe in a position to offer too much advice, but I think something that worked well for us in this work was taking the time to connect with each other, with each other’s practice, and with the material.

Taking the time to create together and collaborate together. We don’t always have the luxury of time, but something that enabled us to make a work of this scale, with this many different outputs, was the fact that we had collaborated together before.

So for Stuart and I, when we started making works for percussion and electronics, we started with really short pieces for a concert setting — you know, 10 or 20 minutes. Stuart was very much the composer and I would come in and be the performer.

Then we’ve also made a couple of pieces that we’ve co-created, where I’ve made the acoustic part and Stu has made the electronic part, and we’ve taken turns being responsible for the notation or the presentation and things like that.

All of these experiences of each other’s practice and way of working, and collaboration preferences, informed what we were able to do in this context. And honestly, with the whole Covid border thing, I think without those previous experiences we would have had no hope of making something of this scale.

But what it’s shown me is the richness that can come from building artistic, collaborative relationships over the course of a career. Alluvial Gold feels really special and really personal — and really like Stuart and Erin and Louise in a really lovely way — and I hope that there’s more of this in our creative futures — more time in the studio together, more experiments, and more chances to let the materials lead us somewhere unexpected.