While not trying to read too much into this, when I came across an electronic music track called Origin 2045, it was perhaps a sign that the work I’ve been endeavouring to create from The Chapel Project needed to get back to basics…back to its origins.

After months of discussions, pleading emails, lost sleep and a final decision to push forward to present a work for Artlands Dubbo, my search for a soundtrack for this work in the electronic music genre was in keeping with a ‘what the heck’ attitude I’d developed to where this work was taking me. Electronic music was really as far off the beaten path as choral music when it came down to it…but I had been working on the marketing of an electronic music event and I was listening to an awful lot of this type of music at the time.

In terms of the music that had been written for The Chapel Project, it was simply a lack of money and time (to raise more money) that has meant it had to be abandoned. There has just been too many people, processes, boxes to tick and money needed to get it over the line. However, with my core, regional creative team still with me and a much diminished budget (about one eighth of what it was mid 2015), a multi-media (sound and projection) work titled Volucres (The Birds) is now in production with a deadline of 25 October 2016. The contract has been signed and Artlands kicks off on 27 October.

The process from here is to work with a local sound engineer on mixing my birdsong recordings with the purchased electronic music track, then taking it to my video production team to marry it with the visual concepts we’ve been throwing around for the past 10 months or so. I’m also toying with some choreography as part of the visuals, but first things first.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be hitting my studio to get the soundtrack concept nailed so that time in the recording studio mixing the track is optimised. I’ll update you when we get to the other side.