Peter Knight and The Australian Art Orchestra: Crossed and Recrossed
Author: Jane Cornwell
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Musicians: |
Mary Rapp (c) |
Label: |
Hospital Hill Records |
Magazine Review Date: |
October/2021 |
Media Format: |
CD, DL |
Catalogue Number: |
HHLP03210750 |
RecordDate: |
9 May 2016, 10-11 May 2019 |
Settle back and let the Australian Art Orchestra take you on a journey across an interior, through endless overlapping vistas into the red heart of … what? Australia? A remote region that only exists in the minds of its inhabitants? Author Gerald Murnane posed such quandaries in his iconic novel The Plains, from which 'Crossed', the first half of this wonderfully strange, hugely atmospheric album – two large-scale works composed by Knight – takes its cue. Knight weaves golden trumpet lines through a soundscape all the more metaphysical for intoned verse, keyboard improvisations and the drumming of Simon Barker (whose real life penchant for barefoot marathon running is palpable). Electronics glitch and shimmer; a didgeridu blast feels ancient, portentous. Space is taken then relinquished.
On 'Recrossed', a musical reading of Italo Calvino’s Diomira, an excerpt from Invisible Cities, the talented contemporary ensemble navigate a labyrinthine world of textures and ideas, subverting chamber jazz clichés with turntables and tape machines, conjuring place with strings and brass, sending compasses spinning with mashed-up field recordings. It’s a treatise on time, a mapping of remembrances past, present and future. Or it’s a sort of Great Unravelling, disorienting but hugely cathartic. Either way, it’s some trip.
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