Luke Jaaniste’s new cinematic project was inspired by a captured sunrise.
Teaming up with image-maker Jonathan Nalder (JNXYZ), Luke has helped to craft a sonic-cinema event based on footage of a sunrise over the Pacific Ocean and its lapping shoreline. INFINITE DAWN is the result, and you can see the dreamy and atmospheric work below.
Luke (working as HHAARRPP) is in the process of producing about half-a-dozen music-films with Jonathan, and chats with us about their first two – a vision and soundscape series featuring BLOOD MOON (above) and LINES IN THE SAND. The project will be presented in a live performance this weekend in the Metro Arts Cinema Space.
Talk us through your new cinematic project INFINITE DAWN with JNXYZ. How was the idea for this music video series born?
The project has evolved very naturally from our friendship and mutual interest in each others’ work. At some point in the middle of this year, one of us said that we should maybe do some music-films together. It was nothing more than a hope, until one morning in August, Jonathan came back from a sunrise video/photo trip to say he had caught some footage that might be good. We had a look together and yes, it was stunning. Even more so when mirrored.
The rest is rather workaday. We set out to find an existing HHAARRPP track that worked with the glowing clouds, and BLOOD MOON it was, which I then rewrote to the duration of the footage (the film was sped up to the point that felt right, rhythmically, both visually and sonically) and to fit some of the key moments when clouds disappeared, a boat appears and disappears, and so on — very simple/humble moments that in this setting are rather epic.
The second music-film was just as much an unplanned surprise – we had cut the original 4K clip down to just the sunrise, and in the editing process of BLOOD MOON at some point we accidentally saw the bottom part of the footage, of a lapping shoreline, also mirrored. Instantly, we both knew this would become a second music-film! Again, what music to set to it? It was obvious to use LINES IN THE SAND which is a rework of the Sovereign Murders track by Nonsemble. The dreaminess and pacing suited, and also the lyrics that occasionally turn into the track speak of the ‘lines in the sand’ drawn around Australia – literally our oceanic boundary – concerning refugees policy.
What was it about the vision that initially grabbed you? And what sort of story do you tell by blending the vision with music?
Intense, gorgeous beauty. Many of us love a good sunrise, but this one that Jonathan captured was particularly stunning. What’s more, the footage seemed to have the right kind of slow, morphing evolving form, that feels like a great fit for the way that I work my HHAARRPP tracks. I’m very much captivated by minimalist form, but only if it has rich timbres and tones. Atmospheric textures that ebb and flow.
The ‘story’ is thus an energetic one that puts us in relationship to the sky above, the ground below, and the horizon before us.
Who were your influences in creating these ambient soundscapes?
HHAARRPP is my music project that most overtly deals in contemporary popular/familiar idioms. But, at least to me, it is still dealing with what’s at the heart of all my projects: immersive, intense, vibrational, enveloping listening. HHAARRPP gives me the chance to work cinematically – to use simple, moody, sometimes drippingly sweet harmonies and melodies in ways that evolve-whilst-looping to both feel eternally the same yet eternally changing.
How I work with layering and slowly shifting textures in HHAARRPP is something I think comes from my composition studies in orchestral and especially neo-tonal 20th Century work like Debussy, and later the American and Euro-Asian minimalists and post-minimalists such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Arvo Part and more recently Michael Gordan. But the electronica content is more directly connected to the electronica-classical and instrumental-electronica mood and groove makers like Nils Frahm, Jon Hopkins, Rival Consoles and bands like The Acid / Ry X, Moderat, CocoRosie, Caribou, Sigur Ros, to name a few.
Why do you like ambience? What effect does it have on you as a music maker, when compared to its powerfully relaxing or meditative effect on listeners?
I like ambience enough – I did a PhD on it. There’s a lot of very interesting things to say about it, but to cut to the chase, I’m interested in ambience with grit, and with many intersecting, interweaving layers rather than a single ooze. I want music, I want art, I want experience where I feel both the amazing vastness of an infinite horizon, mixed with the grit and grain and texture of what is right here now next to me. Intensely expansive and intensely intimate. So, yes to releasing and meditation. My work tends to open up spaces where we drop the busy middle-ground of our attention and get-far and get-close. But it’s also hopefully just as active and exhilarating as it is contemplative.
Many cultures over many centuries have developed techniques to induce and expand a sense of trance, where the arc form of the trance ritual and the ebb and flow of sexual tenderness and elation seem analogous to one another. My live immersive sound events, and the HHAARRPP+JNXYZ films, are a contemporary electronica addition to this ancient vibe.
You have a history of collaboration regarding interdisciplinary arts. Why do you feel it’s important to work across platforms?
My answer here is a story in two-parts:
The first part of the story is that I used to only work in a singular-expanded way – in which if I was to work with anything sonic, spatial, visual, social, etc., it needed to be ‘in’ the single one idea. So with my SUPER CRITICAL MASS project that I co-direct with Julian Day, it is as much visual, spatial and social, but all this comes from the singular simple act of humans making sounds with objects, together in public space. If we ring a bell, or hum a tone, and do it in a networked relationship within an indoor or outdoor area, it already operates across an expanded domain that is beyond the confines of staged performance or composed music. That’s just one example but I could say the same things about my projects that use feedback systems, SUB TERROR and BLACK BOX, and my keyboard projects PORTAL and TRANCE PIANO, and my choral projects FLOOR CHOIR and REVERB LAB.
This was the case for me, even back in the days of composition training at the Conservatorium of Music in Brisbane. Unlike many of my colleagues, I could never come to add lyrics/words to my compositions, because it felt too ‘additive’ rather than singular. For this reason I was never interested in opera and music theatre, which are the pre-eminent forms of additive collaborative, mixing music, script, acting, costuming, set design etc.
But recently, things have shifted. The newer story is that, whilst I still really like to work in this singular-expanded way, over the last year or so I’ve been wanting to bring my music into collaborative connecting with dance, film and computer games; in that more obvious way of additive collaboration. This arose after realising that what was most important to me was the expanded sense of time, space and whole-body listening/improvising that my projects pursue, and that if I could have this, then adding other layers, artists and artforms in this content (rather than approaching these other artforms as a composer-for-hire who writes to time-code) would be possible and potentially so much fun.
Tell us how you came to work with Nonsemble for LINES IN THE SAND. You’ve said Sovereign Murders has made you cry – how can we hear this emotional impact in your reworking of the piece?
I first heard the Sovereign Murders track composed by Chris Perren and played by Nonsemble at a Jungle Love festival towards the end of 2015. It was a pretty remarkable festival so I was already in a heightened mood, and so when their guest singer Cameron Bower (who heads up the band Big Dead) started rolling up the tune, the tears just started flowing. I’m even crying just writing about this memory now. It’s a damn beautiful melody, and ensemble arrangement for piano, strings, bass and drums, and Cameron has one of those voices which sounds so effortlessly warm and gentle, and yet with the full force of the song’s intent behind it. And it’s a full-on set of lyrics, speaking about the arbitrary lines in the sand our government has drawn around Australia’s borders, keeping certain people out, and letting others in, based on what seems to me like a barrage of fear and cruelty, all the more tragic given that European colonials were the ultimate in uninvited boat people.
And every time I’ve experienced Nonsemble and Cameron do this song live since then, I cry some more. How do I spend more time with this song my heart loves? One way is to sample from it and rework it into my own track. And that’s what I did. Not with any audio stems from the studio session, but just clipping from the final track. To the clipped and looped samples, I added a whole bunch of electronic layers. I’m very grateful for Chris Perren’s generous permission to work with these sounds.
When I do a HHAARRPP rework from others’ tracks, I’m don’t mutate the samples, but let them speak as they are. And so I trust something of the original mood and vibe will carry into whatever I then overlay and mix with it. It’s a discovery process — to see what HHAARRPP can do and become in the wake of someone’s else’s work. The creative process at this point is very intense and I am creating many additional layers quickly as the samples are layered and looped and I drench in the sound for hours and hours. It can seem like a miracle, after the fact, like I don’t know how certain layers and connections are made in the moment. But the point is to be in a process that for as much as possible is a dreamy dream of sonic enjoyment, even whilst thinking about timbral shifts, EQing, contrapuntal intersections, formal devices of repetition and change, and so on.
What can audiences expect from your live show INFINITE DAWN?
The live show at Metro Arts cinema space is a full-on intensification of the music-films in time and space: a live performance, feature-length, big-screen, extended version of both works.
Instead of the 8-minute and 13-minute music-films you can see online, I’ll be doing live extended music performances of 30 minutes and 60 minutes, where I morph and meld core elements of the track’s electronica layers, and also add my own ethereal vocal loops and seething electric guitar lines. And I’ll do this using my quad speaker set-up, spread around the audience, bathing of all us and the entire room in the sound. And whilst the core layers are pre-composed, it’s essentially an improvisation, accompanying the extended cuts of the film — which is all possible since the original footage was an hour of the sunrise from pre-dawn to daylight. Super immersive, gorgeous, atmospheric.
See INFINITE DAWN live at the Metro Arts Cinema Space on December 11. Tickets and more information online.
Images supplied.
