BY SAM GILLIES
Melbourne-based composer, trombonist and sound artist Tilman Robinson doesn’t restrict himself to one style. Having performed (and premiered) a diverse range of works in Australia and around the world, Tilman works across jazz, classical, experimental and popular music. His debut album Network of Lines was launched in February at the Melbourne Recital, and he took some time to have a chat about his new release.
Since studying jazz at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, you’ve departed significantly from what a traditionalist might consider the genre to be and have instead incorporated a range of styles to create a unique sound. How does your music so successfully combine genres and has your jazz training provided you with a foundation to push and pull against?
To be honest, I try not to think about characterising my music. It’s a bit of a cliché to want to avoid labels and genres, but such genres can lead to a musician feeling constrained musically, which has always been a massive buzzkill for me. It’s the reason I’ve never really tried to find a musical clique to slot into. I never aspired to be a cutting edge classical or jazz composer, I just wanted to make music. It turns out that the music I write is heavily influenced by my past work in the classical, jazz and improvised fields of music. With this in mind, the electronics side of things came about because I wanted to write and perform electro-acoustic music, not out of any kind of reactionary gesture against my jazz and classical training. It has been very interesting to develop a new set of skills on these instruments and ultimately it relates back to musical influences that have been constants in my life – think Björk, Boards of Canada, Portishead, Radiohead.
Network of Lines is based upon Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. How does your music relate to the text?
Network of Lines was commissioned by the Melbourne Jazz Fringe Festival and APRA in 2012 as part of that year’s festival. In order to receive the commission, you had to submit a proposal to the committee detailing an idea and how you wanted to realise that idea. As usually happens with me, I was leaving things to the last minute and needed to come up with an idea pronto. I was reading If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler at the same time and started to think about that novel in a structural sense. The form of the novel is quite strange. It has ten completely unconnected short stories or first chapters of different books (which I like to call ‘narrative chapters’) bound together by 11 instances of direct communication between Calvino and you, the reader (I like to call them ‘conversational chapters’). The idea was to take the ten narrative chapters and write ten completely disconnected short pieces, then link them together with periods of solo, duo or group improvisation. So, in writing Network of Lines, I outsourced the form of the piece, mimicking that of the novel. Each of the ten pieces is also musical response to its corresponding chapter.
Can you explain to us the concept of a “network of lines” in a musical context?
I thought about this a lot while I was writing it. There are two chapters in the novel that reference a ‘network of lines’. One is titled ‘In a Network of Lines that Enlace’ and the other is ‘In a Network of Lines that Intersect’. I guess I took the idea of lines, enlacing and intersecting as a starting point for my composition of those two pieces. In ‘Lines: Enlacing’, I wrote a series of short melodic fragments that are constantly repeated and interweave with each other to create a what I like to call a ‘faux-minimal’ effect. ‘Lines: Intersecting’ took more of an angular route with its 12-tone rhythmic ostinato clashing against the loose and free melody.
What does the future hold for you?
I’m pretty flat out, which is great actually. I’m currently working on a rework of one of Peter Knight’s pieces from Residual that came out on Parenthesis Records a couple of years ago. At the same time, I’m writing chamber orchestra arrangements and co-producing a series of four EPs for a folk singer-songwriter called Packwood. Once that’s done, I have to start thinking about a new commission I received from PBSFM [106.7FM] and the Melbourne International Jazz Festival to write a piece that will be premiered and recording in late May. It’s actually based on literature again – this time, theVolsungasaga: an old Icelandic epic that mirrors the Nibelungenlied and was highly influential on the work of Wagner, Tolkien and others.
Check out Tilman’s other works at www.tilmanrobinson.com.
Image supplied.
