Enter the entirely white-clothing-clad Nick Littlemore into a massive Marrickville warehouse space one rainy January evening. It’s post-Auckland, pre-Sydney Big Day Out and, amidst his festival tour obligations as one part of Sydney duo Pnau, Littlemore plans to squeeze a little Beat Generation-style creation into his already over-capacity schedule.
The motivation is the creation of a feature-film soundtrack for a project championed by Littlemore and adored by EMI record label. The planned film is based on colours - red, yellow, blue, green… and what those colours mean to the musician. It may sound a little abstract, but if Littlemore's previous projects are anything to go by, the film will undoubtedly speak for itself.
At one end of the empty industrial space, a selection of musicians and choral singers mull about around a conglomeration of synthesizers, drum machines, effects pedals, desktops, laptops and notebooks (the traditional kind). Van She's frontman Nick Routledge and synth player/expert Michael Di Francesco are present and accounted for, as is the other half of Pnau, Peter Mayes. Dotted across the concrete floor are various mics and other unnamed recording devices. At the other end of the unoccupied space sits sole guitarist, another Michael. This musical dot-in-the-distance, as he appears from my near-entry vantage point, is surrounded by amps, leads, more effects pedals and a sophisticated selection of guitars.
It's an interesting situation, the back-story of which Littlemore explained in more detail some weeks later when we met outside a Surry Hills coffee shop.
"We pitched the idea of the film to them [EMI] and they just went for it. It was kind of weird", he confides when asked about the motivation behind the recording. A selection of threads were pulled together - a grant, the concept, the musicians and, importantly, the space - and woven into a one night only majority-improvised recording session. As for what information he gave the Littlemore-described selection of ‘great musicians’, admittedly they (and I) were kept very much in the dark about what would actually be taking place that night until the moment of arrival.
"No one really knew anything when they came," Littlemore confesses. "It was all about the space. It's a very size-specific work. As soon as the singers walked in they noticed that their voice went for ten seconds after they stopped, so the space really defines a lot of what happens."
And define it the space did. So much so that on the night in question, the four singers were set up in an onsite shower block to record; complete with shower head for each (and one to spare) poking out of the grey tiles behind them. Their seemingly pitch-perfect spacious sounds were captured by the sole mic standing in the centre of the room, tracked along the lead that snaked its way across the white block tiles, and projected out into the adjoining warehouse space. Out in the warehouse the sound was added to by the gathered musicians, with the recording process closely monitored by Littlemore.
"The idea is to put the sound at one end and record at the other, just to feed all the stuff in and then have it all come back delayed through the room and through the air."
And what of the final creation? "There are ten songs on the album," Littlemore tells me by way of explanation. The ten colours and ten resulting songs were the result of prior concepts and a discussion with the label, "They [EMI] want us to produce ten videos. It's like an exploratory series of events through time."
It’s a fitting concept for a film set to feature this note-driven ambient piece for its soundtrack; the evening’s session journeyed through an exploration of notes that night. From a voyeuristic point of view, it was an evocative almost humbling experience, as experiencing the creation of musical beauty often is.
It doesn’t end there either; this is not just another sound-driven one night stand slipping out onto the street under the cover of early dawn without so much as a whispered ‘goodbye’. Littlemore has his sights set firmly on a bigger space, offering an even greater musical challenge. The next time around he plans to open the session up to the public, in more of a performance vein. There are also whispers of a Sydney Festival slot in 2009. Therein lies potential of an experience not to be missed.
