GreyWing Nature Forms I project

Since their debut in 2016, GreyWing has focused on new Australian music and environmental music. The recordings on this album represent a number of composer’s responses to shapes, sounds and imaginations of nature. Emulation of the sounds of the natural environment may be one of the earliest manifestations of music, but the manner in which the ‘extra-musical’ sounds of the sonic environment have been emulated in human music has greatly shifted with the capacity to capture highly detailed nuances in the pitch and timbre of natural environments. This has driven efforts to move beyond human-derived aesthetics and engage with the sounds of nature as much as possible on their own terms.
The majority of the works here derive from “field recordings” captured by composers themselves or artists including Leah Barclay, Philip Kenworthy and Catherine Ashley. (Details of the recording locations are pictured on the card insert). In most cases the recordings have been analysed to create notated emulations (lyrebird, wellington forest, small waves) or resonant frequencies (Shelter, A'aa and Nocturne). The work nature forms I in contrast uses digital photographs capturing the grasping shapes of living things and the actions of weather over time in a collage graphic score and in Sonic Dreams the composer turns inward to the performers’ imagined sounds of extinct and endangered Australian fauna (their last known locations are also included on the postcard insert). Only Ono’s pre-digital secret piece takes a diametrically opposed position, emphasing the essential impossibility of anthropomorphising the sounds of nature - hiding a single human sound amid a recording of a dawn chorus of birds. 

GreyWing Ensemble
​Kirsten Smith - flute
Lindsay Vickery - clarinet/saxophone
Jameson Feakes - guitar
Catherine Ashley - harp 
Sage Pbbbt - voice
Zoe Kilbourne - saxophone
Josten Myburgh - laptop Dan O'Connor - trumpet
Eduardo Cossio - harmonica
Philip Waldron - double bass 

Works performed and/or recorded ​
Matthew Burtner - A'aa [2009] 08:11
Sam Gillies - Shelter [2016] 05:34
Yoko Ono - Secret Piece [1953] 
Vanessa Tomlinson - Sonic Dreams [2017] 05:45
Chaz Underriner - Nocturne Series I [2012] 
Lindsay Vickery - small waves raised by the evening [2016] 07:33
Lindsay Vickery - lyrebird (wetlands) [2014] 
Lindsay Vickery - nature forms I [2013] 
Lindsay Vickery - wellington forest [2017]
Lindsay Vickery - nature forms ii [2016] 07:58
Lindsay Vickery - Sanctuary [2018]  08:21
Chaz Underriner - nocturne 4 [2012] 11:28​