“For this project I felt like it wouldn’t be fulfilling for the audience or musicians if we just attempted to play Bjork’s music the way she has produced it, especially for a jazz festival! There has to be something fresh, intriguing, experimental or risky involved for it to make sense to me. I guess this is what we will strive towards presenting some amazing music that we all know and love with a new perspective and sound and room for everyone involved to get their individual voices across.”
This strange sense of yearning and of trying to capture the essence of a memory and understanding that memory is fallible and you can never really re-experience something as it was, I was interested in that and interested in the way that music can communicate that gradual decay of memory. So the piece is kind of about patterns and the decay of patterns, it’s about memory and the beauty of decay.
My creative process ideally begins with an idea that is exciting to me, and often that seed of inspiration is enough to drive the project through to completion, and overcome all the challenges along the way. Georgie and Josh have been my inspiration for the last month or two while writing this music.
Self Aware of Myself weaves together song, interview fragments and spoken text to form fragmentary portraits. At the core of the project is set of interview questions by Georgie Darvidis that are whimsical, candid, and quietly revealing.
“When I think to myself ‘what do I do’, I say ‘I’m an artist and a lecturer’; when I introduce myself, I say ‘I’m a vocalist, a composer and a teacher’ and then it gets confusing, because I have to explain what I mean and I usually just run away”, she laughs.
“We both sing songs made famous by both Judy and Barbra as well as some of their infamous live duets that really encapsulate the close connection they had, a connection that we also feel when we sing together.”
