Sometimes Home Can Grow Stranger Than Space Australian Art Orchestra

• 1Sharp Folds, Pt. 112:30
• 2Sharp Folds, Pt. 210:43
• 3I Was Only a Child, Pt. 104:02
• 4I Was Only a Child, Pt. 208:42
• 5I Was Only a Child, Pt. 303:41
• 6Bent Heart, Pt. 110:30
• 7Bent Heart, Pt. 205:41
• 8Bent Heart, Pt. 302:32
• Total Runtime58:21

Info for Sometimes Home Can Grow Stranger Than Space

An elegy to the victims of WW1 created by three of Australia's most fascinating composers and commissioned by the Australian Art Orchestra.

Sometimes Home Can Grow Stranger than Space is a suite of three works that each respond to intimate accounts of lives remembered in fine grain detail away from the thrust of battle as recounted in the 100 Stories archive edited by Bruce Scates.

Sometimes Home Can Grow Stranger than Space premiered in 2018 at the London Jazz Festival, and at Wangaratta Festival of Jazz and Blues for the centenary of Armistice Day. We are proud to announce the long-awaited release of studio recordings of this music beautifully engineered by Jem Savage.

The Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) has been commissioning, performing, and recording music for 25 years, from notated works with master composers to free-wheeling visions of spontaneous energy that harness the power of collective improvisation. The AAO works with a wide range of musicians from western and non-western backgrounds and in the last 5 years the output has been prolific. To celebrate this creative period, the AAO will be releasing a range of new recordings in 2020 and 2021.

Sometimes Home Can Grow Stranger Than Space is the first of this series and includes three multi movement works:

Sharp Folds (words and music, Peter Knight). Peter's Knight's work imagines a parent's grief. Garry Roberts and his wife Berta never recovered from the loss of their son, Frank, who was killed in action in September 1918. Peter says: "As a father, I was struck by the image of Garry sleeping in his son's bed for months after receiving that terrible news in the hope he might 'feel his son's presence again".

I Was Only A Child (Tilman Robinson). Tilman found a tape recording of an interview by an unknown school student with an unknown returned WW1 soldier. He took snippets of this recording and turned them into a piece of music with the AAO. "It was the natural thing for anybody" says the veteran interviewed who went to war when he was sixteen years old. "I couldn't stop wondering what drove these young boys to volunteer to go to war," says Tilman. "Were they trying to prove their worth as men? It's so compelling and heartbreaking to listen to this recording of one of these child soldiers as an old man."

Bent Heart (Andrea Keller) Bent Heart reflects four stories of women whose lives were inexorably impacted by World War I, either through their service, or the service of those they loved. "My piece is a musical vigil for brave women ahead of their time," says Andrea. "It takes the words from these women and from those who knew them and sets them to a musical score."

Sometimes Home Can Grow Stranger Than Space was made possible through financial support from the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications, Anzac Centenary Arts and Culture Fund, Australia Council for the Arts, Creative Victoria, City of Melbourne and the Ian Potter Foundation.

Australian Art Orchestra
Georgie Darvidis, voice
Lizzy Welsh, violin
Peter Knight, trumpet, electronics
Aviva Endean, clarinet
James Macauley, trombone
Andrea Keller, piano
Tilman Robinson, electronics
Jacques Emery, bass
Simon Barker, drums

The Australian Art Orchestra (AAO)
With an emphasis on improvisation, The Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) explores the meeting points between disciplines and cultures, and imagines new musical forms to reflect the energy and diversity of 21st century Australia.

Founded by Paul Grabowsky in 1994 the AAO is one of Australia’s leading contemporary ensembles. Now led by daring composer/trumpeter/sound artist Peter Knight, its work constantly seeks to stretch genres and break down the barriers separating disciplines, forms and cultures. It explores the interstices between the avant-garde and the traditional, between art and popular music, between electronic and acoustic approaches, and creates music that traverse the continuum between improvised and notated forms.

The Australian Art Orchestra nods to the hugely influential, Art Ensemble of Chicago in its name, as do a number of other famous groups including the Vienna Art Orchestra, and in doing so it builds on a set of ideas that stretch back to the beginnings of jazz. These ideas in turn drew on an extraordinary collision of cultures, ways of thinking, and folk traditions that are so old that their beginnings are untraceable. The AAO’s music may sound very little like American jazz these days but the restless energy that made jazz such a force in the twentieth century still drives the projects it makes, including with the traditional songmen from Ngukurr in Arnhem Land (Crossing Roper Bar), with Bae Il Dong, the Korean p’ansori singer (The Return of Spring), with Guru Kaaraikkudi R. Mani from Chennai (Two Oceans), with Nicole Lizee, Alvin Lucier (Exit Ceremonies) and with an extraordinary range of Australian artists from a range of disciplines. This is Australian ‘jazz’ in 2018!

The Australian Art Orchestra has won many awards, nominations and much praise for its work. Most recently Diomira, composed by Peter Knight, won the 2016 Albert H Maggs composition prize and was nominated for the APRA/AMCOS Art Music Awards ‘Work of the Year’, while Erik Griswold’s Sichuan inspired, Water Pushes Sand, was nominated for the 2017 ARIA for Jazz Album of the Year. The group has also won three Australian Jazz Bell awards (most recently in 2014), the 2014 AMC/APRA Art Music Award ‘Excellence by an Organisation’, 2013 AMC/APRA Art Music Award ‘Performance of the Year’, a 2010 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards (Group Award), the H C Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship (2010), a Helpmann Award (2004), and a 2009 Classical Music award for ‘Outstanding Contribution to Australian Music in a Regional Area’. The AAO regularly tours both locally and internationally with recent highlights including the 2018 London Jazz Festival, and 2018 Jazztopad Wroclaw (Poland).

‘Thrilling and daunting in equal measure. . . the AAO’s boldness of vision remains intact as it heads into its third decade.’ The Age November 2014

‘Words were intoned, usually as text-poems, with slow steps made by the players, densities gradually increasing, coated with thick electronic tones, several members using effects devices. Fanfare horns and boom drums made them sound like a thicker Necks, or a Liberation Music Orchestra with Reichian pulses, or a stately Nyman preen, climaxing with drum solo thunder, garrulous trombone interjections and a megaphone vocal crackle.’ Jazzwise review of ‘The Plains’ at Jazztopad Poland 2018

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