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Lake Eacham Blues (2004) |
12 male voices – 7'
Lake Eacham is a water-filled volcanic crater in North Queensland, Australia. Rising some two thousand feet, the entire rim of the crater-lake is fringed by dense tropical rainforest. The waters of the lake are very deep and often a deep aquamarine in colour – some of it the tone of lapis lazuli. The lake itself is home to a vast number of tropical fish species and water-turtles. But it is the fringe-forest that is the ‘home’ of a great orchestra of birds and insects. During any day, the dawn heralds a spectacular upsurge of song, gradually dissipating to near-silence by the shimmering heat of midday. As evening ebbs in and the light dips quickly towards velvet darkness, the birds and insects begin a second crescendo, again trailing and fading to give way to the sounds of the odd insect or night-owl. The visual artist, Heather Johns, made a ‘quartet’ of pieces derived from a day at Lake Eacham. The ‘dusk’-work (third in the series), hangs on my wall at home. Its brilliant colours and vibrant almost electric markings are powerful representations of an exotic earth-orchestra at work. This motet follows the design and form of the Johns mixed-media piece; even to the extent of working closely to notions of 12-bar blues, whose form plays with vertical dispositions of triads set against decorative linear effects and ‘improvisations’.
Edward Cowie, 2004