There was nowhere else to go but inside

Oct 25, 2024

There was nowhere else to go but inside

Ollie Olsen performing with Terminal Quartet, February 2006

On 16 October 2024 musician, composer, visionary and collaborator extraordinaire, Ollie Olsen returned to star dust. Ollie had been a tremendous support and influence to countless. He was greatly respected and loved. We got to know each other over a hectic couple of decades creating sound works, performances and installations in Melbourne, Newcastle and Austria. This is how I came to know about the great man.

Andrew Garton
Oct 25, 2024

Crystalline excretions grew deep underground drip by drop. Timeless. Ancient passageways emerged from glistening rock in all directions. I had been in a reverie of listening and what I heard took me down, way down beneath the Brisbane River where it flowed parallel to Oxlade Drive. Twenty seconds in and a choral-like voice evoked the first tumbling of primal drums accompanying my descent. The pace quickened, and I seemed to be flying into a cavern lit by stars reflected through countless quartz crystals embedded within a nest of barely perceptible shafts riven through bedrock. Then, a voice, as if gouged from coal and ground pestle-like into sentences, emerged from the vast speleogenesis landscape, from the step stomp of beats. Into your mind. The vastness had spoke! Timeless.

This was a strident, self-assured music emanating from everywhere within an ancient, timeless chamber. How it evoked this was as beguiling as finding myself here. And it was here, in the centre of this void of smooth rock and myriad stalactites overhead, a single eye-ball of improbable proportions was suspended. It was big! It blinked and simultaneously I heard a pulse of sorts. A repeating sine wave, hypnotic and primal. Voices invited me to it, the eye. Then! A breath! A pause… It blinked again. There was no where else to go but inside, to.it, the music, the eye.

I was in my bed. It was late. I had headphones on and listening to Third Eye’s Ancient Future. An album I would cycle over and over, mesmerised by it, allowing the music to create spaces I imagined beneath me, beneath the weatherboard cottage I’d spent 14 months in Brisbane in. I was listening to a brooding, yet expansive and seductive electronic music.

Techno had been on the outer periphery of my world of music. Its repetitive beats as meaningless and mournful as the chaotic, senseless wailing I’d thought punk was about; its social story, its political dimensions as lost on me as were the raves flourishing in forests, warehouses and Brisbane’s nightclubs. It was 1993. I’d been living in Brisbane for about a year when I met Kathleen ‘BigK’ Williamson. BigK had been photographing a live interpretation of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Frankenwein was performed by the Omniscient Gallery at the former Woolloongabba rubber factory where the then Sydney based musician, David Nerlich and I were performing a live and noisy underscore.

BigK invited me to contribute my bare butt in a polaroid photo series of infamous Brisbane bottoms. At the informal launch of her series BigK introduced me to another of her butt models, local electronic music producer, Andy Bagley. She was eager to have us work together on a play she was involved with.

With our butts having had their 5 minutes of fame behind us, Andy and I agreed to work together on a score for the Brisbane based Debacle Theatre Company’s interpretation of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. The book was published in 1962, the year I was born. Burgess had written it up as a play in 1987 and it was this reworking of his well known futuristic classic that would be seen for the first time on an Australian stage.

In the weeks that followed Andy and I set to work on music drawing inspiration from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Hitler’s apocalyptic speeches on agricultural productivity and our distinctively individual music making approaches, Andy’s driven by beats and bass riffs and mine by aleatoric melodies, textures and drones.

Our collaboration took place in Andy’s well equipped studio. It housed the most diverse collection of keyboards and synths I had ever seen. Andy had synthesizers from every era of their making and we would use many of them. But first, before we recorded a single note we would get to know each other through the music we listened to at that time. At our first gathering in the studio I’d brought Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit’s Radio Inferno which remains a thrilling inspiration to me. When it came time for Andy to share his offering he began with a Front 242 album. I recall it being loud, hard and bereft of harmony. I didn’t like it. Then, Andy loaded up Quilombo, the 1991 release from JG Thirwell’s Steriod Maximus project. I was so taken by it I bought a CD of the album the following weekend and listened to it so much I doubt I’ll listen to it ever again. He then played Third Eye’s Ancient Future and I was drop-jaw smitten!

Who’s this, I asked?

This, Andy replied, is Ollie Olsen.

Huh? Ollie… Olsen?

I’d first heard Ollie’s name in 1980 I’d when his song Win/Lose appeared on 2JJ; a desperate appeal for sanity amid deranged and uncertain times. I adored its odd shuffle, its angular motion, its weird organ grinder aesthetic. Win/Lose was one of those pieces that changed the way I listened to music and what I would look for in it.

I told Andy that throughout the 1980s Ollie’s trajectories in music somehow found me in many of my own. Bands such as Orchestra of Skin and Bone, Whirlywirld and No would feed my curiosity for this man’s bewildering creativity. But Ollie Olsen writing, producing and releasing techno? On a label of his own making too! At first, it didn’t make sense, but here was a music that was not only infectious it had cadence, harmony, an orchestral kind of approach to its arrangements and it had a dynamism that I could listen to. Yes, I actually could listen to Ollie’s techno as I would Bach or Bowie.

Andy loaned me the album and that evening I rode back to my Newfarm cottage, parked the bike, slid off my helmet and leapt up the wooden stairs, opened the door, changed into shorts and a t-shirt and lay in bed with a pair of headphones plugged into a portable CD player I kept atop a stack of books. I flipped open the player, inserted Ancient Future, pushed down the lid, pressed Play and Repeat. I laid back and closed my eyes.

Just as The Clash and Elvis Costello eventually led me to the wide world of punk, Ollie’s Third Eye tuned my ears to techno that was musical, that had history to its making and a creative dimension I’d not heard, nor understood before. Here, embedded within Ollie’s Ancient Future, were elements of Stockhausen, Noi, Can, Ligeti, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Gorecki.

In the years that followed I would dance the fuck out of Ollie’s music and we would work together on any number of projects – Terminal Quartet, Regenerative/Generative, D3 Derive to name but a few – and share in each others deeper thoughts and aspirations, but back then, it was all about laying on my bed in an old Brisbane weatherboard, a crisp evening in 1993 with possums scampering across corrugated iron, fruit bats camped in the trees outside and the Brisbane river nearby as I lay listening, going nowhere else but to Ollie’s third eye suspended there

Rest in Love Ollie.

The wonder of the Blacksmiths Tree

Feb 8, 2019

The wonder of the Blacksmiths’ Tree

The Blacksmiths’ Tree [Video Still: Michael Wilkins]

My story with the Blacksmiths’ Tree began in 2011. Its own story began in 2009, but if truth be told it began much earlier than that.

Sometime between 2558 and 2532 BC, ancient Egyptians of the Old Kingdom build the oldest known sculpture in Egypt, The Great Sphinx of Giza. We know it was carved out of bedrock, but how and for what reason is lost to us as might have been the Sphinx itself were it not for centuries of restoration, its distinct features once buried under sand. But in AD 1378 its long beard and one-metre wide nose were chiselled off by a religious zealot when he observed commoners offering gifts and salutations to the mighty rock. According to Arabic historians, he was hung for his vandalism.

In 280 BC, over 2000 years since the Sphinx emerged from a single piece of stone, a statue of the Greek Sun God Helios was erected in the City of Rhodes. The Colossus of Rhodes was said to have stood 33 metres high, celebrating the tumultuous victory of Rhodes’ over the ruler of neighbouring Cyprus. The tallest statue of the ancient world collapsed during the earthquake of 226 BC. Parts of it remain to this day, but it was never rebuilt.

On July 20, 1969, the first human stepped foot on the Moon. It took just under 10 years of a massive scientific and engineering undertaking to not only breach the Earth’s gravity but to reach the Moon and return three astronauts safely back to Earth. The mission was driven by a yearning to outflank the Soviet Union’s efforts, who had themselves thrown the first satellite, then a dog and finally a man into orbit around the Earth.

As incredible as these and other human achievements have been, as far-reaching the technologies that led us here, it did not take the posturing of powerful kingdoms nor their gods, or the celebration of war and the craving for power it underscores, nor had it taken political avarice and cold war theology to motivate a small group of artisans, blacksmiths and welders, engineers and volunteers to create what now stands 9.8 meters tall in Strathewen, one of several townships affected by the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Australia.

In the 21st Century, the makers of the Blacksmiths’ Tree show us that human ingenuity need not be driven by magical thinking, by war and political ambition. It can come to us all by serving our community needs, through collaborative outreach and action… and love. It is this that we may learn from the Blacksmiths’ Tree, that we can come together, today, tomorrow and the days ahead to remake the way we live here on planet Earth. And we do so so that our children and their children’s children may live long, well and safe because this stainless steel Tree, unlike the Sphinx and the Colossus of Rhodes, may, if politicians continue to falter in their responsibilities, this the Blacksmiths’ Tree may well be the last tree standing. But for now, it isn’t and how it came about and what it means to us all is the story I tell in my film, Forged from Fire — the Making of The Blacksmiths’ Tree.

I am not an alien

Dec 22, 2018

I am not an alien

For decades I believed I had come from the stars. For many of them I would recount my adventures as Zandor, Master Explorer, first to my younger sister and brother, then to my daughter. But what I truly am is far more astonishing than the fancy of a lonely boy with an eye to the stars.

Andrew Garton
Dec 22, 2018

“Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the ‘walks’ of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.” ― Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

For decades I believed I had come from the stars. What I believed to be memories waned in my 30’s, re-surfaced in my early 50’s and came to a necessary halt around the time I turned 56. But it was that first decade when the backyard walks of my childhood fired my imagination so much that the outer space adventures of Zandor the Master Exporer lived both in me and the stories I would share with my younger sister and brother. Our mother would have us bed down early — as children we slept in the same room as our parents — and I would recount my memories of adventures across the cosmos to them.

As I grew older I knew I was not of Earth. How could I be human when I had such little in common with anyone I knew? I’d move about schoolyards from infant to secondary, often alone and when not taunted, pushed about and ridiculed for my accent, blond hair or lisp I would be in the library cultivating my stories with the many others I found there. We lived across the road from the primary school I attended in Sydney’s outer western suburbs. On the few days I would have lunch at home, my mother would often wait for me at our front gate . That too was a source of much harassment. Mummy’s boy, they would taunt.

It took several decades to realize how much I yearned for an extended family, a village, a collective happening beyond the perimeter of the school yard or that of my home. My parents migrated to Australia from Europe, arriving in 1950 escaping their world war memories and trauma. They arrived in suburbs where homes were fenced off from each other. The White Australia Policy was still in play. My father was of mixed Ukraine heritage and my mother grew up in a mountain village in Austria. My genes may not be of Australian soil, but I would come to realise that I am not an alien.

Andrew Garton in Game Over a short 8mm film by David Nerlich, Sydney, 1985.

I am not an alien. I did not arrive on Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago, keeping myself alive by evolving through plant and animal DNA. No, I am not the galactic adventurer, Zandor, who mastered English in this life, but somehow had forgotten the hundreds, perhaps thousands of others he would have spoken across the eons including his own alien mother tongue. I had not originated in the Mentas System nor was I stranded on Earth, crash landing here waiting for my people to come.

I am not an alien. But what I truly am is far more astonishing than the fancy of a lonely boy with an eye to the stars. What I am and what you are is of those stars, and that is the remarkable achievement of life.

If I were such a creature from the stars I would know how to navigate the galaxies and understand something of the technologies that brought me here. My stories of a crystal powered spacecraft is not evidence enough.

I would also know of the flora and fauna of my home world, its linguistic capacities, its historical achievements, but I have no recollection of any. What I do have is a loosely constructed narrative of an adventurer with a child’s view of their inner and outer world; a child that had grown apart from his family, neighborhood and a small cohort of school friends. A child mesmerized by science and astrophysics, consoled by music and radio plays, creatively restored by filmmaking and writing. A boy whose head was not in the clouds, but among the stars from where he knew, with all his being, all life had emerged from.

Andrew Garton performing Tong Tana with Benguela, Cape Town July 2009. Photo by Niklas Zimmer.

Here we are, on Earth, bound to it by the atmosphere and gravity that prevents us from falling in every direction into space.

Here we walk, sleep, stand and flourish as flesh wrapped to bone stood upright, with skin that heals itself when cut, with eyes embedded within a unique hominoid skull housing the very same human brain from where both the fictional Zandor emerged and the perceptive thinking of the Greek philosopher Aristotle.

It is extraordinary that not only have we the historical records to prove this, but that we exist at all. That we literally evolved from cosmic dust, from the essence of the numinous we can barely fathom, that our telescopes and radio scopes scan the heavens to fuel our curiosity for, marvels beyond the stratosphere and our imagination; that is the making of me and the making of us. All of us.

Consider the atmosphere; a thin triple-decked pancake comprised of troposphere, stratosphere and the mesosphere. Astronauts have described the atmosphere as thin as a slick of oil, astounded at how fragile it appears from space.

That thin slick protects us from the random violence of the entire universe, from asteroids smashing into celestial objects, stars collapsing, black holes devouring everything including light. Thankfully, we are too far from the nearest black hole to be sucked into it.

The atmosphere has its limits, and yet it protects us from our own sun, mighty and supercharged whipping solar flares across our galaxy. And here we remain, protected from this unruly cacophony and the deep chill vacuum of space. Such is the fragile nature of all that keeps us from oblivion, but sadly the atmosphere cannot protect us from ourselves and the penchant for extinction oligarchs the world over appear to prefer than a life palatable for all.

Air pollution, India, 2015 — Air pollution on the road to Alwar, India, 2015.

I grew up with a cocktail of stories of a life beyond this planet. Stories that helped me survive school, that gave me the courage to travel beyond the domestic fence boundary, a troposphere of wire and concrete, that filled a longing for my traumatized father who left us too young, for laughter, and for love. And I took those stories with me into adulthood where they became less necessary, somewhat embarrassing and finally extinguished when I longed for my daughter whom I had been separated from in her early teens, for laughter still and again for love.

At fifty-six, all that had been imagined collapsed. No, I am not an alien from Alpha Centauri, 4.22 light years away from us here on Earth. No, I am not. But I and we, are of all that Alpha Centauri is comprised; we are of the stars. But we did not come here in a spacecraft, we arrived through the most incredible confluence of protons and neutrons. At the atom heart of our bodies resides the very stuff of stars and that is an astonishing thing to behold!

There are wonders enough out there, said the astrophysicist Carl Sagan, without our inventing any.

Artistic licence

Jun 10, 2017

Artistic licence!

Unlike countries with a fair use exemption, copyright laws in Australia require artists to secure prohibitively expensive licences for even the smallest quotation of others’ work.
Patricia Aufderheide

Flip Case leads rehearsals — A scene from Andrew Garton’s documentary ‘This Choir Sings Carols’.
Credit: SECESSION/FILMS and FIRST IMPRESSIONS YOUTH THEATRE

Once a year, in early October, around 60 people gather at the City of Whittlesea’s Fountain View Room in the northern fringe of Melbourne to begin 10 weeks of rehearsal for a single concert.

They span generations – aged from eight to over 90 – cultures and faiths. For nine months of each year they never see each other, and then they come together to sing Christmas carols as part of a healing process that began after the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. I documented one year’s worth of rehearsals with the help of a grant from the council and volunteers from First Impressions Youth Theatre.

The result, a 30-minute documentary called This Choir Sings Carols (2016), writes Patricia Aufderheide, will probably never be seen.

Since then, it has, but that story is for another time. For now, we are interested in why the film was constrained from being publicly seen. Read Copyright rules crippling artists, published in The Saturday Paper, 10 June, 2017.

View/Download Copyright rules crippling artists _ The Saturday Paper [PDF]

InsideAPC Number 20 – May 2017

May 17, 2017

Andrew Garton on Fair Use in Australia

Over recent months an intense debate has had artists, authors and filmmakers in Australia rail against recommendations made by the Productivity Commission, consisting of a Fair Use provision to be added to Australia’s Copyright Act. Andrew has been one of a few supporting such a provision and he has been a guest panellist at two recent forums on the subject in order to describe how restrictive the Australian Copyright Act can be within non-profit and educational sectors.

A film he completed in 2016 cannot be seen due to the cost of synchronisation rights that would have to be paid for the right to have it screened. “This Choir Sings Carols” tells the story of a community choir that meets once a year in a multicultural, multi-faith, intergenerational setting. The film was made with a local youth theatre group mentored by Andrew to crew the production. The end result is a series of interviews with choir members interwoven with auditions, rehearsals and a public performance. It’s a not-for-profit production commissioned by local government who in turn sponsor the choir.

Even if they could raise the AUD 10,000 to cover synchronisation rights for the music sung throughout the film, there are strict limits to the licence. “This Choir Sings Carols” would be allowed to be screened at Australian film festivals only, no theatrical nor broadcast release, only 100 DVDs could be published, and trailers would have to be negotiated independent from the feature. Another flag: it’s a three-year licence. If they wanted to have it screened at an overseas festival the synchronisation rights fees would increase 100%.

Meanwhile, if Australia had a Fair Use provision, such a film could be screened anywhere at any time. Royalties for rights holders would still be distributed were the film to be screened at festivals. The only people missing out are the publishers which benefit the most from synchronisation rights licence fees. Andrew will be speaking at Sydney’s Vivid Festival in May to further the discussion about these issues and “This Choir Sings Carols”, fast becoming his most popular and least seen film. For more information about this topic, check “The Creative Power of Copying” and the Australian Digital Alliance.

Provisional Fair Use sampler by Andrew Garton and collaborators.

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