Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

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Work Overview

Red Earth Mine is a soundscape for the iron ore mining industry in deep time. In the first movement, 'Deform', material is repeated with stubborn insistence, and subject to a gradual extraction process-a musical metaphor for the extraction industry. As the work progresses the performers must negotiate dwindling resources, for example as the range shortens, physically constricting both the guitarist and percussionist in their upper registers. As the acoustic material degrades, so does the electronic material, which is made up of an archival recording of a mine blast. In the second movement, a graphic score entitled 'Reform', the same musical material is rearranged in structured improvisation, freed from the rigid extraction processes. The work ends as a speculative sound-world for this landscape in the deep future-what will happen to the red earth over deep timescales, long after human activity has ceased?
Red Earth Mine draws on familial knowledge of the extraction industry in the north of Western Australia, as both my father and grandfather worked on iron ore mines (Mount Tom Price and Paraburdoo) as engineers in the latter half of last century. The impetus for this work came from conversations with my father especially, who has spent his career subsequently campaigning for a green energy industry. We reflected on the tremendous scale of human impact upon the landscape, the beauty in engineering processes, the politics of land ownership as it translates to profit (and the ongoing violence enacted upon our First Nations communities), and the ubiquity of the energy industry as it underpins all our lives.
This piece is dedicated to my father, a man who understands that sustainability is measured in deep time.

Work Details

Year: 2024

Instrumentation: Guitar, percussion.

Duration: 14 min.

Difficulty: Advanced

Dedication note: dedicated to Boyd Milligan

Commission note: Commissioned by Jonathan Fitzgerald and Paul Tanner