The Secret Noise
Not all music was made for public consumption. The Secret Noise is a fantastical project exploring music and secrecy. Created by composer Damien Ricketson, the dreamlike work has been inspired by cultural practices that deliberately shield music from public life including forbidden ceremonies, legally extinguished music, covert music-making and private love songs.
The Secret Noise exists in multiple forms including a live music-dance performance and a set of limited-edition recordings. The sold-out premiere production, by Sydney’s Ensemble Offspring, was lauded by the public and critics as a “trailblazing triumph” (Limelight).
The Secret Noise was premiered by Ensemble Offspring at the Lower Sydney Town Hall (20-22 Nov 2014) and at Melbourne Festival, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall (14-15 Oct 2016).
Artists
Damien Ricketson: concept/composer
Carlos Gomes: director
Devising performers
Katherine Cogill: dancer
Bree van Reyk: percussion
Claire Edwardes: percussion
Katia Molino: physical movement
Jason Noble: clarinet
Narelle Benjamin: dancer
Creatives
Bob Scott: recording and mix engineer (recordings)
Fausto Brusamolino: lighting design (live version)
Acknowledgements
The Secret Noise was created with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts, City of Sydney, Create NSW, Ensemble Offspring Noisy Egg Creation Fund and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the University of Sydney.
Images
Photos by Heidrun Lohr
Recordings
The Secret Noise recordings, released by Curious Noise, comprise a vinyl EP and a CD each of which is unique to their particular physical media and a different sonic experience to that of the live production. The vinyl EP includes three tracks, two of which are contained in a spiral groove (Side A) and the third (Side B) is playable forwardss and backwards as well as at multiple speeds. The CD is one long-form immersive experience, certain CD players will also be able to unlock a secret track. The recordings are also available for digital streaming and download.
ACCLAIM & RECEPTION
Awards
Winner of the 2015 Art Music Award for ‘Instrumental Work of the Year’
Critical reviews
“The Secret Noise is an eccentric, but sensitively constructed evening that is part installation, part dance theatre and part concert … Ensemble Offspring are pioneers and with this production they have left the first footprints in the sand of an exciting new territory for Australian performance.”
“This collaborative music/dance/theatre work communicates not only the sound of music but also the experience of musical process as reception, memory and fantasy. It’s a critical commentary on our understanding as concert-goers of interpersonal musical exchange. What if ‘classical music’ were individually tailored and responsive at all times?”
Felicity Clark. “The concert: surreptitiously re-thought” RealTime Dec-Jan 2014
“a playful and original exploration of gesture, sounds and the ghosts of machines that produce them.”
Peter McCallum. “Playful music-making beneath Sydney Town Hall” Sydney Morning Herald 23/11/14
“For all the experimentalism, surreality and abstraction, it’s a throughly engaging, watchable and listenable happening, one that unfolds and unfurls at a gentle pace … Edgy isn’t always assimilable, but the virtuosity of Ensemble Offspring and its esteemed partners, their collective sense of genre-defying adventure, commitment and striving for excellence distinguishes this work as truly cutting-edge. It’s, at once, very now, with more than a hint of tomorrow.”
Lloyd Bradford Syke: “The Secret Noise: Ensemble Offspring” Syke on Stage 8/12/14
Selected media profiles about the work
Harriet Cunningham “Secret Noise” Sinifini Music 15/11/14
Harriet Cunningham “The Secret Noise plays at Sydney’s Town Hall” Sydney Morning Herald 18/11/14
Siobhan Moylan “Discovering the secrets of the noise” Limelight Magazine 13/11/14
Anni Heino “Ricketson at work: the fragile and the secret” Resonate Magazine 29/10/14
Radio broadcasts and interviews
Andrew Ford “Damien Ricketson and The Secret Noise” The Music Show, ABC Radio National 15/11/14
Julian Day “The Secret Noise” New Music Up Late, ABC Classic FM 15/11/14
Selected audience response
"A really pleasurable kind of strange"
"I was suspended in that moment between being given an anaesthetic and falling asleep"
“I have never been as blown away at any contemporary music concert as I was tonight … This is an experience I'll never forget.”
“I’m still buzzing from what, for me, was the best new music performance I’ve ever enjoyed.”
“a visually and aurally engrossing creation seamlessly blending live music (with some strange instruments), dance and design. It's subtle, witty, sexy and surprising and features wonderful talent.”
“Tonight’s performance was the most mesmerising musical experience I have had in years, by far. Absolutely stunning and inspirational work. Perfect and unique in every way.”
“I loved it!! The whole crazy experience … cutting so many edges. I felt like I was being taken on some Magical Mystery Tour.”
“It was delightful, inventive, unexpected and incredibly well executed.”
“the best thing I've seen all year. Combining musicians, dancers and an actor, it's an immersive, engaging, funny and serenely beautiful work.”
Preview video
5 minute trailer
More about the work
The Secret Noise finds much of its inspiration in cultural practices that, for various reasons, have been shielded or hidden from public consumption. The work has evolved as a sequence of scenes, each of which poetically references diverse types of music-making at the fringes of public experience. From sacred forms of ceremonial music to legally extinguished compositions, to backmasking and personal music players, The Secret Noise is a poetic response to such practices and a critical commentary on our understanding of music as a public or private exchange.
The work spans scored and improvised music involving conventional and unconventional instruments as well as electronic music. Although the entire work is based on common themes and sound-sources, the recorded form of the work is not a recreation of the live experience. The live work tends towards a more dramatic theatrical aesthetic while the recorded work tends towards a more austere and meditative aesthetic making creative use of attributes particular to the vinyl and CD media.
The live work is produced by Ensemble Offspring and involves eight experienced artists from different disciplines who have created the work in a collaborative fashion.
The Secret Noise is grouped into sections around themes that refer to different conceptions of secret or private music:
Plis Cachetés
Forbidden Spectacles
Music of Friends
Backmask
iMusic
Plis Cachetés
Plis Cachetés takes as its starting point a surreal exploration of artistic ownership and the law. It forms the basis of the opening installation of the live show where audience’s plis cachetés (drawings by Harry Pierce) are interpreted/authorised with individualised performances.
From paranoid governments to monopolising corporations, hyper-protective artist-estates and composers withdrawing their early works, this scene is a compendium of sound based on music that has been legally extinguished from the public experience. This scene takes its name from the French Scientific Academy’s method of patenting ideas via the submission of proposals as plis cachetés (sealed envelopes). In the period following the French revolution thousands of ideas were sealed and, until recently, remained lost and unavailable to the public. This scene alludes to proposals concerning the invention of new forms of music and dance notation. The drawings used in this ‘entry’ scene allude to arcane notational languages and were created by artist Harry Pierce. Distributed to audiences prior to the show and invited to add to the drawings, the audience discover they are a ticket (or bureaucratic form) that are interpreted into movement and sound by the performers in a surreal experience somewhere between bureaucratic routine and the intimacy of a private show.
Forbidden Spectacles
Forbidden Spectacles is built around an abstract allusion to the bullroarer a sacred instrument communicating the spirit over vast distances and excluded from the experience of the majority of the community. I was interested to note that many of the world’s cultures to create instruments swung overhead in a rotational fashion have used the instrument almost universally to serve a sacred function within that community. This interest formed the basis of the three scenes that feature whirling instruments including fricative objects (the heads of toilet brushes), and newly designed instruments: chortle balls and humming cups.
Music of Friends
Music of Friends delves into the idea of musical cliques. The scene alludes to the chamber music tradition: from its pre-concert function as music heard only by royalty to music exclusively composed and played by groups of friends in private settings. In this modern-day rewrite of the repertory, Music of Friends becomes a slightly humorous commentary on the phenomenon of closed musical circles and the identification of music as a commodity to advance one’s own (and exclude others’) social standing. Musical material used in this scene resulted in a self-standing spin-off work Clique performed by James Crabb (accordion), Claire Edwardes (percussion) and Jason Noble (clarinet). A modified version of the trio, under the title Music of Friends, including Bree van Reyk on pianoaccordion is featured in the live version of The Secret Noise.
Backmask
Can music hold double meanings and secret messages? From the ‘Plato code’ of Ancient Greece to US Congressional hearings into subliminal mind-control, the capacity of music to carry hidden messages is the subject of continuous controversy and conspiracy theories. The possibility of music having a superficial form as well as a secret form that may be unmasked by the inquisitive listener is the basis of this mash-up of hidden references. This scene is a playful rethink of techniques popular in the recording industry to conceal secret music and messages. Backmasking (the satanic message that reveals itself by spinning an LP backwards); incorrect play speeds (a new meaning found by changing LP speed or skipping through a CD); secret tracks (concealed between the grooves of an LP or in the pregap coding of CDs); hidden text and images (unveiled by the visualisation of digital audio); and modular structures (where a new work is exposed by the reordering and/or superimposition of separate tracks). The Secret Noise includes over 35 references to existing works noted for their double-meaning sources which can be found mainly in the track Backmask (EP only) and the bass clarinet, vibraphone, drumkit and turntable quartet Heaven Only Empty.
iMusic
Private music for the headphone generation. From court dances to the throbbing beat of the nightclub, music and dance, for the most part, has served a social function: a medium to bring people together. At least until the age of the iPod. With the experience of music increasingly individualised and personalised, the iMusic scene explores the ubiquitous headphone as an expression of private music. The original version of iMusic was based on music delivered through iPods that the audience would never hear, however, the work subsequently evolved into a more soloistic work for vibraphone and electronics under the title Time Alone.
Watch the Full show
View the premiere live production performed by Ensemble Offspring at the Lower Sydney Town Hall in Nov 2014. [9x short videos in a YouTube playlist]
The Secret Noise in development
The Secret Noise was created over several years comprising instrument building, studio production, creation of scores and electronic music as well as creative development workshops where an interdisciplinary team of performer-devisors created innovative work in a collaborative fashion.
Photography by Oliver Miller
