SIMON WICKHAM-SMITH

As a teenager I developed an obsession for mediaeval music and, later, for twentieth century (composed) music. John Cage became my hero, replacing Perotin and Desprez, and I can still remember the thrill of buying my first recording of experimental music - Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie: finally, I think, I had discovered a music which spoke directly to me - the music of chaos and of stillness and, perhaps, of the culture so far from my own situation.

On my first day at university, the mention of Cage’s name brought me into contact with Richard Youngs. The following week, we went together to a performance of Stockhausen’s Stimmung; soon after that we began to make music together and have continued to do so ever since. I would say that meeting, and playing with, Richard has been the principal formative experience of my life thus far.

Even from before our meeting, Richard had been recording with other musicians, but I resisted the temptation. I think I preferred to keep a lower profile and, anyway, I couldn’t think of anything I really wanted to do in music except play with Richard. In the early part of 1999, however, I decided to venture out on my own - at first mainly with acoustic instruments and only more recently with computer - and it is this period which resulted in my appearance at festivals in Australia and the United States.

Since early 1999 I’ve been playing didjeridu and I’m looking now to develop a MIDI-didj interface for real time performance. This is the main project at the moment and I’m planning to write a work combining didj, digitally-modified samples and khöömei (Tuvan overtone singing) over the next few months. Alongside this, I’m working on a series of pieces under the title Multiple Tongues, in which voices speaking different languages are digitally transformed and layered, thus creating a music which preserves the timbre of the voice and the feeling of (the) language, while retaining little of the original text(s); jusKidding is the first section of Multiple Tongues to be completed.

As an adjunct to the discography page, and as a kind of formal œuvre, here is a list of my completed pieces to date:
Charms to Control the Sun (1999)
jusKidding (1999-2000)
Ave Regina Celorum (2000)
Sealight (2000)
The Self-Immolation of Thich Quang Duc (2000)
Songs and Dreams the Whalers Weave (2001)
Sri Guru-vandana (2001)
Sandokai (2001)
Music for Butoh (2001)
Katotohanan (2001-2002)
what makes me dive in headfirst (2001-2002)
Pange Lingua Gloriosi (2002)
Buckminsterfullerene (2002)
Három Denevér (2002)
The Falling Asleep of the Most Holy Mother of God (2002)

I taught myself Tibetan so that could understand the texts which I was chanting. I enjoyed learning the language and, subsequently, teaching it to a few (fool?)hardy people during my year in retreat and preparing translations, both of practise texts and of literary texts.

It was during this time of literary wanderings that I discovered the poetry of Tsangyang Gyatso. I was fascinated by his story and by his simplicity of means: his poems are jewels, like haiku, and written in a contemplative and allusive style. I began to translate the poems almost immediately and, over the last few years, I've gradually worked and reworked the texts into their present form.