Clay bowls make music

Press, 19 March 1986, Page 22

Clay bowls make music

By

KAY FORRESTER

A conversation with members of LIME is a little like one of their performances.

Four separate threads of sound all contributing. It is difficult talking to the four Australian musicians not to catch their enthusiasm for their kind of music. And their enthusiasm for making music from the most unlikely of instruments. Their customs declaration last week when they arrived in Christchurch was a customs officer’s nightmare. The original instruments ranged from clay bowls and gourds to bamboo to two lilo pumps. Then they had left behind some of leader Ros Bandt’s most unusual instruments — the glass instrument, the Flagong, cement tanks, and water pipes.

The group has learnt quickly — now their customs forms say simply “musical instruments.” Lime — Live Improvised Musical Events — has been touring for eight years, and the musicians are very close musically. Although they perform the same pieces of music no piece is ever exactly the same — it depends on how the musicians feel on any particular day. “If I want to go off into a long solo then the others just have to hang around,”

says Ros Bandt. The others — Carolyn Robb, Julie Doyle and Gavan McCarthy — don’t seem to mind in the least.

The group’s performances usually have three or four interludes and two or three ludes (main pieces.) It is flexibility and the space for individual creativity that appeals to the musicians.

No selling out for them to a more commercial sound. “We’ll lose out on this tour,” Carolyn Robb says. "But this is the sort of music we enjoy. All of us feel something when we are playing. It’s a terrific feeling to be creative. Other composers have to write something and then have it played by someone else. We can write, compose and play all at once.”

The group will never grow to more than four. “We know each other well. We have tried working with other musicians and it doesn’t work. We split up and do pieces with just two or three of us but not with others as well,” Gavan McCarthy says.

The musicians do go off and perform solo. Gavan McCarthy is a freelance double bass player in demand with chamber groups. Ros Bandt has recorded solo, playing cement tanks and other unusual instruments.

LIME’S music is not all percussion. The instruments include wind as well as gongs, wooden sticks and clay. The performances are not all music. They include dance by Julie Doyle and theatrical pieces and the use of transparencies. The group is sponsored by the Music Board of the Australia Council and has performed in streets and outdoor spaces as well as in concert halls.

Carolyn Robb says it is important to take their music to the people. “I like the idea of performing where people can really share the feeling of creating.” They do not switch their creativity on and off as they go on stage. “Our lives are dominated by our ears,” jokes Ros Bandt. Ideas for new sounds and instruments occur at any time.

One of the oddest instruments the group has brought to New Zealand is the pedewhistle. Carolyn Robb pumps two lilo pumps with her feet, plays the recorder part and changes the pitch of the whistling note with her thumbs and accompanies that with a rhythmic chant.

Rhythm is a large part of LIME’s work although no piece is too structured to prevent freedom for the players within the general framework. Ros Bandt says the music is "democratic.

Every one of us directs every other person in pieces. We each react to what the others do. It’s not at all a case of each person having their part and just playing that over and over.”

“Who wants to play the same thing over and over again. Boring.”

For the musicians music is human and making music is about human participation.

Sounds are the tools for communication.

Inspiration for compositions can come from almost anywhere — the forms in a painting, the lines of a poem or a simple rhythm. The music draws much from Eastern rhythms and Western minimal music.

But no-one else has the same sound as LIME, according to Ros Bandt. The Philip Glass Ensemble plays on a similar principle but its music is far more structured and less free.

For the LIME musicians freedom and creativity is by far the most important aspect of their music.

All have studied composition at university. Ros Bandt has a musicology doctorate in new music. All the musicians have made original instruments. Alongside Ros Bandt’s flagong and Carolyn Robb’s pedewhistle is the plumbaphonen of Julie Doyle and the farmarimba of Gavan

McCarthy. Carolyn Robb has also created the hammockmarimba and a hand painted barrel frum.

Other instruments are made for the group such as the clay works of Judy Lorrian, leading Australian potter. They also use electronic equipment depending on the size and acoustics of the performance venue.

Sometimes they perform to taped music, although during their stay in Christchurch they have opted to not use tapes.

The group is now in Wellington after a performance and workshop last week. The musicians will also play in Auckland before leaving this country .