Logue Live

Pic by Sam James

Back in late October I played a new Live AV piece called Logue at a theatre in the Blue Mountains in a show put together by Miriam Williamson. I’ll often head into making something without an idea of where it comes from and trust it’ll work itself out during the process, or maybe I’ll understand it after the fact. The mechanics of proposals and funding however often mean you need to state with some degree of detail what a project is, what it means, what it does, how it works aesthetically long before you really know any of those things. And to a certain degree over time I’ve internalised that process and will tell myself the overarching ideas and concepts as both a way of rehearsing what I’m going to say about the work in those contexts and also I’ve come to understand, as a way of having a polite internal fiction that the unbridled chaos of the process can actually hide inside while it gets done.

But even given that leeway, this project was on another level of fragmented meander over quite a long period of time. It was eventually called Logue to reference monologue, travelogue, dialogue, epilogue. All the Logue things that it came over time to contain. Built entirely from field recordings, 3d lidar scans of buildings, landscapes and people taken mostly during travel and residency trips from 23 to 25, at first I thought it was a semi traditional poetic travelogue. Albeit one related to more abstract ideas of visual music and rhythm, where both places and the subjective states of perception they evoked were played musically, counterpointed with a voice I would write to speak/sing as performance alongside.

Manang – Chris Caines 2025

In the upper Himalaya earlier this year, dreamy from continuous low level hypoxia I wrote endless fragments for this, as well as collecting quotes and asides from half remembered books and articles. I took the field recordings from there and from the collection, tuned them to fundamentals and moved them through an arc of key modulations to generate an overarching tonal narrative. Yet coming back home after that, the piece remained for the most part a series of fragments in folders. It began to sink in that this was a result of the deep fog that the process began in, the origin story had set the tone from the outset no matter what sense I tried to impose after the fact.

Even the streets of Siem Reap align to the temples

In 2021 still deep in Covid conditions I started work on a commission for a long quad screen piece for a public screen site in Sydney. This was based on a fascination with the deep time of the axial precession, the 26,000 year cycle also known as The Great Year after Plato. More than the achingly slow polar movement itself the trigger for this was how the phenomenon had been tracked by early civilizations obsessed with astronomy. In particular I had a memory of seeing a documentary on late night TV as an undergrad about how the Angkor Wat site was built as a map of the processional star shapes from 10,000 years prior to its construction. Clearly this fell into the category of mystical conspiracy theory and when it re-emerged from memory decades later I could find no mention not only of the program but even of the general speculative idea in any of the exhaustive literature searches I conducted. Nevertheless in mid 2023 in a delulu is the solulu style side quest I landed in Siem Reap to explore the sites and find what I might find by being on the ground.

Exterior 3d scan view burial chamber Angkor Wat

This was the start of the scanning and collecting over the next few years in between other projects and significant life events. And also the start of working out how to play this collection that presented like some sort of grounded instrument, part photo archive, part ruined spatial record, part metaphor for the incomplete and patterned interpolations of memory. The voice narratives fell by the wayside as texture and pattern took over and it became the more musical set of sequences it wanted to be. Not that I gave up any of those earlier plans easily, every release of one structure into another looser one had to be negotiated like an existential tussle between sense and nonsense.

Still from Logue sequence

A main screen section recording from that show is below and the soundtrack is released on all the streaming places titled Logue Live. In a week or so I’ll play it for an audience here in Greece for a second public outing far removed from original context and expectations.