Life Lessons and Other Ridiculous Birds

Galahs are the unacknowledged legislators of Australia. They can smell a microphone from kilometers away. This is one of the many lessons I have learned as I have shaken down my plein-air rig.

Galahs are not my major enemy, however (neither are legislators). It is the wind that causes me the most trouble. Only the very stillest times are suitable for recording, and in the time it takes to get to location, set up the rig and balance the mix a perfectly still night (it is almost always night) can suddenly turn gusty and grim. Most recently a beautiful take was ruined by the entrance of a storm that blew without cease for three days. Sometimes, I battle on, waiting out the gusts, utterly sure that they are only transitory. In the end - power supplies draining as fast as my patience - I pack up only to have the calm restored once I have driven away.

Other problems are less prosaic. I have a neighbour two valleys away with an antiquated harvester. It is not operated by internal combustion, but by a hundred gnomes running under duress in heavy clogs upon a tin sheet treadmill. The noise is beyond belief. I have it recorded at very high fidelity. You can tell exactly where the crop is falling, to the precise square metre, but you cannot hear much of what I am saying.

My best take so far also has a harvester in it - this one seven kilometers away in the valley behind me. It has a sweet tone and the mopokes sing to it. Again, the fidelity is so good that you can tell exactly where in the paddock it is - you can also hear the trucks moving to it and away from it, and, if you listen very closely, the occasional gurgle as tea is poured out of the driver’s thermos.

I have learned much. I have learned how to position my microphones so that my voice is properly embodied in a space that is defined by the random events around it - the movement of kangaroos, the songs of birds and frogs, the road-trains running a full ten kilometer stretch from east to west, dogs barking and - regrettably - the occasional moth landing on a microphone.

I have also learned not to rehearse in the field. This should have been obvious, but in the theatre - or, perhaps, only in the theatre as I practice it - nothing that is obvious to others ever occurs to me until long and painful ages have passed. The dynamics and pacings that are meaningful when face to face with living people are merely weird when isolated and caught by a machine. Getting from “it worked live” to “it works in the can” is a delicate process and the frustrations of field-recording only make it harder. Almost all my wasted takes could have been avoided if I knew what I wanted to record before I started.

I have also learned how to let the earth work for me. The echo of voice from the surrounding landscape features is one of the major reasons I wanted to develop plein-air in the first place. I think I had imagined that earth-echo would be something like a background colour, but in fact it is a major dramatic dynamic capable of carrying considerable meaning and emotional charge. Most of my delivery is off-voice, but by grading subtly into on-voice and back again I can trigger echoes of considerable richness. This is my happiest discovery.

Most of us spend our careers knowing that we are doing the best that we possibly can, but  believing that almost anybody else could do it better. There is a moment, however, in every project when we get it, when we fall in love with what we can do and have done and we know that we are on the right track regardless of what might happen afterward. I have found this moment.

Galahs are the unacknowledged legislators, but tonight I don’t care. I just feel good. And feeling good feels good and that is all the feelgood I need.