Waves of Consciousness (February 2019)

Happy New Year, listeners!

We’re delighted to welcome 2019 (our 5th year!) with this immersive playlist of audiovisual recordings titled Waves of Consciousness.  These seven amazing works are deeply contemplative, thematically and aesthetically. When we titled the playlist, we contemplated the individual reflecting on various broader contexts, noting their consciousness of things beyond their immediate self, e.g. the environment, humanity and mortality.   The works feature small chamber music instrumentation that we felt reinforces a closeness and level of detail across the various themes explored. We love the opportunity to release video playlists that feature performance footage of the work, adding another layer of immersion and celebration of musical talent to this month’s listening experience. We hope you find this as enjoyable and thought-provoking as our growing Making Waves team has. Don’t forget to leave your words of support for these talented composers and musicians by visiting their profiles, following their sites, sharing their work and leaving a comment below.

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Guitar Waves (December 2018)

In our final playlist for 2018, Making Waves celebrates the expansive and engaging exploration of the guitar in Australian new music!

The guitar, in its various guises and combinations, offers composers a smorgasbord of sounds and techniques. Whether it is the quirky and emotive combination of guitar, trumpet and trombone in Andrew Batterham’s or the raw power of the electric guitar when it meets it maker – a set of pliers in Sam Harvey’s Bloodlines – you might just have your curiosity ‘plucked.’

We hope you enjoy this month’s playlist, and maybe even consider giving your local guitar teacher a call afterward…

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Keyboard Waves (November 2016)

Here at Making Waves, we’ve been wanting to collate a “Piano Waves” playlist for over a year now.  This staple instrument attracts so much solo repertoire that it can be hard for performers and listeners to know where to start.  There is of course the burden of tradition, of a solid canon of classical piano repertoire, but also the instrument’s versatility in playing a huge role in jazz and popular musics.  In this month’s playlist we broadened our definition to “Keyboard” to include not only acoustic works, but some amazing tracks in which the piano meets technology: via live electronic manipulation, the use of electric instruments and MIDI, input via audience mobile phones, and even a robotic piano named RHEA.  We’ve also split the playlist into a Soundcloud segment (c.50min) and a YouTube segment (c.20min) in order to include a wide array of works. Listen, enjoy and share!

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