Planet Pacific and Island Gardens

Planet Pacific - Pieces Of  Heaven? is a super eight film I shot in the early 1990s (for me pre-digital days) while travelling in some of the Pacific IslandNations, Tahiti, Fiji, Hawaii and Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia.  The title was taken from a book, Pieces Of Heaven, written by Nancy Phelan.

 

Before the invasion by tourists, writer Nancy Phelan worked in the South Pacific. As a member of the South Pacific Commission staff, she spent months of each year in the islands - New Caledonia, Fiji, Niue, Tonga, Western Samoa, American Samoa, the Northern and Southern Cook Islands, Tahiti, Ocean  Island, Nauru, the Gilbert Islands (Kiribati). Almost forty years later she  returned..rekindling the enchantment of that earlier era and seeing first-hand the changes brought by Independence, in the 1950s from the perspective of  the 1990s. I added the question mark to her original title.

 

ISLAND GARDENS is a series of my own short videos again travelling in different island locations mostly in the tropics. Sri Lanka, Lamma Island near Hong Kong, Pulau  Ubin near Singapore,  Koh Lanta in Thailand etc., as well as some Mediterranean islands. I have lived in the Mediterranean for more than 35 years.

 

An audio thread connecting them all is my concern for the co-habitation of the human and non-human world expressed through my use of unprocessed avian or insect field recordings of song, signs and  signals. Climate change, as well as the destruction by humans of the natural habitat of many species, is disturbing the balanced relationship we need to have with nature.

 

Indigenous and  small, often nomadic, coastal communities are very aware of this balance and  the incursion of the industrial world into their way of life is having disastrous effects which will ( if not already ) have similar effects and repercussions on  ours.

There are field recordings on this edition from Pulau Ubin, Ko Phayan, Ko Lanta, Sri  Lanka, Bangkok, St.Lucia and Martinique; all places that can look forward to or are already witnessing the Postdiluvian Future.

 

 

ISLAND  GARDENS  is available as a double dvd and I use a selection from the series projected as a back to my performance.

In 1999  I began  a  series of musical compositions/improvisations that I described as  Ambient/Electronic/Exotica. Initially inspired by the Exotica/Easy Listening music from the 1950s by composers such as Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, Les Baxter and others, but my intention was to make a more modern, avant-garde version. I wanted my music, like theirs, to evoke exotic far-away places but mine, unlike theirs (none of them ever travelled), would be based on my on real travels and would make practically no reference to the music of the places that I visited. It would be pure imagined invention and it would be political. So far I have made eight editions in this series all available on  vinyl and c.d.