“Xronofilm” is a chronicle of Paragraph 51 work undertaken between, approximately, 2012 to 2019. This album features music from that period in various stages of completion – some finished, some not, and others that were polished up to a finished-ish state in 2020. As you might expect, the quality varies, but the album serves as an accurate chronicle of the period. This collection, “film”, is defined by the number of tracks that were created for use in student films. Only three tracks (Where, Coincidental, and Kosuud) were not created specifically as film music.

[01-04, 13-15] Blood Is Thicker (Themes)
These tracks were for a student film (probably Simon Direen’s) entitled “Blood Is Thicker” but I don’t recall if they were ever actually used for that purpose or not. They were last altered on 19th March 2012, just before I moved from Hobart to Melbourne. Eschatology One features Emily Wolfe (violinist and bandmate in Kreigan Hill) and was actually a standalone track before it was repurposed as film score music. I think this track also includes the rusty nails percussion from an earlier track, Rut. In a reverse process to Eschatology One, Hewn Of Earth was originally film score music before it was repurposed to include lyrics and become a section of a song for MASS, but it never went past this version. The lyrics were written by John Kostaras.

Lyrics:
It can hold you warm
Through your panged cries
You set sail away
I watched your back from the pier
And, lost, the world closed in…

During 2012 and 2013 I created film music for several of Simon’s (and a couple his fellow Swinburne students’) films including Blood Is Thicker, Devour, Vent, Mutt, and Crouch. At the time, I found the process to be mildly frustrating (and it probably was for them too) because, firstly, I didn’t understand the film score composer’s role as well as I thought I did and, secondly, I often found the non-musical language of filmmakers’ requests to be contradictory and confusing.

[05, 09, 12] Mutt (Themes)
These tracks were created for the student film, Mutt. They were last altered on 24th August 2012 and feature violin, voice, and various other manipulated sounds.

[06] Devour (Theme)
Last altered on 14th August 2012 just after I moved to Melbourne from Hobart, Devour is a piece of music commissioned by Simon Direen for a film he was producing. The film version also features a narration by him and the music was created on an ageing laptop in my bedroom of the house we were then sharing.

[07] Vent (Theme)
This was also film music but for a fellow student of Simon’s in this case (I think). It was last altered on 14th August 2012. The percussion in this track was created using a deck of cards and other household objects.

[08] Where
This standalone track was created for fun on the ageing laptop but I deemed it too long at the time and I had no other tracks to release alongside it. It features the manipulated sounds of a poorly-played Vietnamese instrument (đàn bầu this time) and has a very dramatic conclusion.

The next two tracks jump ahead several years. During that time I mostly worked on writing and performing blues songs on slide guitar for Doggerel, writing heavy progressive things for MASS, and completing by Bachelor of Music (Performance) at Melbourne Polytechnic (2016-18).

[10] Coincidental
This standalone track was last altered on 7th October 2018 but I think it was created circa 2015 or 2016. It was an experiment in writing incidental music which I erroneously understood to mean coincidental music. Here, pitches and rhythmic motifs were chosen and set in motion against each other and that’s basically it. At the time I found the result to be a bit underwhelming but, looking back, it has its own charm and it is now clear that this track prefigured a lot of my recent and current work including: Moment, Nothing Mantra Is Love, and Impositions.

[11] Kosuud
This standalone track, last altered on 2nd September 2019, is related to the previous track in its “coincidental” nature. While listening to the band Sonar I had the idea to use completed sudoku puzzles as number diamonds. This is the only experiment in that line of thinking to date but I intend to explore it further in a group improvisation setting.