NULLARBOR - THE ALBUM (2008)
The story commences at Southern Cross in Western Australia, traverses the legendary Nullarbor plain in Western Australia and ends almost 4,000km later in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, pretty much the entire width of Australia.
Along the way, I made a series of audio field recordings which eventually transformed their way into these pieces. Each work is named after a particular point or stretch of the journey.
In November 2006 the initial recordings were aired as a series of live performances before being taken back into the studio for 12 months before they were ready for mixing and mastering.
I hope you enjoy the journey too!
Love and peace,
Mick.
Album now also available from CD-Baby
THE BACKGROUND
miXile (Michael Shanahan) has been working in the area of Electronic/Ambient Music/ Performance Art since 1986. Now based in Waterford, Ireland, he grew up and lived in Australia until the mid ‘70s.
Between 1986 and 1990, he performed a number of ‘one-off' live visual/sound works in Cork, Waterford and Dublin, Ireland as well as various Arts Festivals in Europe.
From the mid to late 1990's he moved from Performance to Musical Art Pieces, and started working under the name miXile.
On December 29th, 2001, he commenced a twelve month electronic music project based on field recordings made while hiking and incorporating keyboards, guitar and sampled sounds. The resulting work - 'White Horse' was released in April 2003.
Since then, he has been writing and recording on a continuous basis and has completed several albums and EPs. These works have allowed him to explore various strands within the electronic genre including ambient, sound art, techno, psytrance, drum & bass, and to acknowledge the influence of artists such as Biosphere, Carbon Based Lifeforms, Shpongle, Radiohead, Aphex Twin and Berlin School electronica.
The 2005 work, 'Phaedo' in St. Finbar's Cathedral Cork, Ireland, was an 8 hour electronic work based on the death of Socrates and marked a return to live performance after a fifteen year break.
Since the beginning of 2006 the artist has worked on a number of commissioned works including pieces for Cambridge radio in the UK and two works based on the life and writings of Samuel Becket for the ‘Bend it Like Beckett' CD commissioned by Art Trail in Ireland.
In June 2006, the artist commenced a 7 week journey that took him from Perth in Western Australia across the legendary Nullarbor Plain and on to Sydney before travelling north to Noosa in Queensland and back to Sydney. Along the way, several hundred hours of audio field recordings were made to be used as part of a series of electronic music events and other sound based projects.
The resulting field recordings form part of a series of four albums with the first two parts, Bibbulmun (2006) and Nullarbor (2008) already released. Work on the remaining two albums in the series is already in progress.