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The Mark Atkins Experience was an affectionate joke name given to a musical collaboration between Mark Atkins and myself.
We first met in 1994 and throughout the remainder of the '90's we collaborated on numerous live and recorded soundtracks for television and theatre.
In 2001 we decided to work together again and between 2001 and 2003, we embarked on several European tours ,playing our brand of bastardized Australiana to mostly festival audiences.
In 2003 we were also invited to play at the Womad Festival in New Zealand and this was followed by another European summer jaunt. Thoughout the time of our collaboration, we played shows in Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Spain, England and New Zealand. Ironically (theatre soundtracks aside) we've never played a proper live show together in Australia. There just didn't seem much interest here . Our last show was in Barcelona, on a sweltering night in August 2003. This was an inpromptu, hastily organised gig which only came about as a result of us missing our plane. It was a bittersweet end to a period of tumtuous lug your own gear touring that we were perhaps getting a little old for. We arrived sleepless at Sydney airport two days later, sunk a few beers and went our seperate ways. In 2004, Mark began recording and touring with American composer Philip Glass. Mark's work on Philip's Orion project had him performing shows worldwide. Some of the venues in which Mark performed with the Philip, included New York's Lincoln Centre, the Sydney Opera House and the 2004 Olympics in Athens. Recently Mark performed as part of the black armband series of concerts and nowadays Mark spends much of his time touring and performing around the world. . . .Mark and I never released an album together though there was an embarassing bootleg getting around for a while.
We have however had an unreleased album hibernating on a hard drive for some years now.
There wasn't funds to release our cd when we were a gigging act but there's been ocassional talk of releasing something in the years since then.
But dont hold your breath, we haven't played a gig together since 2003 and as such we don't really have means of promoting such an unusual cd.
Aswell we're both actively involved in creating new music so mixing and mastering something we did years ago isn't exactly high on the financial agenda either. However If someone ever wanted to cover the cost of mastering and pressing we'd be keen to release something.
Until then what you can hear here are some unmixed/unmastered selections from our album that never was. Our record has quite a filmic feel to it and this is combined with some legthy pieces of musical storytelling . Tracklisted it s kind of plays like a soundtrack to an out there Australian road film.
I guess I should also mention that we were never actually billed as The Mark Atkins Experience and I simply toured as Mark's accompanist . As I've mentioned the name Mark Atkins Experience was just a kind of in-joke amongst our friends. Hmmm I guess because we were an Experience,, part musical part comical part tragedy. . In the end I guess our crazy didgeridoo adventures would probably make a better book than a record. . It could be called The Didgeridoo's and the Didgeridont's . We hope you enjoy the tunes nonetheless. The live drums on these tracks were played by Jason Morissby. 'Superhead' features the voice of renown Aboriginal songman Mathew Doyle. Gondwana features the fab operatic voice of Fi. 'Invasion Day' includes a sample from our good friend India Bharti .
Mark of course plays the Didgeridoo. If you've ever seen him live you'll know he's unbelievably good at it. The Didjeridoo is the backbone of most of our stuff and also the lead . Mark narrates on 'Lost in Dreaming' and 'Gondwana' and you just cant fake a voice like that. (beleive me i've tried) Our album features several spoken word tracks by Mark and we'll post another one soon.
Besides drums and didgeridoo I play all the instruments here. These include guitars, plucked bass,bowed bass, ebow, keys and electronica . I also play drums on 'Gondwana' , narrate on 'Invasion Day and sing on 'Song to the Siren' For this track we were more after an effect than a lead vocal. Kind of like the sound of a drunken irishman singing to the sea from a cliff, but i think i overdid the drunken part, te he . I'll get a proper singer to do it if it's ever to go on a record.
The haunting Alp Horn style sounds on Siren are in fact just a traditional eucalyptus didjeridoo. I'm told the technique in hitting different notes without a slide is very difficult. Mark is the only didgeridoo player i've heard who can really play in this manner.
Song to the Siren was of course a Tim Buckley song though the musical pieces at the begining and end are our own . All the other tracks on this site are our own compositions as is the rest of our album.
We're both interested in composing music for film and if you would like to have us work on a soundtrack you can contact us through this site.
For current information regarding Mark Atkins, you can click on his official myspace page below. Cheers
