Drawn and twisted w/ Vicki Hallett

In 2020, Vicki had the unique opportunity to explore the sonic qualities of the heritage machines housed in the National Wool Museum of Australia. Granted access to the space during the COVID lockdown period, she was able to experiment, perform, and record with each piece of equipment in an unprecedented moment of quiet as the presence of other people, traffic, and construction were halted. The machinery in the museum follows the process of turning raw wool into the thread, fabric, and clothing consumed throughout the world. Vicki approached each machine as a musical instrument as she investigated the combs, looms, levers, bins, and other mechanisms inherent to their physical materials. Each producing a unique set of textures, resonances, and percussive elements. She passed this new collection of recordings onto me with the invitation to begin composing and collaborating on a new set of works. Over the course of the years since, Vicki and I have explored iterations and avenues that finally became Drawn and Twisted.

With this new collection of recordings, we began editing, sampling, morphing the discrete voices of each machine into imagined soundscapes centering around the various stages of processing wool from raw fleece into a commercial textile products. Each piece like a scene from a possible narrative interweaving the hardship and prosperity inherent to the process and history of manufacturing sheep’s wool from herding to shearing to finished product. The process yields the thread of comfort and warmth brought to people around the world in the form of clothing, jackets, blankets, and socks. It has also polluted waterways adjacent to mills where the wool is cleaned, trampled the grasslands to dust with the herding of sheep, and impinged upon the freedom and vitality of indigenous people. With Drawn and Twisted, we encourage a listening towards the future in which the wealth of knowledge from as yet untold stories and perspectives is foregrounded, where a reverence for the land embraces a returned vitality to its native grassland.