Ultima Thule
has broadcast interviews with many notable ambient music composers and
producers over the years, including David Hykes, Vidna Obmana, Hybryds,
Peter Miller, David Parsons, Eckart Rahn and Winsome Evans. We are now
making the best of these - along with a series of newly recorded
interviews - available on this page over coming months. Click on the links
below to hear them.
Jaroslav Kovaricek
is known to radio audiences across Australia as the voice of
Dreamtime, a
ground-breaking music show broadcast for many years during the 1980s on
ABC-FM. The show successfully juxtaposed traditional western classical
music with contemporary new age and ambient styles, and was
immensely popular with audiences. In this interview Marc Cottee
talks with Jaroslav about his work on radio, his experiences of
running Australian ambient/new age record label
Terra Australia, and about
music and life in general.
The voice of
Sydney artist
Inga Liljestrom has been
described as Australia's answer to Bjork-meets-Marianne Faithful and
Portishead with a
dash of Lisa Gerrard thrown in for good measure. Her complex,
multi-layered, richly
orchestrated songs merge a neo-jazz sensibility with crisp
Scandinavian-inspired minimalist lyricism, and evoke an intimate
world, simultaneously cinematic in scope and dripping with potent
audio-visual symbolism. The promise of Inga's 1998 inaugural release
Urchin has been fully realised in her acclaimed follow-up,
Elk (recently released on
Groovescooter Records),
which she discusses in this interview with George Cruickshank.
Elk is scheduled for broadcast by Ultima
Thule in February 2005.
Sydney artist
Stevie Wishart
is the founder of contemporary experimental music group The Machine for
Making Sense and mediaeval performance group Sinfonye. She is
recognised as one of the world's leading interpreters of the music of 12th
century mystic, poet and composer Hildegard von Bingen, whose
extraordinary musical creations have been rediscovered and popularised in
recent years after centuries of obscurity. In
this interview Stevie speaks with George Cruickshank about O
nobilissima viriditas, the third volume of a series intended to
encompass the complete works of Hildegard; the recording is newly released
on the Celestial Harmonies label,
and is scheduled for broadcast by Ultima
Thule in June 2004.
Celestial Harmonies,
founded in the early 1970s, is the label that launched the careers
of such ambient music luminaries as Paul Horn, Kitaro, David Hykes
and the Harmonic Choir, Richard Burmer and Steve Roach. In this
interview label founder and president
Eckart Rahn
shares with George Cruickshank the amazing story behind The Music
of Islam - a monumental Celestial Harmonies opus
consisting of seventeen CDs of music from right across the Islamic
world - the result of hundreds of hours of recording and
musicological research conducted as part of an extraordinary three year
long cultural odyssey that led producer
and composer David Parsons all the way from Tunisia to Indonesia.
Lisa
Gerrard + Pieter Bourke Recorded
12 August, 1998
George Cruickshank
speaks with Pieter Bourke
and Dead Can Dance vocalist Lisa
Gerrard about their album Duality
in this interview. Gerrard's career has since scaled stellar heights, involving a
memorable collaboration with Hans Zimmer on the Gladiator
soundtrack, and more recently the solo creation of the haunting soundtrack to the
Oscar-nominated Whalerider. Her most recent release, Immortal
Memory - a work of sublimely intimate grandeur, co-composed
with Ireland's Patrick Cassidy - will be broadcast by Ultima
Thule during June 2004.
For well over
a decade and a half Peter
Miller has been one of
Australia's foremost sound designers and composers of electronic
music for film, television and multimedia. His long professional
partnership with director Alex Proyas (Dark City, I Robot)
resulted in one of the most memorable soundtracks ever to be
associated with an Australian feature film; Rolling Stone
described Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds
(1989) as "the finest and most daringly experimental piece of
electronic ambience ever released in Australia... an album of
stunning instrumental beauty and exquisite soundscapes...". In this
interview Peter discusses his then newly-released follow-up album,
Love vs Gravity, which went on to receive similar accolades.
