Meet Tilman Robinson, a composer, producer and sound designer based in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. Tilman’s music can be hard to define – in our research for this very interview we have seen it described as “maximalist and dark ambient electric-acoustic”, and “both intellectual and emotional”, but trying to put any sort of genre label on his compositions almost feels like doing the works a disservice.
Tilman studied jazz at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, and he has an impressive resume of projects that he has worked on over the years. He orchestrated Sinead O’Connor’s music for the 7 Songs to Leave Behind project (which also featured John Cale of The Velvet Underground, Meshell Ndegeocello, Archie Roach and Gurrumul Yunupingo). He created an incredible piece of work in Deer Heart, recorded over three years in Reykjavik, the Canadian Rockies and Melbourne. His album “A Network of Lines” was a response to Italo Calvino’s 1978 novel “If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller”.
More recently, he released CULTURECIDE, an eclectic, haunting and touching work balancing electronic instrumentation with cello, double bass, choir, field recordings and recorded elements of medical equipment from the Royal Melbourne Hospital. Make yourself comfortable, pop on CULTURECIDE and read our interview with Tilman below.
It depends if I’m making music for myself, for others, or as part of a collaboration. When I make for myself, I like to think in timeframe constraints. Each side of a vinyl record can be roughly 22 minutes without compromising quality so that’s often a nice constraint to work towards. Sometimes I will need to write a piece of a specific length (an hour long concert work, a 15 minute commission for a series of instruments). I conceptualise a suite of music that addresses a certain theme (whether or not I make it known what that is to audiences) or choose a piece of art/literature to respond to and divide up that time into movements/moments/pieces. From there it’s a really simple process of writing, recording, and producing it all…
Collaboration is key to making music for me. From a young age, I played with other musicians first as a trombonist and later performing on ‘electronics’ and synthesisers. I much prefer being in a room with others making whether they be musicians or other kinds of artists - I didn’t start making music to be in a room alone (although that is definitely a necessity when writing or practising). My collaborators are often friends I’ve made along the journey of art-making: kindred spirits who are interested in similar kinds of art or music that I am. My interests vary wildly, hence my collaborators vary too from very experimental musicians to singer-songwriters, visual artists, dancers and theatre makers. The approach to making music adapts to the collaborator I’m working with which often pushes my limits creatively and can result in epic successes or dismal failures. The spectra of outcomes is risky and exciting.
For a while, I saw this as a way to ‘maximise my employability’ in a very capitalist sense but these days I see them all as the same role. I would work on projects in only one of these roles and become frustrated when the other tools of my practice weren’t part of the process. Gradually I started to form a reputation as someone who could, say, be a live audio engineer on a large scale production but also follow a very complicated notated musical score at the same time to hit cue points and/or offer critical feedback. Or write the music for a theatre production but also perform it live and deliver a complex live sound design that becomes part of the composition. I’m proud of my ability to pull all of these tools together into a holistic artistic practice. I bring them all to the table when working on my own projects or others’. Sometimes they’re all needed, other times they aren’t.
Network of Lines was my first major conceptual work and it was always designed to be listened to as a concert length experience (or now, album). The novel itself is a masterpiece of post-modern writing with a fascinating form. The through line of the story is subverted masterfully to shift from a series of unrelated short stories to a fully formed and overarching narrative structure in the vignettes between these short stories. To respond to this, I wrote a short piece of unrelated music for each ‘short story’ and paired it with a moment of structured improvisation within the ensemble to tie the work together. I find literature a great starting point for outsourcing questions of form and structure. I wrote another similar work in response to middle-German epic poetry for a jazz festival in Australia, the only recorded part of which is Where We Began on my album Deer Heart.
At the time of making Deer Heart I was leading a relatively nomadic lifestyle. I would travel around the world undertaking long-term residencies and work in recording studios. After making and recording Network of Lines I decided to focus on work that was more personal. A very earnest response to approaching a certain age milestone. Deer Heart was originally a character and all of the music was written by them about people in their life. After writing chunks of the music, I just dropped the pretence in my own mind that the character wasn’t just me and wrote music in response to my own loves, fears and joys. I felt very self-conscious about this at the time and didn’t advertise it widely for fear of being derided as a little basic… I’m happy to own it in hindsight. The locations themselves (it was created across Reykjavik, Berlin, Melbourne and Banff) definitely influenced the music but I’m not sure how looking back at it. Definitely from a practical POV working at Greenhouse in Reykjavik and having access to incredible collaborators was a massive boon. But how it influenced the compositions per se I’m unsure on. Often it’s more fun to let audiences create that narrative for themselves. 😛
Ah Culturecide. I’m so proud of that record. Its April 2020 release date was so unfortunate - it just got swallowed on the global horrors of that time...
I think Culturecide and its wildly varied instrumentation was really the first example of me trying to tie the disparate aspects of my practice (composer, producer, engineer, field recorder, arranger, performer etc) into one cohesive package. The instrumentation and field recordings flowed naturally from the record’s conceptual roots: prepared Disklavier (Yamaha’s acoustic piano that can be controlled via MIDI), several very old Soviet era Russians synthesisers and viola da gamba are some other sonic flavours on the album. And yes that very very late recording session in the MRI clinic at Royal Melbourne Hospital was incredible. I don’t remember the name of the MRI nurse that managed to let me in there and excitedly helped me in the session with sonic ideas by supplying their “favourite tests” but I think of them often (that session was actually not particularly legal and there was a risk to their job should their superiors have found out…). There’s no real rhyme or reason to the blending of instrumentation - sometimes you just have to run with a conceptual idea, jam a square peg in a round hole and see if you can make it work. Luckily I think I made things work.
Ah the Nuraphone! Yes I was one of the lucky people to hear the finished version of the original Nuraphone as Nura was based in Melbourne and developed by a friend of a friend. I was extremely impressed by them at the time (as early marketing materials immortalised…) and, of course, still am. A highly innovative piece of technology. It’s great to see the technology being incorporated into different kinds of headphones and designs. I was as impressed by the Denon PerL Pros as the Nuraphones which is no mean feat and would say that so far they feel slightly more comfortable during long term listening sessions than the Nuraphone.
It’s slightly narcissistic but the first song I listened to on them was my track Clathrate Gun from Culturecide. It’s a piece I know intimately and often use to tune the EQ of a room or sound system. Next on the list was Ich bin meine maschine by Atom™ and Earther by Giant Claw. Both also on my system EQ testing list. The addition of a graphic EQ in the Denon app is great as it allowed me to boost the upper mid-frequencies slightly within my own profile (I felt they had been emptied out a little too much).
As a broad social comment, I feel like attention to good sound and has been eroded over the past couple of decades. It’s so common to see people playing music directly out of the phone speaker or laptop or on terrible quality headphones these days. It’s a shame. Concepts such as Personalised Sound and the Denon/Nura technology allow people to become curious about good sound again and willing to invest in a far better sonic experience.
As an artist who spends far too much time making hyper detailed, nuanced, often times almost imperceptible changes to tweak sounds to be just right in a mix, it’s nice to know that there are people who have the same interest and are probably going to have a far richer experience listening to my music than scrolling through social media and hearing it through their phone speaker. I hope people take the time to listen more deeply to music or any sound really. In an era where ‘mindfulness’ is a concept du jour, music/listening can really help us to focus our attention back into our body.
Melbourne really is a great city for the arts and artists. There’s a consistently alarming amount of sound makers here, all working in vastly diverse ways, challenging and championing each other. I feel very privileged to be part of an excellent community of sound makers in this city and contributing in some small part to its legacy. I think you could probably say the same for every city in Australia, Perth included. Australia really does punch well above its weight in the quality of its artists. I’m sure readers of this blog are already supporting their local music scene, wherever they live, but this is just another reminder to do so. Times are tough and we can’t let art dwindle!
I’m very lucky in that music has allowed me the opportunity to traverse the globe working in a variety of different places/cultures on projects of mine as well as those of others.
Here’s a stream of consciousness list of some times that are sticking out to me:
- The times I have spent in Iceland or in residency at the Banff Centre in Canada are particularly fond memories
- There’s the time I gave workshops in Yellowknife in Canada, flying in onto a frozen lake in -40C weather.
- Somehow I found myself at the International Gamelan Festival in Yogyakarta a few years ago.
- I made a theatre show in Federation Square (a massive public space in central Melbourne) a couple of years ago and when we opened one of the shows an entire anti-vax protest walked through. We pretended it was part of the show and let them do their thing.
- In 2021 I somehow talked my way into being able to access an old decommissioned copper mine in Tasmania for a couple of weeks and played elements of my music through it at extreme volume to record the resonance.
- I left my show laptop in the seatback of the aeroplane on the day I was playing a dual-headline show with Luke Howard at Dark Mofo in Tasmania. There was an agonising 2 hours stressed out of my mind before I got it back in my hands (an air steward had noticed it and taken it off the plane before it flew back to Melbourne).
- It’s kind of incredible to me but my music is available on at least 7 different vinyl releases. 2 are my own records and the rest are specifically commissioned collaborations or compilations.
There will always be someone/s experimenting with sound and music. Some people are just wired in a way that makes them seek out sounds that others may find confronting, ugly, too obtuse, or boring. There is a very long list of experimental musicians being venerated in contemporary music circles. You could argue that even composers as far back as Mozart *who were actually pushing boundaries and experimenting within their forms) were wildly successful in bridging experimental and popular musics. Closer to now, think of The Beatles mimicking the musique concrete offerings of people like Stockhausen in A Day in the Life and Revolution 9. Artists such as Björk (a true pioneer in her own right) collaborate widely with experimental musicians. Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead writes music for orchestras these days. The lines have always blurred and they continue to. I think it’s wildly important for artists across the board not to become siloed and to appreciate the complexity that is inherent in all music making whether writing a 3 chord song, crafting maximalist noise, composing a piece of serial music or making a beat purely from samples. To do it well is not as easy (or as hard) as it seems across the board. It takes the same amount of patience and dedication to the craft and one type of music is not more important than another.
In my own practice, I’ve been tinkering away at several new albums over the past couple of years that are in various stages of completion. The most likely next solo release will be an a/v album and performance called Mutualism with a visual artist from Sydney, Carla Zimbler. That focuses on the various different styles of symbiotic relationships: from those where both organisms mutually benefit, to those that are more parasitic and everything in between. I have a swag of collaborative recordings with dear friends such as Matthias Schack-Arnott, Aviva Endean, Chloë Sobek and Lizzy Welsh that are slightly unfinished that need to be cleaned up and released. It’s hard to find the time sometimes… Label owners, hit me up.
I have a major new performance work I’ve been working on for a couple of years that I’m calling The Quieter You Become that is part performance, part installation and utilises a massive massed bespoke speaker system I’ve been building that is spread around a space as if the speakers are growing off trees. The work also gives audience headphones they can choose to wear (or not) that transports them into the ears of the performers who are wearing in-ear microphones. The idea is to shift you through first person, second person and third person perspectives of listening to the sounds that are made in real time. This has all been developed through research of hearing conditions that commonly affect sound makers and developed through research and consultation with people that have that lived experience. It’s huge and ambitious and slightly terrifying but it will be an amazing experience.
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