photo: Michael Shaw

interview by Simon Sellars

Originally published on Sleepy Brain, 5 September 2004.

Melanie Chilianis, a Melbourne flautist, has sallied forth in recent times with a successful union between the instrument she made her name with, the flute, and technological mixes, patches and crunchy electronic treatments.

Melanie has an honours degree in music performance from Monash University and shares a close working relationship with notable Australian composers including Paul Moulatlet, Thomas Reiner and Steve Adam. She features as a soloist on Melbourne outfit re-sound‘s eponymous first CD and as part of the ensemble on their second release IN C, an interpretation of a Terry Riley work. Several of her live performances have been broadcast on ABC Classic FM. As an improviser, Melanie has had airplay on Radio National, Triple J FM, RTR-FM (Perth) and 3PBS (Melbourne).

What’s the inspiration behind your latest work?

I wanted to make some small, self-contained sound pieces that would stand alone for the listener – as brief encounters. Two of the tracks were made as part of the soundtrack to a NeoPoetry video piece. I also wanted to use a limited number of samples that would be quite recognisable as “instrument” or “voice” – kind of a game with myself, to see how I could work within the constraints I had set (three or four short flute samples, not too much space-age processing, and so on).

Tell me about the method used to create them, in terms of technology, philosophy and so on.

I’m using breath and the sound of the flute at many structural levels. In this way I can get into and pull apart the cycle of breath and flute sound. I recorded the flute and vocal sounds through the internal mic in my Powerbook because I didn’t have any other means to record samples into the computer at that time. The sound quality was pretty crap, but I thought, oh well, I’ll have to work with that. You can’t hold back because you don’t have the best system. The sequencer I use is Logic Audio. For these pieces, the creative focus was in the relationship of sound gestures to one another and the juxtaposition of events that have the potential to create an impression in the listener’s aural and psychological space. I use whatever technological methods I can to achieve this, and I keep it simple.

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