We caught up with Australian composer Ashley Davies to talk about Gold, his latest musical release. The album is an instrumental interpretation of ten of the paintings that his Uncle Len produced. Together they tell the legendary story of Lasseter’s quest to find a massive gold reef in the Australian Outback.
I like the wall of paintings behind you.
Yeah, well this is actually my practise room, above Grenville Records in Melbourne. It’s where I practise my drums and write my music and do pre-production. It also doubles for a recording studio. I love that wall; it’s mostly Van Gogh prints I ordered from the museum in Amsterdam, so I get the closest to the colour reproduction. It’s good to have them rather than just pictures of drums and music and whatever.
One thing that jumped out of me when I was looking through your catalogue of work is you seem to be very good at capturing the visual side of things in music.
With this project it was a total visual thing. As you know, some of the previous albums are concept albums. With Ned Kelly and Burke and Wills I worked with a historian, and they wrote the stories. Whereas with the paintings, I wasn’t going into the historical side of Lasseter at all. You know, his story is quite tragic (that whole expedition), but when I found Uncle Len’s paintings, they’re really beautiful things.
The album seems very motion-picture-like. It leads you to the finding of the gold and then so on.
The images are really important to me. I love the album, the music is great, I mean that’s my thing – the music writing. I love the music on it, but the tracks were done to a painting. I reckon for three or four years I had the paintings on the back of my door. It’s great to have something like I said, the music’s really cool, that’s my thing and I’m really happy with how that’s come out, but each piece was written to a painting.
So are you releasing it just on vinyl?
I’m releasing it on vinyl and on streaming. You can buy it on Bandcamp and stuff like that, so the only the only physical product is the vinyl. It sort of had to be vinyl because, I don’t know about you, but to me it’s always been about buying an album. If it comes with artwork it adds to the experience. Like how many times did you reread liner notes? I wanted to make sure with Uncle Len’s paintings that you get that impact. Lou Reed had Berlin that came out with a book and the Magical Mystery Tour came out with one of those books, so yeah, that is what the album is – plus you get the paintings inside the sleeve.
How did you choose which paintings? Were they in a sequence like that as well?
Yeah, they’re all in sequence. It’s really interesting, the first painting is called The Birth of Lasseter. The second painting is when he’s in the Bush and it doesn’t look like he’s in the middle of Australia. I mean, I don’t know where it could be. It’s so colourful that it looks very tropical and then it goes on from there.
The titles do sort of tell you part of the story.
So, it’s not telling the story verbatim, but I’ve written music to Uncle Len’s painting of his interpretation of the story. In a sense, they’re interlinked anyway. So, the story is ongoing, you know, and now we’re discussing it.
I always think that artwork adds that extra dimension to it.
With this record too, I wanted to put people into a certain sort of mental state looking to those paintings and how it makes you feel. They don’t have to look at the paintings all the time, but when I went to the Van Gogh exhibition, it makes you feel he’s quite amazing. I wanted to try and couple that with the paintings that I find that are magnificent and beautiful to look at, but also the musical side of it.
Are you thinking of exhibiting the paintings?
The album has quite a number of musicians on it, you know. It was a huge feat of how am I gonna do this?, because I was such a bad big band that I didn’t think financially I was going to be able to pull it off, at least not for now. So what we did, I worked with an animator friend of mine, Danny McKenna, and we put together a 30-35 minute animated film. We’re not going to get a Fantasia but that’s the premise of what the film is. When you see the paintings, the film is that, animated with the music from the album.
https://vimeo.com/712731509/75bcd976a9
There is also an art exhibition and when people have watched the film, I’ll have some works of Uncle Len’s set up after it. There is a chance that I might be touring this at community centres interstate and regional art galleries.
It sounds like a great innovative concept. What I really like is that you picked very Australian stories. Everyone knows about Lasseter’s Reef, but not everyone fully understood. It’s a mystery.
It’s not a historical show in any sense of it or anything. Burke and Wills and Ned Kelly had narration in a story told through it, you know. But they will get a sense of connecting when he’s out there and gold is discovered and all this going on for sure.
What’s your personal opinion? Do you think he discovered gold?
Look, he was an interesting character – maybe a bit dodgy, you know.
I mean, we want to believe, don’t we? That’s what’s endured the age. We don’t really think he found the gold, but we want to believe that he did.
I mean, there’s a few different stories of how he came to know about the reef. Maybe he had discovered it prior and then he got the funding to go out there. He went to someone and said, ”I know where this reef is”. When he got the funding and once he got out there, it was a bit of a shamble. A guy did a film about 4-6 years ago which is a great movie. I don’t think Lasseter had discovered it beforehand because once they got out there, he was having the hardest time trying to find it. There could be a reef out there, but, you know, I just don’t know. I mean, it’s a sad story; the Lasseter story is a sad story.
In a lot of early Australian explorer stories they suffered a lot.
I found his very different to the others like Ned Kelly and Burke and Wills. I didn’t go into it in the way that I did with them because when I read about him, it’s his story. There’re periods in his life where they don’t know where he is. He has a very interesting history.
The track “Walking” is the first one where a voice appears in the soundtrack. Obviously, that was a deliberate choice. What was your thinking behind that?
Well, there’s one painting and towards the end when he was on his own, indigenous people started taking care of him. They were taking care of him but then they did have to move on. There was one that stayed with him longer than the others. Uncle Len made this great painting of Lasseter and this indigenous boy. The reason that track is called “Walking” is just because he stayed with him. It was desperate, Lasseter was near death, but Uncle Len’s painting isn’t like that. When you when you see the painting, musically I took the notion of the painting. I went with that rather than the desperate situation that would have been going on.
It’s quite an uplifting sort of song. Even though you know that he’s walking to his death, you can imagine in his mind he is close to finding what he’s looking for.
Well, he certainly wasn’t close to finding the reef. When interpreting the painting I was just going on with what that painting showed. In that situation in the story would have been heavy and he might’ve been thinking like that, but the painting that I’ve got is an up painting. So, musically, I went I went like that.
What would you say has been your favourite moment on the album?
I’m pretty happy with all of it. I do really like the track “Walking”. I like “Death”. I love some of the string parts that Bryony Marks wrote. The intro to “Outback” is just magnificent, that long string section.
For me, you can tell straight away from the first track this is the sound of Australia and yeah, “Outback” just expressed the vastness of it in music.
I would have to say, you know, like I said: I’m really happy with all of it. All the tracks to me sort of work but that intro to “Outback” gets me every time. Sometimes when you work on it for so long, you wonder if a particular track is going to work. How it’s all come together, I am really happy with it. All the musicians that played on it are great. Their parts are fantastic. Bryony, like I said. I feel good about people listening to this and seeing it with Len’s art.
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Gold is out now!
Vinyl copies are at selected record stores or can be purchased online here.
Album Launch
+ Exhibition of Uncles Lens ‘Lasseter Series’ of paintings
Sunday 17 July 2022 -Theatrette, State Library of Victoria:
