"The photo on the front cover was taken of the creek that runs through Ravine, Monolith Valley, Budawang Mountains. 'Ravine's' etymology conveys weather's power to sculpt and shape – deeply temporal flow in-forming the place where I sit and play. On a meteorologically calm day—such as the day I recorded Diffraction Study #1—insects, birds, water, trees, wind, frogs, crickets, quietly saturate Ravine. Human poetics and musics have co-sounded here for a very long time too; I hear no good reason to stop. Water running off Budawang Bura (stone) is tinged orange from dissolved minerals, midday sunlight cuts through Ravine's rich green rainforest with its mottled pinkish-grey coachwood trunks to illuminate the bottom of the creek and refract shards of sky and foliage, and a stratum of white slow-spiralling foam surfaces the water. Like-wise sounds spiral around the quietness, diffracting with Ravine's stone walls, caves, leaves, and trunks. Their transparent acoustic demands sounding; it is joyful to join; through musicking one can offer greetings to Ravine's spirits. Places such as Ravine is why I music. It is a special place. Although, it is impossible to auralize a place—once you step outside and conjoin with weather—that doesn't have potential to be musically interesting, engaging, loveable…

Diffraction Studies #1+2 are recorded there. I tend to record with two stereo recorders, one a few metres away from my general playing position on the sandy Eastern bank, the other balances on a rock about 20 metres across the creek and towards the Western wall; at the end of both Diffraction Studies you hear me moving towards the distant recorder to turn it off.

Volcano Body was recorded nearby in the camping cave on the western escarpment of Mt Cole. A hydrophone sits inside my billy, collecting drips and percussion-ing as wind roars up the valley. Michel Serres wrote that the voice; “comes from the earth, through the intermediary of the volcano-body. The soul is a life-sized wind instrument."

Splitrec, 2024