One of my earliest musical experiences is the memory of my aunt playing the piano and singing in the adjacent lounge room to our – well what was still called then the nursery, on this country property. Also, I used to listen to the radio a lot, in fact one of my favourite games was playing with the frequencies of radios and seeing what kinds of statics and sounds I could pick up, and of course, short wave was just fantastic and I was able to often, during the evening, pick up neighbouring Asian stations and so on, and this music really excited me as a child. Whenever I heard music I was always drawn to it. I had to go and listen to it. At about the age of six, my sister sent me a recorder and a teach-yourself manual so, of course, I taught myself to play the recorder in a very short time. This again was something which was very important to me as a means of expression and I, in fact, started writing quite – well, bizarre scores, really the notation of which meant nothing to anybody except myself, but I used to derive a great deal of enjoyment from playing these weird symbols that I’d managed to put down onto paper.
Perhaps my attraction to the sound of shortwave and the static and so on that was created by the radio is a result of my trips by air, the first one of which I undertook as a small child at the age of two. The sounds of the engines of the plane even fascinated me, and the variation in the contrasting timbres and dynamics of what happened when you were actually up in the air. I think probably my fascination with sound of all kinds was a result of living in a silent or a comparatively silent environment in the country, and so therefore these sounds of the city, of machines, of planes, in my rare contacts with them, are all the more meaningful to me.
