David Chesworth last released a CD of new and original music six years ago but he's been far from idle. In that time he and partner Sonia Leber have had multi media installations at the Sydney Olympics, the Millenium River Walk in Cardiff and a toilet in Collins St to name but three. He has performed with his ensemble in Slovenia and New York and has overseen a successful season of his opera Cosmonaut at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne. He has spent time in the studio arranging strings and/or providing life giving electronic sounds for the likes of the Underground Lovers and the Go-Betweens. He has also reformed his influential '80s band Essendon Airport and released a best of entitled Sonic Investigations (of the trivial). David's endeavours have long been duly recognised by the broader arts community but a Chesworth CD or performance has much to offer those more accustomed to sticky carpet and loud guitars as well.

The two CDs (well three actually) that we're releasing on July 25th confirm David's reputation as a truly gifted and astonishingly diverse musician and composer but also seek to throw light on his position as an influential electronic and experimental musician. In short, these records are not intended only for fans of modern classical music. They have a much broader appeal than that.

Music To See Through is coupled with a bonus disc bound to trouble spell checkers around the world titled Disk Of Idioms. MTST features David Chesworth Ensemble interpreting 14 new pieces of Chesworthian brilliance. They're fine tunes but more than that they're wonderful songs, as evidenced by the stellar vocal performances of the ARIA award winning Lisa Miller and Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens on a track each. Disk Of Idioms showcases the more experimental side of Chesworth and is more closely aligned to his soundscape work, but is no less fascinating and listenable for that.

Music To See Through Track List:

panopticon/persuade/passage des panoramas/aloise/walls, mirrors, curtains/dark light/evanescence/soft skin tutti/surveillance/floating world/will/perpetual prescence/blind flâneur/wait a while

Disk Of Idioms Track List:

oceanography/aspirational/biographic/origin/pivotal/funeral sentence/table/transit/lens/brilliant

50 Synthesizer Greats was first released in 1979 and this is the first time this historic recording has been available on CD. It's perhaps best to let David tell you the story in his own words.

50 Synthesizer Greats was recorded in 1978 at home on my parents lounge room table. At the time I was working in a small plastic and Bakelite HiFi knob factory. I was the only employee and had to endure the boss’s preference for radio 3AK Easy Listening for 8 hours a day.

The job however enabled me to save up and buy an Akai 4000 DS reel-to-reel tape recorder, which was being unleashed on consumers at the Douglas HiFI store in town. It was a basic two track tape recorder with a feature called ‘sound-on sound’ which enabled the user to bounce sounds from one channel to the other without erasing what is already recorded which would allow the building up of several layers of music in mono. If heard in stereo the music would have an echo, a useful by-product of the sound on sound layering process and was caused by the gap between the recording and pick-up heads. This was sometimes musically interesting to incorporate, as all the underlaying layers of music would then have a tape delay effect. The final musical layer would not, and would be restricted to either the left or right channel of the tape.

There were two usable tape speeds 7 ½ inches per second and 3 ¾. This meant that a piece of music recorded at 7 ½ ips would have a faster tape delay than music recorded at 3 ¾ ips.

I also had a mini Korg 700 synthesizer. It was Korg’s first ever synthesizer. I borrowed this from the group Tch Tch Tch in fact I still have it! This instrument is monophonic and consists of a keyboard and a number of switches and slider knobs from which a range of patches modifications can be switched into the audio path. Nothing can be programmed or saved; you have to write down all the settings in order to get them back again. I was used to synthesizers, as I was also part owner of a Serge Tchirepnin modular synthesizer that Warren Burt had brought into the country. The Serge consisted of a bunch of knobs and patch chords and did not have anything as crude and wimpy as a keyboard.

The real of tape I recorded on contained previous rough recordings of mine recorded at different tape speeds. These can be heard on several tracks when I inadvertently forgot to erase them or they ‘kicked in’ after I dropped out of ‘record’.

And so, after getting home from a hard day extruding plastic and compressing hot smelly bakelite plus listening to 101 Strings or Ray Coniff for the umpteenth time I would work on some tunes of my own as a form of therapy.

Fellow musician Phillip Brophy had a listen and suggested it be released on record. He put me in touch with Bruce Milne who gave me instructions on how to get it pressed at the Astor Plant in Bentley. There are actually 37 tracks running over 25 minutes per side and the old grumpy guys at Astor had their work cut out cutting the album. I had no idea about compression and phase issues that can cause the record player stylus to pop out of the groove so it was interesting watching them trying to cut the record. To fit all the music on they cut very shallow grooves, which made for a quiet recording – suitably ambient I suppose in retrospect, but I wasn’t very impressed at the time. They were also into saving wear and tear on their precious diamond cutting tools, which, was another reason for giving us shallow cuts. In subsequent visits to cut Essendon Airport and other bands we tended to jump up and down and create a bit of a scene and demand to get a decent sounding record.

The screen printed artwork for the record was devised by Philip Brophy and Maria Kozic and involved me going into the Myers department where they was offering a new hi tech computer technique that involved taking a photograph of a persons face and then rendering it in letters and numbers on to a T-shirt. I went through the process giving them my best smile and had the images printed onto paper, which then became the basis for the cover design. Philip and Maria printed the covers with me as assistant.

Some useful links follow:

Listen to some tracks from both CDs

Visit David Chesworth's site

Buy CDs