Overtone Ensemble

Featuring: David Brown

Digipack CD. Tim Catlin formed the Overtone Ensemble in Melbourne in 2012 to play pieces written for an instrument he had built himself, the vibrissa: twelve tuned aluminium rods, mounted vertically, stroked lengthwise by hand until they resonate. The rods sustain for a very long time and are tuned microtonally, which is what makes an ensemble of them possible at all.

The group is Catlin with Atticus Bastow, Philip Brophy and David Brown. Brophy has been a fixture of the Melbourne underground since 1977, when he founded the group written as an arrow sequence and usually printed as Tsk Tsk Tsk; he directed Body Melt in 1993 and has written on film sound for The Wire for decades.

Around the vibrissa the ensemble sets massed handbells, quarter-tone bells, acoustic guitars played with an EBow, retuned glockenspiels, wine glasses and long wire instruments. Everything is tuned microtonally and everything is acoustic in origin: no effects, no processing, nothing between the instrument and the microphone.

The compositions are built on what happens when close frequencies are held together long enough: phasing, combination tones that the ear manufactures for itself and that live in no instrument, sympathetic vibration between tuned bodies, and the resonance of the room. It is the same material the Dream House is made of, arrived at with aluminium and wine glasses instead of thirty-two sine waves.

The group has played Liquid Architecture, Light in Winter, NOW now, Sound Out and Slow Music, and all four members have long histories in Australian experimental and improvised music.