Location Scouting: Original Soundtrack by Matthew Asprey

Photo by Ken Churilla

In 2003 I wrote and directed four short films. The final film was Location Scouting, shot in black and white digital video, a kind of postmodern response to the Elvis travelogue Fun In Acapulco (1963). I composed a soundtrack for acoustic guitar. Here are two tracks:

“The Drowning” / Download the MP3 (320kbs) HERE

“End Titles” / Download the MP3 (320kbs) HERE

Thornleigh Serenade: Original Music by Matthew Asprey

Back to my stockpile of compositions. ‘Thornleigh Serenade’ (2005) is a piece for flute and several acoustic guitars to be strummed Magnificent Ambersons-style below a young maiden’s window. It has an ersatz Middle-Eastern/Spanish vibe, totally incongruous for something composed in the sleepy Sydney suburb of Thornleigh, which I was about to flee for good.

The piece was partially inspired by Don Ellis Orchestra’s 1966 chart ‘33 222 1 222′. That tune is in the time signature of 19/8. My piece is mostly 4/4, but I threw in a couple of 19/8 bars in that same beat division for fun. It’s a pity my old guitar, bestowed on me years earlier by a Presbyterian minister, is a little out-of-tune….

Download the MP3 (320kbs) HERE

Last Walk, Kibble Park: Original Music by Matthew Asprey

Another descent into the vault of previously unheard compositions. Here’s my demo, almost a decade old, of an original tune called ‘Last Walk, Kibble Park’. This one is a slow jazz composition with a few 14/4 and 6/4 sections. It’s sketched for piano trio.

Download the MP3 (320kbs) HERE.

[Illustration by Ruth Chew]

New Directions Roundup; Roberto Bolaño; Horacio Castellanos Moya

Roberto Bolaño

This year I have been enjoying Spanish and Portugese translations from the New Directions Publishing Corp. That fine indie institution has been publishing Chris Andrews’ translations of the shorter works of Roberto Bolaño. I’m not speaking of the sprawling and wonderful Savage Detectives or the daunting 2666 – both translated by Natasha Wimmer for Farrar, Straus, Giroux – but powerful novellas such as By Night in Chile and Amulet and a less easily categorised fictional encyclopedia called Nazi Literature in the Americas.

I just bought the newly-translated Bolaño novel The Skating Rink, which was originally published in Spanish in 1993. I can hardly keep up: more translated Bolaño is forthcoming from New Directions (Monsieur Pain, Antwerp), and next month Melville House is publishing a book of Bolaño interviews by Marcela Valdes. And meanwhile posthumously published novels continue to appear in Spanish, including El tercer Reich (The Third Reich), which is due in March 2010. Wimmer has said she will probably be the translator of that one. In short, there will be plenty to keep English language readers happy for years to come.

But there are many other fine translated books in the New Directions catalogue. This week I read Guillermo Rosales‘ The Halfway House (transl. Anna Kushner), a bleak short novel about life in a boarding house for mentally ill Cuban exiles in Reagan-era Miami. I also ploughed through Brazillian Luis Fernando Verissimo’s macabre novella The Club of Angels (transl. Margaret Jull Costa), about a gastronomy club that engages in a kind of culinary Russian roulette. A while back I read Javier Marias‘ 1986 novel Man of Feeling (transl. M. Jull Costa) and am slowly moving through a book of his short stories called When I Was Mortal (transl. M. Jull Costa).

The most impressive work I’ve encountered lately is a short political novel called Senselessness (2004) by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translated by Katherine Silver in 2008. Moya is from El Salvador. He now lives in exile, recently in Pittsburgh. Senselessness is a funny, bawdy, horrifying novel about war crimes in an unnamed Latin American country. The narrator is a writer hired to polish the prose of a long report commissioned by the Catholic Church on the atrocities of a military dictatorship. The book has some kinship with Bolaño’s By Night In Chile, which is the confession of a priest who sold out to the Pinochet regime. These works seek to make sense of the senselessness of recent Latin American history. They’re both terrific, important books that deserve a wider readership.

Horacio Castellanos Moya

Moya has written at least nine novels and five short story collections. New Directions have just published The She-Devil in the Mirror, another Katherine Silver translation. Biblioasis have published Dance with Snakes in the translation of Lee Paula Springer.

Words Without Borders has an extract from Senselessness as well as a story called ‘Snatch’ translated by Samantha Schnee.

Here are some interviews with Moya: Bookslut (October 2009); The Quarterly Conversation (Fall 2008); Next American City (17 April 2008); New Directions Blog (October 2009)

Trio Apoplectic

A live Youtube video of the fantastic Sydney jazz band. This was filmed at the Sound Lounge in Newtown earlier this year.

Dave Jackson, alto saxophone

Abel Cross, bass

Alex Masso, drums

A track from their latest album, Sofia (Rufus Records), will be featured on the DVD-R component of the forthcoming zine I have edited called Sydney Samizdat.

Sydney Samizdat Issue #1: Story, Jazz, Short Film

I am in the closing stages of preparing a limited edition zine that will be distributed freely around the Inner West of Sydney this November. The zine package will contain a 48-page chapbook and a DVD-R. It will be called Sydney Samizdat, in tribute to the courageous underground presses of the Soviet bloc.

Pronunciation: \ˈsä-mēz-ˌdät\
Function: noun
Etymology: Russian, from sam- self- + izdatel’stvo publishing house
Date: 1967
: a system in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and countries within its orbit by which government-suppressed literature was clandestinely printed and distributed; also : such literature

Source: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/samizdat

In the tradition of samizdat publications, the reader is expected to pass on the package after 72 hours. The theme of issue #1 is ‘The Pleasures of Transgression’.

The issue will contain a new long story by myself set in Madrid and Marrakech called Red Hills of Africa, part of a larger story cycle in progress. The DVD-R will feature a jazz clip and a short film. The jazz is from Trio Apoplectic’s recent album Sofia (Rufus, 2009). The 28-minute short film is called Michael and Michelle (2009) and was written and directed by Matt Dibbayawan. I worked as a camera operator on the project earlier this year. It stars Stephen Peacocke and Bianca Bradey. Matt has already put the movie online via Vimeo and Youtube, so here it is: