Sophie Hutchings - A World Outside

Einlass: 19 Uhr

Beginn: 20 Uhr

SOPHIE HUTCHINGS: A WORLD OUTSIDE

 

Close your eyes, and take a trip. Listen and you'll see it. An ancient place of desert plains,

mountain ranges and rocky gorges; of blazing sun, star-cloaked nights and shadows that

loom and leave. A timeless terrain where clouds dance in water and red dirt roads stretch

beyond the horizon.  

This is soundscape as landscape. As a vast interior.  

 

 A World Outside.  

The ninth studio album from lauded pianist and composer Sophie Hutchings is a work of

spacious, hypnotic beauty, a musical travelogue inspired by a road trip through Australia's

mighty Northern Territory, beginning in tropical Darwin and going deep into the arid Red

Heart.  

Rich with emotion and feeling, texture and contrast, as propulsive and powerful as it is

elegant and intimate, A World Outside is an impressionistic take on a wide brown land.

Piano notes flow, pause and surge, variously blending with strings, synths, percussion and

field recordings, and features from First Nations artists, revered Yolgnu songman Rrawun

Maymuru and rising Larrakia diva, Lena Kellie.

This is music that unveils itself. Like a universe of secrets.

I'm a person who needs time away in a natural environment in order to make music,says

Hutchings. The bigger and more challenging the space, the better.

Like the majority of Australians, Hutchings grew up - and spent holidays - on the coast.

Sydney-based, she remains an avid surfer. Travelling is a passion: periods spent in India,

Southeast Asia and the Middle East have woven golden threads into a sound hailed as calm

in a maddening world by Clash and stirring, vigorous, grandly melodic; by MOJO.  

Hutchings flexed this shining aesthetic to global acclaim on her 2020 Mercury KX debut

Scattered on the Wind, a collection of hitherto unheard pieces - some based around verse

by the 13th century Persian poet Rumi - and fresh material created with musicians on

strings, woodwind and soprano vocals.  

This time around, she began with a blank canvas. With a map and an open mind. Reflection

had provided direction: Over lockdown I realised that I really didn't know enough about the

land on which I was living, she says. I decided to get lost in its colossal landscape. I wanted

to absorb what I was seeing.

Hutchings committed everything to memory: the constant heat haze. The contours etched

by the sunrise. Palm trees jutting from the sides of cliffs, swimming holes strafed with

rainbow sparkles, rocks whose patterns told of long-gone seas. The great silence, sometimes

eerie, often serene, that crept into her bones.

There were days when I literally didn't see any humans. But I saw dingoes. Cliff wallabies.

Wild camels and wild horses. I heard echoes, and melodies in the wind. Some mornings I do

a big hike up a rock face and stand there taking in these endless 360°views.”

 

A smile. That land has a mystical other worldliness like nothing I've ever experienced

before.