Artists

Rachel Lewindon is an interdisciplinary composer, sound designer and producer exploring the electro-acoustic intersection of composition and sound design in live performance.

She is a collaborator, with her work in sonic world building and the role of sound in dramaturgy garnering her much critical acclaim being hailed ‘one of Melbourne theatre’s best composers working to date.” (Australian Book Review).
Her large-scale Musical Theatre/Contemporary Opera ‘Orlando, explored devised frameworks embedded in the score, and the vocal ensemble as a singular fluid sound. Her recent bodies of work ‘/Esis’ and ‘the truth slips through my fingers to the floor’ explore interactive technologies that heighten and refract live acoustic ecosystems.

She is fortunate enough to have work premiered internationally with The Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada), Sō Percussion Institute Princeton (USA), BRAZZA Artist’s Residency (France), BIRCA Climate Residency (Denmark) and nationally with Speak Percussion, Bundanon Trust, Melbourne Theatre Company, Sydney Festival, Arts Centre Melbourne, fortyfive Downstairs, Midsumma Festival, Darwin Festival and many other local music venues. She received multiple the award for Best Composition/Sound Design in 2022 for her live score for vocal quartet for ‘The Gospel According to Jesus Queen of Heaven’.

In Residence at Bundanon

During my time at Bundanon in residence I will be spending time building and composing on an instrument called the ‘Hammer Harp’. This instrument, made out of the internal hammer systems of an upright piano, is the foundations of a new solo work written and composed during my time at Bundanon. Having this opportunity to spend elongated periods of time to test, attach, build and compose with this instrument is so valuable to me at this early creative stage, as the process pushes me past many creative and logistical comfort zones! Inspired by post humanist lenses of reimagining ‘broken’ and ‘discarded’ objects into instruments, this work fuses tactile and intimate percussive textures with highly processed synthetic voice and synthesis, where the smallest and seemingly insignificant sounds are amplified to create new sonic ecosystems.