By Norm Dixon
Can listening to the natural sounds of Australia's most precious and fragile wilderness areas, combined with the music of top session players, contribute to a greater environmental awareness? Brett and Lydia Neilson are convinced that it can.
They call their music "enviro-music". Since 1988, they have produced five albums. Their first, Lunch on Lamington, was recorded within the subtropical rainforest of the Lamington National Park on the NSW-Queensland border. The many strange and wonderful calls of the abundant bird life were then combined with piano and vibraphone in the studio.
Since then Lydia and Brett have recorded albums in the wetlands of the Northern Territory's Kakadu National Park, the lush rainforests of the Daintree in north Queensland and along the Great Barrier Reef. Their latest recording, The Classic Bird Album, blends piano with natural bird song. Thousands of these albums have been sold, some as far afield as Estonia.
Brett and Lydia work from the Big Toe recording studio in Mullumbimby on NSW's north coast. The studio's name comes from the fact that Brett, born without arms as a result of the effects of the drug Thalidomide, operates the control panel, plays the piano and does just about everything else with his toes.
They believe their records can contribute to encouraging people to save the environment. "It helps people get in touch with [the environment]", Brett said. "I feel it's really good, too, just to help people remember there are other things out there besides buildings."
The music is "intriguing, it can be a subtle education. After listening, you eventually want to go to the source. If you've been there you want to remind yourself that it's there, and if you haven't it may stimulate you to go there and experience it", Lydia added. "People can cruise off and pretend, even if they live in the middle of the big smoke, that the wilderness is available through their ears at least."
Lydia and Brett resist attempts to tag their albums "new age" music. "We don't like the idea of being associated with that sort of really waffly, almost Muzak stuff. There is certainly some very beautiful ambient music but we don't like to be associated with it", Lydia said.
Brett agreed, "When people ask 'Is this one of those new age wanker tapes?', I say no, it's background music. It's relaxing."
"One of its attributes is that it calms tension", Lydia told Green Left Weekly. "Our local hospitals use it in their labour s. That's an indication of the sort of natural peace that it evokes."
While relaxing music may be the end result of their efforts, relaxation is not always part of its creation, said Lydia. "In Kakadu, along the water courses, it was really weird trying to find relaxing birdsongs when we were totally paralytic with fear that we were going to be eaten by crocodiles."
The process of recording and mixing the albums requires patience, Brett explained. "You get out in the middle and you've got your mikes out and your cans on and sit there and wait for little noises to happen. You take the whole lot back to the studio, cut out all the passing planes, helicopters, tourists buses etc until you end up with just birds. Then you get the musicians in, get them tuned in to the birds so that they are playing to the birds, dancing with the birds."
Lydia and Brett were keen to talk about their contribution to the new animated feature film, Ferntree Gully — The Last Rainforest, which was recently denounced by the federal opposition for its "anti-development" stance. They recorded the bird sounds for the film's soundtrack.
"The film is a fairy story about preserving the rainforest. Diana Young, who wrote the story, is an absolutely dedicated environmentalist ... The film is her attempt to show the necessity for saving the rainforest ... There wouldn't be a kid that walked out of that film who would ever be able to hold a chainsaw in their hands", Lydia said.
Big Toe Productions' albums — Lunch on Lamington, Dinner on the Daintree, Brunch on the Barrier Reef, Breakfast on Kakadu and The Classic Bird Album — are distributed nationally by Larrikin Records.