Brisbane jazz pianist Cleon Barraclough and his band The Soundscapes Trio will bring to life their album ‘The Unravelling’, which captures in sound the complexity and seemingly chaotic nature of life in the city.
“The album is called ‘The Unravelling’ and it’s basically a concept album,” Cleon explains. “The point of The Soundscapes Trio is it’s a definite original-project, so we don’t cover anything and we like to invoke a visual image, so it’s cinematic in a way where it’s a film score without the film.
“We’re a concept band, so every album we do is a concept and this one, ‘The Unravelling’, is a concept based on sprawling urban life. With cities you can have very strict planning but what ends up happening over time is you have unpredictability and this randomness that also happens.”
Using the metaphor of a ball of twine, Cleon and his bandmates – bassist David Galea and drummer Luke Pammenton – paint a vivid picture of how social organisms such as cities operate according to a system of organised chaos. “In the album we tried to capture that structure while at the same time having lots of elements of unpredictability and basically things unravelling.
“The album artwork has a ball of twine on the inside cover and it’s unrolling, going wherever it wants and it’s just random. That’s how we’ve approached the music.”
Born in Yeppoon, Queensland Cleon has lived in Brisbane since the age of three and says it, and a few other cities he has visited, provided essential and varied inspiration for ‘The Unravelling’. “Obviously Brisbane’s the city I’ve grown up in and definitely has had an influence.
“But different pieces had different influences in the album because I wanted to have some kind of contrast from piece to piece. For instance, one of the pieces was written on a trip to Bali and captured the unpredictability of traffic over there.
“The first track on the album is called ‘Ignore The Signs’, which is pretty much what everyone does over there, there’s almost no road rules but somehow it still works. It’s that perfect combination of being crazy and random yet with some sort of formation and flow, and to a point it works.”
As an accomplished performer and composer, Cleon employed several songwriting techniques in order to evoke the image and cinematic essence of each piece. “It comes down to compositional technique because that’s the start of the song, so it’s what techniques I use to create the piece and in this album I experimented with some different techniques,” Cleon says.
“I wanted to challenge myself,” he continues. “One piece I improvised and recorded; I did a free improvisation then sat down and notated it note for note. From there I brought in the organised aspect, so it started off as a random thing then I organised and arranged it for the Trio. I’ve never done that before and that piece is actually called ‘The Unravelling’ because it became this interesting piece that literally unravelled.”
The Soundscapes Trio will perform ‘The Unravelling’ at the Brisbane Jazz Club at the end of January and Cleon says he and the band have been working hard on rehearsing the songs and rearranging them for full impact in a live context. “The album was recorded a few years ago, so we’re relearning the material at the moment and doing some rehearsals. We also have a special guest, Joshua Hatcher on saxophone. I’ve done a few rearrangements of the tracks because the album is purely trio: bass, drums, piano.
“We want to do two very contrasting sets. So the first set will be some covers and more laidback songs and the second set we’ll play our album back to front, so it’ll be a big contrast between the two sets.”
Cleon Barraclough and The Soundscapes Trio play the Brisbane Jazz Club on 28 January.
