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Picture this: the British viola virtuoso Lawrence Power portraying a classic sea mariner, breathing life into the late 18th-century verse of English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge with his 416-year-old Amati instrument as his storytelling companion.
Such was the scene in Paris in January when Power, 49, gave the French premiere of the Viola Concerto composed by his friend Garth Knox at the Société Française de l’Alto’s 50th International Viola Congress. The performance took place a few weeks after Power gave the world premiere of this same rollicking piece for viola and strings – co-commissioned by the Australian Chamber Orchestra – in Bern, Switzerland.
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As a child growing up in Meanjin/Brisbane in the 80s and 90s, Gurrumbilbarra/Townsville-born Tony Albert would scour op shops to buy Indigenous memorabilia: ashtrays, plates, cups and saucers with Aboriginal faces and motifs and storybooks such as author Brownie Downing’s tales of “piccaninny” child Tinka.
In his childhood innocence, these treasures helped him understand his own identity. “There was a genuine love for this iconography,” he recalls now, at 45, his red beard tinged with grey on this hot late summer’s day in his spacious work studio in the same city, his large illustrations of aliens flying about in spaceships on the wall behind him.
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Sound and art’s symbiosis was the seed that grew The Vinyl Factory. The independent label began in 2001 when it took over an EMI record pressing plant in Hayes, West London which had once mastered, pressed and distributed almost 20 million records a year—including those of the Beatles, the Sex Pistols and Pink Floyd.
“By the time we inherited the plant and reshaped it as The Vinyl Factory, it had become something of a craft—the detail, the passion, everything you associate with making art,” says Sean Bidder, creative director of the company that today presses about two million records a year, including albums by Radiohead, Björk and The xx.
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