ABOUT
Solomon Frank is a performer and composer living and working on Cammeraygal land, whose inter-disciplinary practice straddles cross-species musical collaboration, vacuum cleaners and time travel. Solomon receives emails from the future including music and musical instructions written by future humans and entities for Frank to perform and carry out in the present. Solomon’s works and those received from the future have been performed by Ensemble Offspring, Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellows, Kirkos Ensemble (Ireland), double bassist Will Hansen, Willoughby Symphony Orchestra and E-Mex Ensemble (Germany) and at Mona Foma (Tasmania), Liveworks, Canberra International Music Festival and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Syd) . These fictional conceits provide a frame for listening, a way of situating art music and making audiences aware of their cultured ears. Solomon’s improvisational practice expands upon the clarinet, replacing parts of the clarinet with other objects, homemade aluminium and plastic reeds, hoses, vacuum cleaners, watering cans and water. Solomon thinks of his music as “dystopian nostalgia for the present”; it reflects upon art music’s precarious place in a world dictated by corporate technocrats, tiktok algorithms and celebrity deification. Additionally, Solomon is undertaking a PhD researching animals and music, exploring interspecies musical collaboration with dogs as means to question the human uniqueness of musicality and creativity.
Photo: Monisha Chippada