The Orchestra and The Big Bang: ACO’s Timeline

Over the past several years, the Australian Chamber Orchestra has played an annual multimedia concert in collaboration with a number of renowned creatives, including photographers Bill Henson (Luminous) and Jon Frank (The Crowd and The Reef). This year, as part of Sydney’s annual Vivid winter festival of lights, music and ideas, the ACO performed Timeline in collaboration with The Presets and, as the concert’s tagline proclaims, life flashed before your very ears. A flick through the concert’s program proves just how mind-bendingly vast and crazy an undertaking it was.

Sarah Blasko - I Awake

Sometimes you think you know a song. You hear it one day, and wonder if you really knew the song in the first place, you find something new in it to fall in love with. Sarah Blasko’s music is a bit like this, in a way: you think you know her songs from her albums – the melodies, the instrumentations, the little adornments and quirks, the rhythms, the timing between tracks – but then you hear them performed live and they’re completely new all over again.

Back in 2010, my sister and I went to Blasko’s As Day Follows Night concert at the Enmore Theatre. I’m pretty sure it was the first ‘gig’ that I could remember going to. There was something about the album, the songs – Blasko herself, even – that seemed irresistible, enchanting, hypnotic, unfathomable, and seeing and hearing her songs refashioned on tour made me appreciate the album on a deeper, more intangible, more inexpressible way.