My new CD Featuring the Choir of Light is released today! contact me on my email mmackerras@bigpond.com for a copy
Friday January 6- It’s the beginning of 2023 and a very exciting time for me -a turning point, the end of a chapter and the beginning of a new one (or sould I say the end of a book and the beginning of a new one!) My album Featuring the Choir of Light is finally done, it’s mastered and pressed! and I am happy. I began the writing process in early 2017 (after the release of Light of The World in 2016). as always you start a new project with big ambitions and visions, some of these are fulfilled many are not and then some things work out even far better than you expect. My process was to write the work and then rehearse with the band which we started late 2018, do a few shows to rehearse the material and then into the studio to record (which we did in June 2019). Many over dubs were done through 2021 ofcourse there was a long period of editing that I did in my own studio through the crazy covid period. Many rehearsals and studio sessions had to be cancelled. Final mixing was done through 2022. Three and a half years since the initial band recording the album is complete.
I am now enrolled in a Masters of Composition at Melbourne University studying under Professor Elliott Gyger. My first piece is Elergy for clarinet and piano which will be performed by my self and Danae Killian.This along with other music I write including an ensemble piece will eventually be recorded and become my next CD.
25 June 2020 Martin is currently working on his latest album 'Climb The Sky' it's at a very excitng stage right now. The album was recorded by the band almost a year ago today we were all set to record the vocals, choirs, orchestrations and finish the album but then the virus hit. That's ok! Martin has been refining the mixes and arrangements on the album and creating 'interludes'. Martin is very proud to present this album which should be finished in 2021.
He recently worked with Producer Damian Taylor (Bjork, Prodigy) as a clarinet and saxophone player on Odette's latest album.
UP COMING SHOWS 2018
Friday Dec 6 With Ross Mclennan and the New World Orchestra- Kastoria Music Club
Thursday Dec 13 - Maya- dreamer premier an entire new Album- Existential Pop- at Bar Open. Martin is curating this show which will also feature Francis Plagne and Great Rack and an empty cub reverb. More details will be posted on our face book page.
Martin Mackerras is a composer and performer active in Melbourne. After studying at Victorian College of the Arts he studied at Manhattan School of Music (clarinet and composition) as a Fulbright scholar.
In recent years he has performed and recorded with many different artists and ensembles of varying styles including classical music, contemporary classical, improvised music, pop, folk and world music. Among these are Laura Jean (as a member of the Eden Land Band he toured many times with Laura Jean and appears on Eden Land and A Fool Who'll), Bucket Rider (for the Melbourne Festival), Sally Seltmann, Grand Salvo, Lior, Bolt and Libra Ensemble (contemporary classical) Spiel Azoi ( Klezmer) and with George Dryfus for the Four Winds Festival. He is currently a member of Ross Mclennans New World Orchestra appearing on his recent albums 'All the Colours Print can Manage' and 'The Nights Deeds are Vapour' His clarinet playing was featured in the 2015 add campaign for Heinze Baked Beans. He is a sought after woodwind teacher and directs ensembles for school students primary to secondary.
As a composer he has released the CD 'As All The Heaven Were a Bell' for ensemble and computer manipulated sounds and 'The Waves' for solo piano commisioned and performed by Michael Kieran Harvey.
The Vehicle for all his creative endeavours is his own ensemble Maya-dremaer and the Future happiness Orchestra, song writing, slow vocal harmonies, minimalism and experimental music are all part of this groups aesthetic. They have performed in many venues around Melbourne and for the Fringe Festival. They have released alums 'Love is your Destiny' and 'LIght of the World'. (for samples please go to the website maydreamers.com)
Martin has been working on a new album with the working title 'Existential Pop' for the last 2 years. This whole album is currently in rehearsal and will be premiered Thusrday Dec 13 at Bar Open.
As All the Heavens were a Bell and The Waves (2005)
“"As always in Martin Mackerras’s music, the evocation of timelessness holds sway. The ocean’s forgotten depths and her shimmering, hopeful horizon are the dimensions of the human soul in its inner eternity, rising and sinking incessantly, the perpetual undulations resolving to the stillness of pure tone, as though the soul were a vibrating string…as though the soul were a lyre…The piano strives to become its entelechy, the lyre of waves. In the beginning was the ocean.
….Martin beholds the world with the untarnished wonder of a child who feels intuitively how in the ocean waves are not accidental transmissions of energy, but essential inner character. In this, ocean waves are like musical tones"
.Danaë Killian , writer and pianist
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"Mackerras homes in on the extremes , the epiphany , the "total " energy. His clarinet improvisation is a frenzied vault at the physical extremes of the instrument, reaching out to a higher consciousness".
Harriet Cunnigham, Real Time
Love is Your Destiny ( 2011)
Using a six-piece band plus singers and an orchestra, Mackerras’s hour-plus debut as May Dreamers is reliably airy despite just how much is happening at one time….It’s baroque pop in the mode and scale of Burt Bacharach or Pet Sounds. The layers are as heady as the sentiments are sunny and hopeful (see the album title)".
Doug Wallen, mess+noise
Light of the World (2015)
‘The Orchestral pop recording of the year , a triumph’
Paul Gough, The Inside Sleeve (included in the Inside sleeve 2016 best albums)
Current project2018
Maya-dreamer and the Future Happiness Orchestra
