Revelation Film Festival. Luna Cinema. Thursday July 7^th. 550 people turn up and slink down into comfy seats. Dim the lights. Action. For the next thirty minutes they are assaulted with ten films from ten different Perth film makers who have made “film tracks” to the electronic manipulations and traditional sounds of f:qs, found:quantity of sheep’s second release, a CD/DVD package entitled monkey + valve. There’s a monkey at a typewriter. Red rivers of blood. Guy Hamilton Howlett from The Tigers in sepia tones.

 A woman drowns in a bath. Then as the films progress these colours feature in this order. Red. Purple. Black. Green. Blue. Yellow. The colours expressing the emotions in the music. The show is a success. But wait there’s more. Schvendes, Radarmaker and The Stickfigures perform at the Leederville Hotel at an after-launch party playing their favourite f:qs songs. The success of the launch and the finished product is a testament to the cause and effect philosophy of Neil Rabinowitz, Trent Barrett, Michael Winlo and Cam Barrett who comprise f:qs.

Several weeks later I’m sitting at the eco café in Subiaco discussing the past, present and future with the delightfully exuberant Neil Rabinowitz. “I have been doing a double degree in Mathematical Physics and Philosophy. There’s music and then there’s maths my other passion.” It’s obvious that logical and lateral thinking are part of Neil’s day-to-day existence. The way he and Trent thought up the idea for the launch was a matter of solving a problem that they had created in the first place. Their self-titled 2002 release had been a compilation of bedroom jams between Neil (bass, piano) and Trent (guitar, vocals) and a smattering of guests including Trent’s brother on drums. The most unusual track featured a washing machine and other found sounds. They ventured on to a stage once but swore they’d never do it again. So when they had finished their second far more ambitious CD they asked themselves “how do we launch it without actually playing live?”

Neil explains the problem and solution. “We didn’t have a performance outlet so we had to come up with one. We figured that the nature of the music lent itself well to film, and it was a pity that there wasn’t a film to go with it. Luckily for us, when we spread the idea around for many films retrospectively, we found many eager filmmakers, progressive funding from ArtsWA, and faith from Richard Sowada from the Revelation Film festival to go with the idea before seeing any of the films. When the film pieces were created, there was an interesting relationship between their content and the music itself. The musical side of things came from building up layers and layers of instruments. There was a social element to it. Friends of ours would come ‘round and play to add bits or improvise over the top of what the four of us had done. Because we didn’t have explicit control over the music it was all the more surprising and exciting to see what the filmmakers came up with.” Nearly 100 friends contributed to the whole thing including multi skilled artists like Ben Franz, Tristan Parr, Kathy Potter, Joel Adams, Andrew Ewing, Noah Norton, Wendi Graham and Cat Hope. “Ever since we started we’ve always looked at different ways of making music apart from sitting down in a room with a band.”

Jumping back to the first CD I mention the fact that I liked track ten, one of the unnamed tracks. “That was an interesting exercise,” Neil says. “When you’re recording there’s always background noise from leads and earth hums. Under normal circumstances you try to eradicate that noise. But for once we thought let’s collect all those different noises, put them together and manipulate them, and build up an entire piece from the unwanted sounds. In a similar vein, on our new CD we’ve remixed the entire first album into a single track, taking extracts and compressing it all on to track eight.”

Now that all of the hard months of work are over what’s next, a new project? “Well first of all let me say found:quantity of sheep is no longer. Trent and Michael have both finished Medical degrees and will be interns next year so . . . I’m looking into a whole different concept. In some respect it draws from the ideas of the second f:qs album, but takes it to an entirely different level. Instead of layering separate musicians we will layer whole bands, ensembles and orchestras on top of each other.” Something about my reaction makes Neil say, “The expression on your face is priceless! We remix and manipulate it. We will use styles as instruments rather than individual sounds.” So you might get a band in and end up using a solitary bass note. What about all the bruised egos? “The music is bigger than egos. People will have to accept that this is a collaborative thing just like monkey + valve was. So whatever we use will be for the bigger picture. I want to do it in 5.1 surround sound because we need the extra sound dimension to fit everything in. Plus nobody’s really explored the sonic possibilities of that medium for this type of music.” I suppose a live performance would be out of the question? “No it wouldn’t. I’m very excited by the prospect of two totally different bands playing together on the one stage.” Perhaps Neil has been drinking too much of that highly pungent Lapsang Souchong tea that was consumed on the monkey + valve sessions. But hey what would I know - I’m just a monkey at a typewriter. 

www.foundquantityofsheep.com