Cactus Ridiculus
The Back Story
A film by Hazel Palmer and Graeme Leak, 2020
[Almost ] all of the sounds in this film’s soundtrack were made by playing a cactus [there is also a vibraphone]. This is done by attaching a contact microphone (think doctor’s stethoscope) to the plant and activating its woody, tooth-picky spines.
The ‘instrument’ sounds like a sort of watery, woody marimba, or a John Cage prepared piano. Of course every cactus is unique – the tougher and longer the spines, the better. They are incredible instruments.
Public Confession: A Guilty Truth Revealed
For our film we envisaged enormous amplified plants, beautifully lit, filmed in close up and slow motion, being plucked, bowed, struck and otherwise activated by falling sand, seeds, salt and water.
But Covid hit.
We could not gain access to the botanic garden collection we had planned to use. The only plant we could find was a tiny 5 inches tall.
So we set up at home, Hazel filmed it, I recorded the soundtrack and we put together a miniature version our film.
It was Ridiculous.
The soundtrack has a much longer history…
Sydney 1985
The actual sounds on the film soundtrack are indeed played on a cactus. They came from a Tascam Portastudio four-track cassette recording I made in Sydney in 1985 with Michael Askill.
Michael is an important figure in my musical life. He was my mentor and teacher as a teenager, and we later became colleagues when I joined Synergy, the pioneering Australian percussion ensemble. We subsequently ran Sistrum Percussion, a rehearsal space in Ultimo, Sydney, which became a useful meeting place for contemporary musicians and artists.
In 1985 Michael was preparing to perform John Cage’s Child of Tree as a solo at the Sydney Opera House, in what would become the piece’s Australian premiere. Cage’s score calls for an assortment of instruments made from plant materials, including an amplified cactus.
We worked together to figure out how to do this.
This was over 40 years ago, and although our memories of the details are a little foggy we both clearly recall the moment when we first heard it.
We couldn’t believe our ears.
We recorded it on a Tascam Portastudio four track cassette machine. I did two tracks of rhythmic finger-plucking then Michael overdubbed beautiful free-flowing cascades and flourishes with bamboo skewers.
The Original Cactus Sydney 1985
Scotland 2020
For Cactus Ridiculus I created a cactus sampler instrument in Logic. I surgically cut notes from the recording and mapped them onto a midi keyboard, allowing me to ‘play’ the larger cactus (with no chance of injury). My more rhythmic twangs and plucks were at the bottom of the keyboard and Michael’s flourishes towards the top.
So we have a little tiny Scottish cactus under lights enduring an onslaught of salt, seeds, sand and water, and a much older Australian cactus, recorded by Michael and I for a Sydney Opera House concert, effectively playing together across time and space. It’s almost as good as the latest Beatles song…
