All my life I wanted to be in a band! Around three years ago I met with two other magical creatives in my studio in Lyall Bay. We walked on weather boards, sploshed water into and out of paint tins, and rustled drawings and paper. I was so nervous about what it meant to improvise musically, having been a person who learnt compulsory piano for many years with bullying and odd piano teachers. Lift your hand up as if there’s an egg underneath it! My piano teachers were all from a Catholic family where there were 11 sons and one daughter. All of the sons got married and proceeded to make more and more babies. I remember their wives; beautiful young women who seemed to me to sink into the ground as they bred and bred. The one daughter had two children only, and stopped there. My favourite thing about piano lessons was the hill we drove past on the way home, and the rabbits and foxes we sometimes saw there.
My favourite thing about our band is that it is the perfect collaborative form for me. Everyone gets to say, and play, what they want. We try out ideas, and layer them up with other ones. It’s exciting, playful, emotional. It often feels like blessing a space when we play. I feel so lucky to be a part of this group. We rehearse every Sunday, and usually play one gig a year:
Wellington-based Band Sensations is an experimental art sound glitterbang band. Amos Mann, Sian Torrington, and Creek Waddington create diverse mini-atmospheres with ecologies of sound, action and words. They typically devise their works by notating only those actions, settings, starting points and phrases that will allow them to approximate sonic sensations through improvisation. These notes are the précis maps for sound expeditions.
Sian Torrington Artist 