Sydney Festival

These last few weeks the Sydney Festival has been on. I’ve done a couple of recordings in the Spiegletent, which has lots of mirrors in it. And I found out Spiegel means “mirror”. So it’s the mirror tent. It gets really hot inside the tent when the temperature is 36 degrees. The poor air conditioner didn’t really cope with Sydney’s heat wave. I’m just glad I wasn’t in there on the 42 degree day. I was recording lunchtime talks by people from the Moscow Art Trio and the Cinematic Orchestra.
I was supposed to record the Joe Henry concert in there on Tuesday, but my other concert, “Camille” got canned in Angel Place on Friday because we couldn’t get recording rights. But then the record company found out we wanted to do it and desperately wanted us to do it, but it was too late. So I ended up doing the Tuesday night Camille show at Hyde Park Barrack’s and DB had to do Joe Henry. It was really hard to get any info about set up or anything, so we just arrived and hoped to find somewhere to set up, but there wasn’t anywhere. Finally we got permission to set up in the gate house, which because of being a historic house has railing all around to protect the bricks so the space ended up being about 1 metre wide – enough room for the gear and me, but no one else. Luckily I had borrowed Triple J’s gear which is all very compact.
Here are some Spiegel tent pics, but they aren’t very good because I was just using the point and shoot. Sorry - no photos of Hyde Park Barracks - too busy and too much gear to take already without worrying about cameras. The Hyde Park Baracks recording was about 28 channels, so would have made much more interesting photos for equipment buffs. Oh well.


My set up for the lunchtime performances of people talking and playing.


The splitters - what we use to split all the induvidual mics so we can mix our own recording without affecting the PA mix.