Beyond Closed Doors (1996)

Beyond Closed Doors is the third single from Silonics' retrospective album: Channeling Apollo/Art Dance Classics (1989 - 2001), which releases in June 2024. It features several works created in collaboration with choreographers for contemporary dance performances, plus some other experimental art music tracks, which are yet to be choreographed. This is one of the dance tracks...

Beyond Closed Doors emerged as my favourite track from an exciting but intense two months of music composition and production, creating over an hour of original music for a new dance and video performance called Rub the Angel. The show played for ten nights from 29th May to 9th June at Theatreworks in St. Kilda, as part of the Next Wave Festival in1996.

Beyond Closed Doors was mostly composed over one Saturday night, working feverishly through to dawn in my bedroom studio in North Fitzroy.

The throbbing rhythm pulses like a heartbeat, supporting a minimal sound world composed of alternating and overlapping call-and response dialogues that repeat, vary and interact, adding complexity as they gradually become more layered and intense, all combining to build story and drama.

A review in The Age, 4th June '96, when summarising the musical contribution to the show, said that the music "composition catches the eerie, dreamlike quality of (the dancer's) video landscapes". Throughout the Dance performance, Music combined with Video panoramas and psychosocial images projected across three enveloping screens, to set up the atmosphere and context for the show's unique bungee-suspended Dancer's gravity defying narrative - a journey from childhood to adolescence and beyond, revealed through a quest for self discovery, social truths and new freedoms.

Beyond Closed Doors featured during a pivotal moment of the production, linked to video footage of a calm bedroom scene, interrupted by images implying a looming encroaching fear, signalling the show's point of transition from innocence to innocence lost...