Reductive isn’t a long enough word to describe writing a 400-word review of a two-hour show that aims to encompass 40,000 years of music. A back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that to work out at about 100 years per word, and I’ve already used 44.
Timeline – Life Flashes Before Your Ears, a collaboration between Sydney electronic duo the Presets and Richard Tognetti’s Australian Chamber Orchestra, certainly doesn’t lack for ambition. In fact, 40,000 years is just the main sweep, it actually begins with John Gleason Cramer’s The Sound of the Big Bang before seguing into didgeridoo, a few traditional ethnic numbers and the western musical canon. Accompanying the music throughout are visual effects from Sydney studio Digital Pulse.
With such a huge project, it’s inevitable that things get left out. There’s no Cold Chisel, but perhaps more importantly, what little non-western music is included feels like an afterthought. That, though, was always going to the nature of a collaboration with a classical ensemble like the ACO.
When it works, it’s spectacular. Around the 750 AD mark, a Gregorian chant combines with stained glass kaleidoscope visuals to produce a truly beautiful and hypnotic effect. Seeing Tognetti in full flight during Bach’s Brandeburg Concerto (1721, thanks for asking) is awe-inspiring. A slave’s field call breaking into Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is oddly brilliant and the orchestra going hell-for-leather on Iggy and the Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog is a sight to behold.
Perhaps inevitably though, not everything works. The visuals are at times incongruous (as when King Tubby plays over images of the Cambodian genocide) and repetitive. And with an interval at 1900, it’s very much a show of two halves. Apart from a few moments like the slave call, there is little sonic inventiveness in the first half, with each piece played for a few minutes before a pause and the start of the next.
By contrast, the second half’s megamix is full of head-shaking “how does that work?” combinations. Kraftwerk and Donna Summer have never got along so well. The gradually accelerating mixup hits fever-pitch after 2000, with Justin Bieber banging up against Grizzly Bear and Gangnam Style sliding into Somebody That I Used to Know.
All in all, the effect is like a cosmic calendar for music, demonstrating that if all of history were a year, Bieber has been around for less than a second and is probably nothing to worry about. That Galaxy Song-style perspective (the Monty Python number didn’t get a look in, sadly), was exactly the intended effect. So despite the occasional misstep and inevitable omission, Timeline does exactly what it says on the box.
