Joseph Franklin

Following on from his widely praised work for piano, percussion and large ensemble ‘The Horror Of The Avant Garde(S)’ in 2023, NM is pleased to announce the release of Melbourne/Naarm bassist and composer Joseph Franklin’s debut solo album, ‘a thousand tiny mutinies’. Franklin is led here to ‘a thousand tiny mutinies’, a voyage of unhinged polyrhythmic expression and textural investigation. A paean to the systematic deconstruction and rebuilding of the tools of formal training throughout his career as a soloist, ensemble player and composer to this point. 

Both the semi-hollow six-string contrabass guitar played on this recording and his live instrument, a custom build with hyper-local materials by Cockatoo-based luthier Tim Kill, enable Franklin to drastically mushroom the scope of amplified bass’ timbral and compositional capacities. Throughout twelve tracks we are treated to multitudinous percussive vamps and tactile complexities - the wry interjection of punctuative, seemingly electronic texturework on ‘tendencies and desires’, the demonic simulated vocalisations of ‘patiently waiting for their moment to sing’ and abrasive thickets of wide-eyed scraping on ‘chaos monde’ before the simple clarity of melodic closer ‘meadow dog’.

His is a practice devoted to the possibilities of amplified/electric bass instruments, developed formatively through practical necessity. As a composer, this later manifested as a marker of Franklin’s innate rejection of the predictability and piousness of a progression to double bass or baroque instruments. This simple dismantling of the academic desire-line has sent Franklin hurtling inwards to find instruments and protocols with less “shoulds” and more meaningful or idiosyncratic facets to facilitate creation of his smirkingly possessed vocabulary. The album takes its name ‘a thousand tiny mutinies’ and track titles 1 to 11 from Andrew Goodman's essay response to Franklin’s work, which adorns the faceted sleeve design by Rose Williams as fragmented poetic text.