The Lepidopters: A Space Opera

STOP PRESS: Alien moth creatures land on Indonesian island. Earth colonisation plan to proceed via interbreeding!

It might sound like the plot of some bizarre pulp sci-fi comic but rest assured The Lepidopters is much more than your standard-issue space opera. With a 40-member choir, a Yogyakarta-based punk art collective and an Australian experimental 'piano' ensemble, this is one of those fusion projects that elevates the mash-up idea into something approaching high art. 

Forming part of The Lepidopters' cross-cultural, multi-platform mix is Slave Pianos, an act that has always looked to bridge artforms. Indeed, according to chief 'slave' Neil Kelly, “We've sorta prided ourselves over the years in bringing disparate things together but this one might actually be the most ambitious so far.”

With The Lepidopters the various elements range across language, culture, musical notation, film, visual art and electro-mechanical pianos. However, the work is grounded in two common start points: the sci-fi of Mark von Schlegell and the spiral art of Robert Smithson. “It's those common threads that bind it together. Everybody that's been involved in making the music has worked to some Robert Smithson-inspired brief and we were always quite firm early on about generating a form that worked with one of Smithson's spirals, a work called The Gyrostasis, which has kinda informed everything. If you sit down and read the three comic books that loosely correspond to our work there is a narrative; but it's certainly not traditional.”

One of the key technical hurdles has been to make Western and Indonesian tunings work together harmoniously. “We've got these traditional Gamelan instruments and they have this totally non-Western tuning. So one of the things we've done is to write this choral music that involves micro-tonal tuning; and the punk band have new instruments that have been made that have tunings more matched to Gamelan.

“It sorta reads like an Australia Council promotional blurb when you talk about these cross-cultural things,” Kelly jokes, “but it's incredibly fruitful when you bring musicians and artists together that are from completely different universes. It's a real joy, I have to say.”