I certainly do have a paper fetish, I guess you’d say it started with a flower…
But now that I think of it…
No.
It started with music, and then I noticed the bees and other insects were collapsing.
My whole life I’ve been following threads. Inspirational threads that come to me out of the blue like the smell of fresh baked cookies waft from the kitchen enticing my taste buds to sit down with a large jug of milk. Invisible threads beckon me. They are extremely successful in wooing me; serving up tasty visions of possibilities along an invisible corridor that may take decades to land me in the kitchen of life’s accomplishments.
The threads that I follow are just that, threads of inspiration.
They call to me, sparking my imagination to see possibilities I had never seen before nor dreamed possible. They give me vibrant energy to envision the end result and the power to persevere no matter what.
In 2014, seeing a book called, Trail – Paper Poetry by David Pelham for the first time was a massive inspiration for me. An intricate sophisticated pop-up book it caused me to ask a question, “What if we could design a pop-up set of the natural world out of paper, and how about a cd cover?”
I bought six of David’s books, and took three of them apart to better understand how they were put together, and how exactly the various sections worked. With his book, I created my own template and redesigned the individual parts to create my own popup experience, with the desire to create a large one for a record jacket when I pressed vinyl for It’s All a Beautiful Noise.
You could say, I became obsessed…
From this, I learned how to create a pop-up flower inside my cd cover with a future thread of employing six smart phone augmented reality animations for people to play with. Click here to see what Mattar is doing with augmented reality.
This in turn, inspired me to start playing with paper on a bigger scale – life-size paper animals that lay flat on the stage and are popped up at certain times during the show. And then, over a year of working with that idea, I came across a simple canon-creative park website that has a massive selection of small three dimensional paper animals. I was inspired to explore blowing up some of the designs into life-size paper animals as a stand-alone installation that could go up before my show came to town. I thought it could act as advertising and bee centric activities could be its central focus.
But the question became, where does one find paper big enough to make a life-size elephant or a giraffe? I had no idea.
I’ve learned life is a treasure hunt, and it comes when one commits to following invisible threads of desire. It can turn getting lost on a back road out of Melbourne heading to Sydney into a magic act!
This is my story…
Driving through some beautiful landscapes on a cool cloudy day with no cell service trying to find the Hume Hwy, I came across the 126 year old Broadford Paper Mill with its big factory doors wide open. I spotted it right before the hwy turn off. It’s fun to reflect on the fact that we were in Melbourne just the night before to have dinner with my booking agent at the time. I knew he was friends with someone at Visy and I asked him if he could hook me up. Visy, if you don’t know manufactures recycled paper and other products.
The beautiful people at the mill (NPI) would provide me with two unused spaces in their factory for several years and unlimited amounts of paper to work out my paper animal prototypes. Whilst at the factory, I would fall in love with Visy paper and make many animals out of their product. Thank you a million times, thank you!
The Music
You see, the nasty little secret is, It’s All a Beautiful Noise was meant to be an album of music no one would want to buy.
Now, I know that sounds crazy, but let me tell you it was necessary.
At the time, my intention was to throw a bone to a gangster record company who had licensed my Keep the Faith record for the US, Canada, the UK and Japan to protect an album of music I had finished recording – Citizens of the Planet – from being pirated. They were in breech of contract for illegally selling distribution rights to two European distributor. They did not account for the amount of money they received or number of units sold, as was stipulated in the contract. In the end, they did not stop selling my album for the next several years. When I called the president of the company and asked him why he was not complying, he said, “Sue us.”
He knew I had no money to take him to court. And I knew that Citizens of the Planet and its state-of-the-art production would be very successful internationally. I had the radio songs and I had the production values, and most importantly, I knew they were not men and women of their word, and if they smelled money, I could count on them tying me up in court to get at it.
I had two options; one was to wait several years till the original contract and their right of first refusal was no longer a threat, or create a new album of songs – an album no one would want.
There was one little tiny problem, I fell in love with the music Mik and I began to write and produce. And, I can truly say the music I created with Mik Lavage would change me forever. It would open me up to greater creative threads of possibilities – Global First Threads – with a deeper purpose than just being about at a time when its needed the most.
Future Self Inspiration
I will never pretend to understand the full mystery of how life works, where we come from and where we go when we die. All I can say is the instrumental musical compositions Mik presented me with opened a portal – connecting ever deeper – to my future-self. A future-self I met in a dream when I was 21.
When I was 21 years old, I had a dream.
It was either the morning I turned 21, or the morning after I turned 21.
I can never remember,
so I always have to start the story this way.
In the dream, I’m standing with my hands on a stone balustrade in front of a French Chateau in the Hollywood Hills, which you can do in the Hollywood Hills, and you can do in a dream.
In the dream the sun had set and from where I stood, I looked down on the San Fernando Valley just as the city lights came online, section by section across the valley. I’d never seen that before.
It was a crystal-clear night; not a cloud in the sky. In front of me, in the distance, was the sharp crisp silhouette of the Angela Crest Mountain range against a massive backdrop of orange. I remember, I had to look straight up into the sky above me to see where the massive bandwidth of orange stopped and a Maxfield Parrish Turquoise Blue kicked in, and the first star appeared.
It was the time of the year when the sun goes down you can feel the crisp bite of the air on your cheeks, and the smell of damp earth as the evening dew is absorbed into the ground.
I find myself basking in the beautiful moment, and then laughter catches my attention. I turn around to look behind me. And I see two very tall narrow French doors. Inside is a full-blown Hollywood party. People are laughing and drinking and smoking and being all-fabulous. I don’t want to go inside, I just want drink in this stunning moment. But as I turn to look back at the view, I notice someone out of the corner of my eye – to the right of the far-right door.
It’s a woman… and she’s floating a foot off the ground. She has no clothes on and she has no hair on her body. And her body, is like a jellyfish… she’s like a combination Box Jellyfish /Gecko. What I mean by that is her breasts and muscle pads in her arms and legs and neck are clear like a Box Jellyfish, but her torso has the transparency of a Gecko. I can see her ovaries and her heart pounding inside her breast. I become so caught up in her anatomy that I totally forget this is a woman, and then when I finally do look into her eyes I freak out!!
“Don’t be afraid,” I heard her say, but her lips didn’t move.
“Are you speaking inside my head?”
She said, “When you reach a certain level in your human development, you’ll no longer be afraid to allow people to know what you think or feel.”
I thought for a moment. “That sounds true”
“Who are you?”
She leaned in and looked at me with loving kind eyes, “I’m your future self!”
And I woke up.
That was a rad dream. Meeting my future self all those years ago gave me a trajectory – a star on the distant horizon to point my inner compass toward. I have now shared this dream with people in more than 20 countries around the world. I believe Mik’s music created a portal for my future self to come through. The impact of this story, and experiencing the effect some of the songs on Beautiful Noise has on people is really something special to experience.
In the show, I share my dream moment in a more dynamic way by allowing my future self to come to life. I give my future self the opportunity to sing (More on that in another blog post.) and talk directly to the audience. She see us differently than we do. she trusts us to make the exact choices we need to make to restore balance.
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