The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 104

1 sound. v. can you see Robin the Spaceman By JOCK VEITCH WOULD you believe Robin Hood in outer space? And 3,000 years in the future? Ifs happening. American television is preparing to launch Rocket: Robin Hood, a colour cartoon eries which Jock Veitch TT seems to be a happy co-inci-dence that the word happened along just as John Terry was starting to achieve musical maturity. For it gave him a handy label for.

what he is trying to do. For it seems that this Beatle-like, six-foot tall, 22-year-old Sydney composer has been working towards psychedelic music for most of his life. And what he is trying to do is merge total sound into a new sort of contemporary music and at the same time team it with a series of shattering visual images. His visual images are an exciting series of abstract projector slides and films which are played on walls around his audience while the music is being played. John, who graduated as a Fellow of the Trinity College of London at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and until recently worked in the sound effects department at the A.B.C., has been practising his craft with a couple of friends these last few weeks at the Wayside Chapel Theatre.

They'll be there for at least two more Thursdays and will look for another locale, if they can't get the theatre after that. John plays a small Japanese electric organ and a piano in his recitals. He is accompanied by tape recorder and lights. The music is little like what most people have experienced. It has hints of jazz, a very occasional pop tune and whole tone scales, among other things.

The tapes contain a jumbled collection of everyday sounds recorded around Sydney and out in the country. John's music is stimulating enough to have split the Sydney music world down the middle. In the music departments Robin and his Merry Men out of this world and into the future, later this year. And nearly 40 of the segments are being mads in Sydney. Animators at the Artransa Park Television studios at French's Forest are now arrows with built-in scientific wizardry.

Robin, Maid Marion, Friar Tuck and Little John are pictured above. The first Artransa segment will go on to the animation cameras tomorrow. Artransa's. manager, Mr Leon Becker, said this week that this was the sixth big animated cartoon assignment the Sydney studio had handled for United States television. The Beatles series was the most prominent.

"We get the assignments simply because the Americans like our work," Mr Becker said. 'They're trusting us more and more. This is the first series we've tackled without someone coming out from America to guide our hands. And this time we're working simply from the scripts. "Previously we've been given complicated story boards to work from, but they're letting us do our own story boards now.

It's more responsibility but it's The series will probably be seen in Australia next year. Robert Peach comperes aHively, topical half hour of reports from home and overseas. 'A A.M. talks about the kind of things that you talk Jrm. about at home, at work, on the It's part of a new Monday to Friday morning Ifffm line-up on 2FC.

John Terry of the universities many of the staff regard him as some sort of charlatan. But Richard Meale, probably Australia's top contemporary composer, is enthusiastic about his work. So is Professor Robert Peart, head of the Music Department at Sydney University, who has been impressed enough to want John's sight and sound for a concert for the International Society of Contemporary Music. John is impressed with Richard Meale, too. In fact, he regards him as one of his major influences, along with Igor Stravinsky and Thelonius Monk.

"But," he said this week, "I've tried to put all those influences behind me. I only find them of historical interest now. To me the only interesting music is what's happening at this moment." John was brought up in a lonely, 150-year-old house at Rouse Hill where as a "Colin Croft rehearsed, we four in Sydney, while Donald was producing the rest of the company of 60 over there; and letters went back and forward, asking for the size of the stage, the size of the auditorium and what about the lighting?" After seven weeks of intensive work in Sydney (using the theatre Studio), the four flew to Kuala Lumpur, 'They told me that my three little sisters in the show were to be played by one American and two Chinese: and my little brother Jake, by a Chinese and a girl," said Margo. "I thought to myself This, is not But njtfimi mil "i inyiiniiiu nwwmj child he showed musical ability and took ah obsessive interest in everyday sounds around him. He also took an interest in visual effects, having found a magic lantern about 150 years old with which he could play.

Years before psychedelia became the rage he became absorbed in the possibility of combining sight and sound into a controlled, emotional experience. He recorded a Tot of his sound around that old house. He found farmyard and household noises. Ha got many of his percussion noises by taping his grandmother's vast collection of old china and glassware. Then he moved into town and recorded traffic noises, people's laughter and industry's clanging.

The whole lot he cut up and glued down to give a sort of composite sound of society. He and his friends, Ann Harris, who plays tone generator during his performances, and artist Francis Good, who works the lights, made the slides and films in the kitchen of Mrs Harris Cremorne flat. They painted direct on film and the slides, sometimes distorting the images with mirrors. John is reluctant to give the details. He says he doesn't want imitators to do the same thing too soon.

Margo Lee. after two we did not notice the difference and there were nine separate nationalities in the cast. "We had Malayans, Chinese, Indians, English, Americans, Australians, French, Polish and Hawaiian." The conductor of the 18-piece orchestra was Chinese, the most cultured woman who was a doctor of music and who had studied in Paris and at the Sor-bonne." "The opening night was a Command Performance for the King of Malaysia, to whom we were presented in the interval, and then we played for 14 performances instead of the usual three, she said. rife 'Sl busily arming Robin and his band with weapons electronic and as old as man. They battle the.

baddies the chief villain is the rascally Sheriff of N.O.T.T. -r with weapons which range from ray guns to electric quarter staves and bows and 2NA2CN AB57.83.97 'Annie' with, a multiracial cast By JOSEPHINE O'NEILL WHEN I said I TT was going to Kuala Iumpur to play 'Annie Get Your nobody would believe me," said actress Margo Lee over a city luncheon table this week. But Margo has played "Annie" and is home again full of charmed affection for Malaysia and stories about the show. It began when Australian Donald Davies, businessman by day, and theatrical producer by night, came from Kuala Lumpur on one of his visits to Sydney. "In Kuala Lumpur, Donald directs for the Liberal Arts Society, just because he loves theatre, and when he went back, he had the idea of doing a Western musical if he could get four professionals from Australia, Margo explained.

Mr Davies decided upon "Annie Get Your Gun," and found an industrial sponsor (the Malayan Tobacco Company) for his ambitious plan. "I had just finished in Red Peppers' at the with Colin Croft, when the offer came for me to play 'Annie'," Margo explained. They flew down to Melbourne and got Robert Mc-Phee (formerly Lancelot in J.C.W.'s to play David Butler: then secured David Williams, as Buffalo Bill: and John Kendall as the chief dancer. "Then it was production by remote control," said Margo. STARTS TOMORROW a.m.

104 THE SUM-HERALD, SEPT. 3, 1967 104.