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Cosmic Synchronism
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Short Stories and Prose How Justin, Alan, Robbie and his wife Ela (and even Fender amplifier!) crossed paths to end up on Dane’s ‘Cosmic Collaboration’ project in the Shpongle Facebook group.
On the 26th of February 1986, Dire Straits performed their 13th and final Melbourne concert, at the open-air Olympic Park stage. At 13 years and 10 months old, this was the first rock concert I ever attended, only made possible through the sheer luck of another ticket holder’s inability to attend, discovered only days before the event. That ticket holder was a friend of my cousin Marie, and as my family had spent some time with Marie’s family that summer, and she’d gotten to know that I was a big fan of the band, she suggested to her friend that I may be interested in buying it. After some serious begging to my parents, I secured that ticket and began my lifelong love of live music. A few months later, I bought my first electric guitar for $100, which I’d saved up doing school holiday work at Ericsson (where my dad worked).
Somewhere in the crowd, at the same concert, another 15-year-old teenage drummer was also attending his very first rock concert. His name was Justin Humphries.
About 3.5 weeks earlier, a baby girl was born in Cebu, Philippines. Her name was Ela.
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Two and ¾ years after that monumental Dire Straits concert, and as a fresh high school graduate, Justin began working as an intern at ‘Main St Music’ in Greensborough, doing various roles, including drum tuition. One day, he was asked by his boss to take on a blind 7-year-old kid, named Alan Taylor. Justin was hesitant at first, not sure if he could handle the task, but quickly let go of those doubts when he first visited Alan’s house, hearing Alan rip through ‘Wipeout’ on a children’s drum kit. This became the beginning of a long relationship between Justin and Alan’s family, as the tutoring continued over almost a decade since that day.
Around about the same time that Justin, from ‘Main St Music’, was tutoring young Alan on the drums, another young customer walked through the ‘Main St Music’ entrance doors to purchase his first guitar amp; a Fender Champ 12 which he’d spent many months paying off on layby with his scrawny part-time job salary from the fast-food store Red Rooster, which was a few kilometres down the same road.
This small, single tube, guitar amplifier, would stand the test of time and feature in the Cosmic Collaboration project, some 35 years later.
Meanwhile in England, about 10 years after that Dire Straits concert, Simon Posford and Raja Ram teamed up to form the psychedelic electronic music project which became known as Shpongle. In another 10 years, the Shpongle Online Community group would be created on the recently launched social media platform Facebook. 15 years later, I would stumble across and join the group, having been a huge fan since their ‘Are You Shpongled?’ album release in 1998.
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Throughout the years, I had always loved making music but never really took it beyond the 4-track cassette recordings that I’d made in my bedroom and other various rooms in houses, apartments and hotels I lived in. As it turned out, I ended up working full time at Ericsson straight after finishing my final high school exam and have been working in the telco industry on and off ever since. This line of work took me all over Australia and the world, so I never really got to settle down at any point, which lead to the failure of every attempt to form a band, or take my music to the next level, as I could never be relied upon to stay in one place long enough.
On more than one occasion, I quit my job to go study at university, but always seemed to return to the telco world, in one way or another, mostly as a contractor. When I was 35, I was offered a role in Madagascar, which was to be my last before the global financial crisis of 2008/2009. I would have stayed in Madagascar but when the national riots broke out in February 2009, we were all told to evacuate the country for safety reasons. As this coincided with the global crisis, and all the job offers had dried up, I decided to go live somewhere where my savings would last longer, and that place ended up being Cebu, Philippines. It was here I met Ela, who would two years later become my wife.
Meanwhile in 2011, while I was busy getting married, Justin founded his Phoenix Sound Studios.
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Fast forward to March 2020, and I had now settled back into a full-time office job in my hometown of Melbourne, for almost 5 years. Suddenly, the news of a deadly virus spreading all over the globe forced most of us back into our homes. The orders to stay at home were issued at government level, so had to be taken seriously and working remotely quickly became the defining theme of the years that followed. After constant months of ‘Covid lockdowns’, Steinberg decided to launch a special promo pack for their flagship DAW: Cubase. It included everything you needed to produce music at home, free of use for 3 months, as a kind of consolidation gift for all the musicians out there who couldn’t get to a recording studio due to the lockdowns. Having never really tried the computer-made music path before, I decided to take up the offer and check out what it was like. Needless to say, I loved it and decided to upgrade to the full version once the promo period finished. In fact, I loved it so much that I decided to take it even further and treat myself (it was my birthday that week) to some sound engineering lessons, so that I could take my home recordings to a whole new level, as well as registering my own business (Boar’s Grunt Productions) so that I could publish them without the need of any other middlemen.
There was only one problem – where could I get such lessons during a time of Covid? I searched Google maps for nearby recording studios and found Phoenix Sound Studios, which was only a 20-minute drive from my house. Browsing their website, I also came across a ‘Teaching’ section, which stated:
“Justin offers private one-on-one Drum kit and Sound Engineering lessons at Phoenix Sound Studios or remotely online via Zoom.”
This was perfect! I immediately sent an email to this ‘Justin’ guy and asked if weekends were available. He scheduled me in for a Saturday morning session, and these continued fortnightly for the next 18 months. In one of the last lessons, in which the topic was sound restoration, I mentioned I had recorded the first concert I ever attended on a hand-held portable cassette player/recorder, which would be a great candidate for practising these sound restoration techniques. “What concert was it?” Justin asked. It turns out it was the exact same very first concert for both of us and now, 35 years later, he’d become my sound engineering teacher. What are the chances?
Even after I finished the whole curriculum, I asked Justin if it was ok to keep paying him every fortnight to save up some studio time, as this is something I wanted to do next; record a song properly in a real studio.
During the same Covid times, my wife at age 35, decided to ditch the Carer agency she was working for and also start her own business, so she could take on clients without the need of other middlemen. One of the clients she eventually took on was a blind man, who needed fortnightly assistance with preparing his meals. His name was Alan Taylor.
* * *
It’s August 2023 and enter Dane Curley; a musician/producer from New York who posts something about a ‘Cosmic Collaboration Machine’ in the Shpongle Facebook group that I’m a member of, where he’s looking for contributors to the project. “This could be fun!” I thought and proceeded with contacting Dane for more information. As it turned out, the project was quite serious and would demand some quality contributions. As such, I decided it could be a good idea to return to Phoenix Sound Studios to ensure my contributions were recorded with the highest quality equipment. For the song I’d been asked to contribute on, I had also added some midi drum and home recorded djembe loops in the demo versions, and these could be much better represented through an acoustic kit and high-quality mics.
“Why don’t you ask Alan to play drums?” my wife said. She was always telling me about this blind client she had who was apparently a great drummer. She’d also told Alan about me being a musician and promised to hook us up one day for a proper jam, though to this day it’d never happened.
“If he’s ok doing a recording session, why not?” I replied, having no idea about his connection with Justin, or how well he could play the drums.
It was at this point where the penny dropped – Ela mentioned Justin’s studio to Alan and from there the connections began to emerge. Alan had no idea Justin had become a recording studio manager but when he heard the name ‘Justin’ he asked if his surname was ‘Humphries’? What are the chances?
Well, Alan was more than ok to do the recording session, as this was to become the reunion of a teacher and his student, for the first time in decades, and brought out some great stories of synchronicity during our recording session lunch time break.
Thank you, Shpongle & Dane, for providing the cosmic triggers that brought all this together and may all the synchronicities in life bring you as much joy as they did to this bunch of old musos (and his wife and guitar amp) over the weekend!
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