Duration: 12 minutes
I1: Red Hill Child
2: Red Bellied Black Snakes Mating
3: Minmya at Alice
4: Klemzig Fire

"4 Tales from Mangrove Mountain" is a collaborative project between Padma Newsome, Nick Lloyd and Robert Esler. The work is in 4 movements. Each movement represents a single imprint from the composer's life in Australia: Alice Springs in the Red Center, Canberra, the nation's capital, Klemzig, a suburb of Adelaide, and Mangrove Mountain, a remote valley in NSW.
The pitch material for the work is often tightly controlled and is derived from a single scale and its overtone potentials on the marimba. Multiple mallet-types are used to exploit this multi-timbral world and is most fully explored in the 3rd movement, "Minmya at Alice".
The computer portion of the piece is a hodge-podge of electronic music styles: interactive percussion tracking (Movements One and Four); non-interactive tape-style accompaniment (Movement Two); and an autonomous random walk (Movement Three). In spite of these divergent processes, the aesthetic surface of the electronic component finds continuity through the use of two main elements: audio material drawn from Esler's own pre-recorded marimba playing and the thematic use of the concept of noise (in this case, pink noise). Noise is used, at an audio rate, to generate the evocative sounds of the first and fourth movements, and, at a control rate, todetermine the randomness of the walk through the audio samples in the third movement.
All that being said, the electronic components were of course inspired by and remain strongly tied to programmatic elements of the music itself.