The Mushroom Whisperers
Audiovisual concert by Romano Crivici and Carla Thackrah | Australia | 2024| 60 mins | Rated G
A "Made in the Northern Rivers" Bangalow Film Festival exclusive

World Premiere

The Mushroom Whisperers is an audio-visual concert featuring Romano Crivici and Carla Thackrah, the composers behind the magnificent score of Follow The Rain. They are joined by one of Australia’s finest didgeridoo players Mark Atkins, and multi-instrumentalist Jess Ciampa with the quartet bringing you an intimate, immersive live music event, set to the backdrop of stunning timelapse footage from Follow the Rain.

Stephen Axford and Catherine Marciniak of Planet Fungi have partnered on The Mushroom Whisperers, providing the backdrop of their exquisite fungal time-lapses, which will be combined with evocative music played live to the screen by Romano and Carla performing on multiple instruments, for an immersive audiovisual experience created especially for the Bangalow Film Festival.

This is music that expresses fungi's inner rhythm and other-worldly beauty. Enter the realm of mushrooms, and their dreams.

Romano Crivici
Romano is one of Australia’s leading contemporary composers/performers (violin and piano). A former member of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the New England String Quartet, he has also worked widely as a pianist, repetiteur and conductor. He was a composer, director and violinist with his group Elektra String Quartet and the ECU (Elektra Collective Unconscious). His most recent projects are recording his String Quartets 4 & 5, released on ABC Classics, and the music for the films The Last Violin (BFF23) and Follow the Rain (BFF24).

Carla Thackrah
Carla is an award-winning musician, screen composer and filmmaker. She was a principal flute with the Opera Australia Orchestra for ten years, based at the Sydney Opera House. She has performed as guest principal with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO), the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO), the Queensland Symphony Orchestra (QSO), and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra (AS0). She has also performed with contemporary and world music ensembles including David Ahern’s A-Z Music, the Lindsey Kemp Contemporary Dance Co., Seymour Group, and Tango Paradiso. As a filmmaker, her award-winning film Sex, Drugs and String Quartets screened on ABCTV and NZTV, and The Last Violin has recently garnered two best documentary awards in Europe and is to be screened on SBSTV this year.

Mark Atkins
Mark Atkins is acknowledged as an elder of the didgeridoo and one of Australia’s finest didgeridoo players. He is recognized internationally for his collaborative projects with some of the world’s leading composers and musicians, having worked with Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Hothouse Flowers, Marlene Cummins, Philip Glass, The Black Arm Band and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. A descendant of Western Australia’s Yamatji people, as well as of Irish/Australian heritage, Mark Atkins is known not only for his masterly playing, but also as a storyteller, composer, percussionist, visual artist and instrument maker. Through Mark’s lips the air blows as a natural desert sound, in old ethnic chants and in polyphonic melodies of astonishing rhythm.

Jess Ciampa
Jess Ciampa is a multi-instrumentalist at home in a variety of styles of music, ranging from mainstream orchestral through to jazz, Latin, early music and commercial. He has performed with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Synergy Percussion, the Seymour Group, Sydney Dance Company, and Monsieur Camembert. His time with The Spaghetti Western Orchestra included return seasons at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London and a performance as part of the 2011 Proms in The Royal Albert Hall. For the past 27 years he has performed with several ensembles as part of the Musica Viva in Schools program and was also percussionist for The Lion King and Come From Away stage shows.