Kynan Robinson


Kynan Robinson is an Australian trombonist and composer. He is most commonly associated with jazz but also plays other styles.

Career

Robinson was born in Australia but spent his childhood in Bangladesh as a child of Christian missionary parents. They lived there for fifteen years and were the only white people in the village. He returned to Australia to complete high school. His career and accomplishments are remarkable in their own right but take on extra significance when one considers the breadth of fields he has excelled in. He is a composer and musician with a formidable record and reputation. His extensive, diverse and very well regarded and reviewed body of work place him in a position of status and reputation with the Australian art scene. He received a bachelor's degree in music from the Victorian College of the Arts which he built on completing a Masters In Composition in 2010.
Robinson formed a contemporary improvisation quintet named En Rusk performing hmos open original compositions. The band toured Australia a number of times. They recorded their debut self-titled CD in 2001 and in 2004 finished their second recording, In 2005 he formed , which released an album entitled Wrapped in Plastic, compositions and concepts inspired by the films of David Lynch. He also established a reputation in electronic/techno/sample based music. Continuing his recording and touring career mainly with the iconic and iconoclastic dance/performance act, Des Peres and second with Hard Hat, a group that brings together electronic and acoustic musicians. Both acts toured Australia and internationally regularly performing at summer festivals around Australia and internationally. Des Peres completed their debut album in 2004. The album was released through Flict/Shock. Their second album Ace Doubt was released in 2006 through Flit/MGM. Des Peres combines a theatrical stage approach with a sample-heavy sound. While playing with the band, Robinson adopts the name Old Des and works very with Luva DJ and Mr. Ection as well as guitarist Tom Bass and Kelsey James. Their third album was entitled The Adventures of Cowboy and Miniman.
His musical output combined with an unusual level of creativity is reflected in his ability to genre hop with seeming ease. In 2010 he formed co-lead the ground breaking Australian Jazz band Collider, a band he co-leads with Melbourne saxophonist Adam Simmons. Combining a traditional jazz ensemble with orchestral and improvising string players the uniqueness of the ensembles sound couple with their outstandingly high performance ability created the space Robinson needed to write and perform his most courageous and what many in the Australian media consider his most personal works. "Solo in Red" was a large form composition composed by Robinson, performed by Collider and commissioned by the Melbourne Writers Festival. Its thematic material was drawn from the writings of American novelist Cormac McCarthy. In particular his epic novel Blood Meridian. Beyond just music the completed work also involved a highly technical and moving video work, a lighting design and narration with excerpts from the book narrated on stage. Solo in Red was released as an album at the same time the band also rebased a second album, titled "Words". When working on the music for "Words" Kynan returned a third time to his technique of using literary figures and texts as a lens through which he composed the music. For Robinson this was never a literal translation rather an attempt to sit in the same conceptual space and in doing so allow a new music to emerge. This technique is what Robinson refers to as a "Space to Be" derived from empathy. The album was appropriately titled "Words".
Over a 30-year career Robinson has toured and recorded with many of Melbourne and Australia's leading, musical innovators including C.W. Stoneking, Brian Brown, and the Melbourne Ska Orchestra, Miss Yugoslavia and the Bare Foot Orchestra, The Adam Simmons Toy Band, BucketRider, and ,. He is also featured on the Australian TV Series Miss Fischer's Murder Mysteries, produced by the ABC. He has composed music for jazz ensembles, dance productions, musical theatre, contemporary classical ensembles, and electronic dance acts and has had his compositions performed in festivals around the world. In 2001 he was a collaborative composer for Double Venturi, a collaborative piece involving musicians and funded by Arts Victoria. In 2004 he received funding through the Australia Council to compose a concert-length work for prepared piano and small ensemble that was premiered at the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz. He also has scored the music to six short films and has collaborated in numerous cross arts projects with visual artists including Kiron Robinson, Narinda Reevers, and Dave Macleod. Robinson has won three ARIA awards, considered Australis's top musical prize.
Beyond music he is considered one of Australia's leading voices in the field of systemic educational change. His doctoral thesis, which framed learning and education within complexity thinking is considered a hugely important addition to contemporary Western Education. In his research he presented new findings and a new form of yet unnamed identity which he called a Vellooming Identity. This is an identity that is in constant shift, highly linked to social constructionism, has strong links with Poststructuralist Philosophers Theory of Discourse and Deleuze's ideas of identities of 'nomadic thought' In that it rejects the idea of the self as an absolute, rather viewing it as a controlling agent of power created by Reductionism and its striving for singular absolute. Where Robinson's Vellooming Identity differs from existing definitions "identity" is in the impact that technology, specifically the connected web has had on reshaping how we know and place ourselves. The increased scale of connectivity linked to an increase in the diversity of the connections made possible by the internet has shaped it. In doing so it has also lifted our understanding of place to one that moves beyond reductionist categories including geography, gender, and name, In that the identity is also not grounded in time but rather has a fluidity unfamiliar in the reductionist definitions we have become familiar with. Robinson claims a Velooming identity as an identity of becoming, but goes further to refer to it as an identity of "continually becoming other". His doctoral thesis and publications since have also demanded for a redefinition of creativity moving to from a concept defined and limited by reductionist and modernist worldview, rather using emergence and continual becoming as metaphors for this new definition. Robinson defines creativity as a continual, collective experience. By doing so he links it to the Velooming identity. The Velooming Identity and collective Creativity as emergence have strong parallels to similar emerging identities he speaks of often in his work, identities of Continually Becoming Other.
His redefining of creativity, connected to his concept of a Velloming identity, has resulted in new possibilities in the space of learning, knowledge and formal education. In 2020 Robinson founded the Consultancy firm EnRusk. It was with this organisation that Robinson began to enact the theoretical ideas alongside the processes and tools he had developed over a lifetime of study and creation. The firm's focus was always complete, systemic, global educational reform. Robinson believed the change went beyond education to what he referred to as a global mindset. He is committed to help shift the global mindset away from the dominant reductionist mindset to a connected one nested in Complexity. Robinson's company was formed to enact this change and in that the resultant ways of being and doing. Increased connectivity, collective learning and collective creativity are at the heart of both the theoretical frame and the work that results.
At its heart his work rejects Reductionism and replaces it with a world view that embraces ambiguity continual change and continual creativity. Again, the idea of the self is non existent in this theoretical space replaced with an identity of continual becoming other. His achievements and creations across every field he works is be that music, education, commerce and technology have always displayed this mindset and have been tools of communication for Robinson.
In 2014 he was recognised and awarded with the ICTEV/DLTV Educational Leader of the Year Award.
He is considered a leader in the field of Complexity Thinking specifically as it relates to Education and the Arts.

Discography

As leader