In 2011, Melbourne band The Cambrian Explosion released an album of their interpretations of Felix Ookean's soundtrack compositions. This essay was written for the liner notes of the release.
The Forgotten Music Of Felix Ookean
“Music and the natural world are not mutually exclusive magisteria; they’re two sides of the same coin,” – Felix Ookean, 1985.
Felix Ookean was a true original; as singular as the Australian fauna that he embraced so firmly. Never before has a man combined his seemingly disparate talents – musical and scientific – with such aplomb and enthusiasm. With his characteristic moustache and penchant for unusual hats, Ookean was once one of the most recognisable zoologist/musicians in Australia. And yet he is rarely remembered today by either the scientific community or the local music scene. However, an audience hungry for genuine, original talent is slowly rediscovering this charismatic figure. If one delves deeply enough, there they find Ookean, shining like a star within a sea of mediocrity.
The son of a Jewish Romanian mother and an Estonian father, Ookean was born in Bucharest in 1937. His family immigrated to Australia in 1938, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. The Ookean family settled in Adelaide where his father worked as a freelance piano/accordion tuner while his mother looked after her young son. It was during this time that Ookean developed his love of the natural world, becoming an avid birdwatcher and collector of rocks and fossils. As a precocious teenager he accompanied geologist Reg Sprigg on a fossil collecting trip to the Flinders Ranges, which catalysed his decision to study natural sciences at university. He was also an extremely musically gifted child, learning the flute, celesta, guitar and the acoustic šargija.
In 1955 he was accepted into Melbourne University where he studied music and zoology, achieving excellent marks in both. It was around this time that Ookean formed his first musical ensemble, a country influenced exotica band called ‘The Banjo Sharks’. Amongst the players was fellow zoology graduate and well-regarded marimba player Robert Teal who would go on to become one of Australia’s foremost crypto-ornithologists. Ookean finished his studies in 1959 and began working at ‘Bluebottle Bay’ – an ill-fated local business that tried to emulate the burgeoning success of Phillip Island’s famous penguin parade by showcasing migratory jellyfish. During this time Ookean became interested in producing nature documentaries and began to recruit crewmembers for his nascent production company.
Ookean made his first documentary film in 1966 entitled The Southern Oceans – Life Without A Notochord, focusing on Australia’s native marine life. The film was unique in purposefully ignoring fish, mammals and birds and only featuring invertebrate animals. He felt that including more charismatic animals such as whales, seals or sharks was “too easy”. When asked about his motivation he replied that “anybody can film a dolphin and get a response from an audience. I wanted a challenge – I wanted to try and reveal the charm of the mollusk, the verve of the echinoderm.” The series was aired by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in 1967 and was met with critical applause (and a modest, albeit enthusiastic, audience).
The soundtrack, entirely composed by Ookean, was performed by himself and a group of Melbourne's best jazz session players. The studio sessions were recorded at Ookean’s home studio which he dubbed ‘Sea Grass Meadows’. The personnel that comprised these ensembles were constantly evolving and Sea Grass Meadows was for a time frequented by some of the hottest contemporary jazz players and biologists of Melbourne. The soundtrack was an intriguing blend of avant-garde jazz-fusion, exotica/surf music and Romanian folk influences that perfectly complemented the visuals of the film and was to become his signature sound. Ookean was particularly influenced by the active music scene of his adopted hometown, Melbourne. His favourites were bands such as the all-girl exotica vocal band ‘The Sea Lilies’, Balkans influenced instrumental surf band ‘The Surfin’ Skuas’ and Australian jazz pioneer, “Dr.” Frank Wolfe.
The vinyl pressing of The Southern Oceans – Life Without A Notochord; The Music is notoriously hard to find today, even in Ookean’s native Melbourne, and a copy in good condition can sell for upwards of $20. A single was released from the album, ‘Five Step Waltz Of The Starfish’ which received limited airplay on local radio stations.
Soon after, Ookean headed inland and turned his attention to native bird-life. He took a job as a field researcher for Prof. U. G. Gould, a distant nephew of John Gould and an expert on subterranean bird species. Ookean spent his days cataloguing bird populations in South-Eastern Australia and concurrently collating material for a new documentary series. This culminated in his breakout 8-part series of 1969, Feathered Lives. He later described his intentions as “want[ing] to show the public what it really meant to be a bird. What they felt, how they saw the world. What life is like on two wings – or flippers in the case of penguins.” As with Ookean’s previous work it was picked up by the ABC and the soundtrack was composed him and performed by his collective at Sea Grass Meadows.
Unlike his previous work however, it was a resounding success appreciated by critics and viewing audiences alike. The Radio Times called it “a soaring eagle of a series”. Antipodean Geographic commended it for “finally giving a real bird’s eye view of Australia”. It garnered very impressive ratings for the ABC and turned Ookean into something of a minor celebrity, causing him to remark wryly at the time, “I’m more popular than Darwin now.”
The soundtrack was very popular and was his highest selling release, peaking at #4 on the national soundtrack charts. The album spawned 4 singles: the mournful, Eastern European themed ‘Mynah Key’, the swinging bossa nova of ‘Eatin’ Honey’, the chaotic and experimental high-pitched noise of ‘The Lorikeets Are Restless’ and the minor hit, ‘Twelve Apostlebirds’ – a sweeping orchestral piece which conveyed Ookean’s religious-like respect for his winged subjects. This is one of the few albums of Ookean’s that was re-issued on compact disc and his most easy release to find today. The 45RPM singles are highly valued by collectors however, due to the b-sides containing the birdcalls of each song’s subject species.
The success of Feathered Lives filled Ookean with confidence and an ambition to achieve something truly monumental. It was at this point that he started planning a series that would comprehensively document the entire natural history of the Southern Hemisphere. The project took him seven years, covered almost 50 countries and resulted in his most contentious work yet, Australis – The Other Half. The series was broadcast in 1977 to mixed reviews, but to a predominantly positive public reception. A contemporary review in The Age slammed it for being “pretentious, overblown and unnecessarily grandiose. Ookean’s constant claim that the Southern Hemisphere is the ‘better’ hemisphere only serves to make us all look foolish”. Ookean conceded that the series had suffered many conceptual problems and attributed its more questionable moments to a bout of quollpox he contracted during a tree-climbing shoot in New Guinea. He added “perhaps Australis just wasn’t quite ready for television. Maybe it was too big a series for just one hemisphere.”
Nevertheless, the soundtrack Ookean created for the series was incredibly well received and generated much-needed sales for his production company. The release, a double-LP entitled, Australis – Four Sides Of The Other Half, was an epic and ambitious quasi-concept album that was hailed as his greatest musical achievement. The second LP contains one continuous piece, ‘The Antarctic Suite Parts I-XXIV’, a 43-minute epic that, despite the inconvenience of having to turn over the record halfway through the song, many consider a prog masterpiece. Amongst them is Nick Moody – amateur teuthologist and lead singer from neo-prog band Brontotheramin, who describes the album as “[t]he most fully realised Austral aural approximation ever attempted. When listening to the 7/8 section of ‘Cries From The Giants Of Gondwana’ one can almost see the Diprotodonts”. There was even talk of a rock-opera adaptation, but this was quickly dismissed due to Ookean’s strong personal distaste for musical theatre.
Following the completion of Australis, Ookean found himself, for the first time in his life, unable to decide what to do next. He still had a good standing with the viewing and listening public, but he was simply unable to obtain the big budgets he was used to. In early 1978 he followed his restless muse to his birthplace of Romania and traveled Eastern Europe searching for inspiration. During a dinner party with acclaimed palaeo-ursinologist Baron Béla Nopsca he was introduced to Erich Von Daniken and, for better or worse, Ookean was inspired by his ideas of extra-terrestrials visiting ancient civilisations.
He soon returned home and organised an expedition to central Australia convinced that Uluru was constructed by aliens in prehistoric times as a UFO landing base. It’s easy to judge this notion as ridiculous in retrospect, but the Australia of the late-seventies was far less sceptical than it is today – one need only look at the baffling success of Daryl Somers – and the series, Monoliths From The Heavens? was produced in 1979. However, due to some unfortunate wrangling with his creditors over unpaid debts combined with production delays, the series was not aired until 1985. Although Ookean’s more hard-line scientific friends balked at the series, the space-obsessed public of the time barely batted an eyelid. Neither, it seems, did they watch it. It was to be Ookean’s most poorly received series, and his last major project.
The soundtrack built upon Ookean’s trademark style with the addition of more synthesisers and judicious use of the theramin – indeed some critics described it as ‘overkill’. In reference to Ookean’s use of electronic instrumentation, Trent Skinner of Sci-Fi Hi-Fi Magazine wrote; “Of all the uncertainties surrounding space travel, the one thing Felix Ookean seems certain we will encounter is an abundance of high-pitched whistling noises.”
To compound matters, the indigenous inhabitants of central Australia were so incensed by the series’ claims that a landmark legal case was outlined in which Ookean would be charged with libel, misrepresentation and ‘wanton disrespect of accepted historical fact’. The court-case lost steam however when it became known that, according to the Australian Broadcasting Bureau’s estimation, less than 1000 people actually watched the series. In light of this information the plaintiffs were satisfied that the series would have no lasting effect on the Australian public and withdrew their case. Ookean’s financers came to the same conclusion. Monoliths From The Heavens? was the last moderate-budget documentary series of Felix Ookean’s career.
Felix Ookean was never exactly a household name, but then neither were Wallace, Cropp or Libaek. His influence may have been subtle, but he managed to unite the natural sciences with music in a more invigorating and thought-provoking way than any Australian before or since. He is largely reclusive now, reported to be living somewhere in far-north Queensland, and shuns public appearances. He summed up his own feelings on his work in a rare interview with Antipodean Geographic in 1985: “What could be more in synch with nature than music? Birds were singing long before we ever did. All I’m trying to do is to illustrate the music that is already present in the natural world. To highlight it and bring it into the foreground. If I have managed to achieve that – if only for a moment – in any of my films, then I consider that to be both a scientific and musical triumph."
- Rohan Long, April 2010
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