New release: Music of the Spheres

I don't often write drone music, but I was recently asked by noise=noise to write a drone piece for their event, A Midsummer Night's Drone, a celebration of the summer solstice on the Suffolk coast in which drones would be played from sunset until sunrise the next day. They were asking for work that explored the mathematics of the solar system, so I created a piece using the notion of 'the harmony of the spheres'.



The concept of the harmony of the spheres originated with the Pythagorean philosophers of ancient Greece. Using the ratios of the orbits of the planets, they drew analogies between music, mathematics, geometry and astronomy. Harmonies are also ratios, and so the orbits of the planets could be thought of as one giant harmony encompassing the solar system. But this music was not necessarily one of actual sound, but rather conceptual sound: a mental music using the power of the human brain to abstract reality and make connections between ideas. 

The idea re-emerged with the likes of Johannes Kepler, whose ‘musica universalis’ again connected geometry, cosmology, astronomy, harmonics and music in one enormous and powerful concept. 

In exploring this concept, my piece, Music of the Spheres, uses the ratios between the average orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris as the basis of its harmonic development. To govern the relative weighting of each harmony I used the mass of the respective body, eg. Jupiter being the most massive, it was the loudest. I wanted to get something across of the extreme scale of the solar system, both in terms of size and timescale, so opted for a very slow and gradual development. This would allow me to keep the feeling of a drone, while having a continuous evolution of the sound.

The a.P.A.t.T. Orchestra: Musical Settings Part I

On Sunday I played with the a.P.A.t.T Orchestra in a concert that included work by Cornelius Cardew, Liverpool composer, Richard Harding, and Argentinian composer, Alan Courtis. The concert was the first part of a series of events that will take in various unusual locations in and around Liverpool. This one was at the bandstand in Sefton Park.

The first piece was Alan Courtis' In-Formed Music for newspaper ensemble, which was much as described on the can: creating sounds and textures using newspapers, which had been supplied by the Echo newspaper. More interesting was the next piece, Richard Harding's Untitled, which, while tonal, used aleatoric and improvisational processes to create shifting clouds of sound. Finally came Cardew's piece, Paragraph 7 of The Great Learning. The work is for voices, and with the 23-strong ensemble sounded quite stunning, resounding in power and beauty in equal measure. Using guided improvisation, Cardew's piece starts with dense and dissonant harmonies, slowly evolving into a sparser harmonic field, though still retaining the power of the massed voices.


Here's a short article about the event.



There are also some photos of the concert taken by Michael Pace-Sigge.

New Hot Hail release on Electronic Musik: Utrum

Last week a new piece of mine was released as part of a compilation album by net-label, Electronic Musik. The piece is called Utrum, from the Latin for 'whether', and was released under the Hot Hail name. Sparse and desolate, it explores continuous evolution of sound and timbre, while developing what Stockhausen called 'moment form', the idea of taking a single instant of time and stretching it out to examine it microscopically. The piece uses a variety of sound sources, including my newly constructed trombone-clarinet hybrid. There are a lot of other interesting works on the compilation too, so be sure to check them out as well.

DJing and Free Improvisation

While I was delivering a series of workshops at Band on the Wall in Manchester recently, I was interviewed by Dan Leach for an article about the connection between DJing and free improvisation. The article explores the ways in which an improvisatory approach can help DJs, and is now available online.

Remscapes: therapy through sound

I was commissioned recently by an EMDR therapist to write a music therapy piece for a client of hers. The brief asked for a piece based on the ideas of EMDR therapy (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) and using singing bowls as the sound source. After creating this version, I then wrote a second piece using the same techniques, but creating a more artistically-based work. I've released both as an album on Bandcamp under the Hot Hail name.



EMDR therapy uses bilateral sensory stimulation - sight, touch or sound. It is an established psychological technique that is used to treat trauma and anxiety. It was first developed by an American clinical psychologist, Dr Francine Shapiro, in the 1980s.

Since then a wealth of research has been conducted demonstrating its benefits in treating psychological trauma arising from experiences as diverse as war related experiences, childhood sexual and/or physical abuse or neglect, natural disaster, assault, surgical trauma, road traffic accidents and workplace accidents. Since its original development, EMDR is also increasingly used to help individuals with other issues and performance anxiety. EMDR has been found to be of benefit to children as well as adults.

If you are interested in finding out more about EMDR therapy, go to the EMDR Association's website:
www.emdrassociation.org.uk/about-emdr-therapy/

Feedback Prototype Test

I've just completed the first prototype for my interactive audio-visual-haptic project, Feedback. The work uses the sense of touch to guide the audience through its interactions with the piece and each other, making the audience’s engagement literally ‘hands on’. The project extends my work in the manipulation of feedback with physical objects. Passing feedback through the surface of a beach ball, the audience can change the sound by manipulating the beach ball. The video was recorded on my phone at Red Wire Studios, Liverpool. The prototype was funded by a research grant from Frakture.

Here's a short video of the first test of the prototype.

Hot Hail: new solo project

I've started a new solo project called Hot Hail, a solo extension of what I've been doing with Noise Club for the past 8 years. I've got a few tracks completed already, some released by myself on Bandcamp, and a track in an upcoming sampler release from net label, Electronic Musik (I'll post it here when it's released).

Here's my first completed release under the Hot Hail name.



The piece is called coram, from the Latin for 'in the presence of' or 'before'; a symphony of sounds, shifting through evocations, moods and ideas, exploring subjective perception and constructed meaning. The sonic landscape is made up of metamorphosing timbres and clouds of sound; sometimes the textures are jagged and moving, other times the music is supremely desolate in its delicate beauty.

The entire piece is performed with egg slicer and feedback.

Noise Club BBQ performance

It's been a little while since I've updated my blog... busy with lots of projects, as usual. I've been uploading a few videos to the net of performances from last year. Here's a bit of a gem... it's a Noise Club performance I was in at the Bluecoat's If Only...! night in Liverpool. For this gig, we decided to have a noise barbeque, complete with homemade burgers: a food performance. Surprisingly, the contact mics we made actually withstood the burning flames of the hot BBQ for quite some time!

WARNING: EXPLICIT LYRICS

Nektar 2017 Volume 3

My latest composition, The Closeness of Being, has just been released as part of volume 3 of Nektar 2017. The piece was composed under the Noise Club name, and was a response to Nektar 2017's theme of Macro / Perception / Micro : Evolution.

You can listen to my work here...

And the whole compilation can be found here...

The entire piece is built out of a very small number of initial sound fragments that are put under the intense scrutiny of the microscope. I wanted to capture a sense of moment, an exploration of that moment through time by elongating it beyond the instant of its existence. The fragments of sound are explored and developed in themselves and in their connections, creating a continuous evolutionary process that takes us on a journey that has no length. A moment is but an instant, and yet it is connected to every other moment; networks of possibilities develop in dynamic relationships that are constantly changing as each new moment arrives. A moment is not a singularity, it is an evolutionary process, the past changes with the present, the future spreads anew. Like all such evolutionary processes, there comes a point at which the quantitative changes in the relationships between the underlying dynamics beget a qualitative change, the moment is born anew, a revolution.

Musically, the piece explores the idea of Klangfarbenmelodie (sound-colour melody), as well as my own theories of continuous rhythm and melody, and the pitch-rhythm-form continuum.

PRSF New Music Plus performances

It was a busy week for me last week, particularly the Thursday (16th Dec), when I played at two consecutive performances to mark the culmination of the PRS for Music Foundation's New Music Plus partnership. The New Music Plus project consisted of a set a of year-long partnerships between the PRSF, new music producers and prominent venues and cultural organisations. The two performances I played in on the final night were:

'The Intergalactic Mashup King'
Organised by Ross Dalziel with his partnership organisation, National Museum Liverpool - World Museum. We got to play in the planetarium at the World Museum, performing along to the planetarium's show about the solar system and the Universe. A dream come true! In fact, this concert was the first of its kind at the planetarium, and was to mark the 40th anniversary of its opening. As well as Ross and myself performing, there were also Glenn Boulter and Mark Pilkington. We started out with a composition of Mark's that melted into one of my compositions, before we all started improvising along together. Great show, and amazing how dark it gets in there!

Setting up at the planetarium

Opening Party for FACT and Tate Liverpool's Nam June Paik exhibition
The next gig was organised by Glenn Boulter in partnership with FACT and Tate Liverpool, and was the opening event for their joint exhibition of the work of Korean artist, Nam June Paik. The event took place at the Kazimier, which is a great venue. The group this time was a new duo that myself and Adam Webster of Frakture have set up called 'the white snow leaves imprints in the dawn'. In fact, we set up the duo in response to the commission to do a Nam June Paik inspired piece, but we're planning to take the group further and have a second work ready to go. The piece we created for this performance was called One, after Paik's piece of the same name. While Adam played the cello, I affected his sonic output. We then simultaneously sent out the clean and affected signals to the PA. At the same time we projected some of the computer generated visuals I've been working on, using a second projector and a camera to capture the visuals and project them back into the same space, creating a visual feedback loop.

Photos by Glenn Boulter

 

Sound Relay

Last month I played in a project called Sound Relay, which was a collaboration between Ensemble 10/10 (the Liverpool Philharmonic's contemporary music ensemble), and the a.P.A.t.T. Orchestra. The project was part of the Liverpool Biennial's Long Night.

The musicians were split into groups starting at different locations. I was stationed initially at FACT. Starting at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, the first group of musicians walked to FACT, playing along the way; then we went to the Bluecoat, still playing; and made our final stop at Tate Liverpool, where we split up into different groups, each in a separate room in the gallery.

Here's a video with highlights of the whole event.