Reconstructions in Brass

It's been a little while since I updated my blog. Been busy with gigs and projects the past couple of months. I'm still in the middle of it all, but here are a few little updates till I've got more time to write some lengthier posts.

First off is the Noise Club commission from Octopus. For this piece, Reconstructions in Brass, we bent, manipulated and circuit bent a variety of brass instruments for a 2-hour performance in Barrow Park's band stand. It was a lot of fun getting to find new ways of making sound with brass instruments, some relatively straightforward, like a hacked-off trombone with a clarinet mouthpiece, others a bit more complicated, like the circuit bent tenor horn Mike Loftus constructed. Even the geese joined in for the gig... it's amazing how loud they can be!

Hopefully, I'll have an extended video of the event for you all soon, but, in the meantime, here's a short clip to give you a flavour of the day.

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.

Interface Amnesty 3

Interface Amnesty is an event run by SoundNetwork. It shows off new interfaces that artists have been working to control sound/vision/bubbles/and much more. This was the third Interface Amnesty (Noise Club have been at all three), and was part of the Abandon Normal Devices festival. This time the event was held in Noiselab in Manchester.

It was a double-whammy for me, as I was there not only with Noise Club, but with the Inari Noodle project I had been working on.

For the Noise Club stall, we demonstrated a few of the new instruments we'd been working on. Mike Loftus, always the prolific builder, had modified a cello with brake pedals (see clip below), and was also demonstrating his new electronic instrument he'd built with home-made capacitors. I showed off some of the work I've been doing on controlling feedback with physical objects (more of this to come in future posts).



Inari Noodle is an audiovisual noodle bar project by Japanese artist, Inari Nishiki. My role in the project was quite extensive: writing computer-game-type music to use as the project's theme; creating a media player for the audiovisual clips, and getting them to play when a particular type of noodle was selected; and controlling the noodle dispenser using servos controlled by an Arduino. It was really interesting working on the Arduino - so many possibilities - and I think I'm going to use the knowledge I gained in the process to create a robotics project at some point in the future. More to come, then...

In the meantime, here's a short clip of the moment I got the Arduino controlling its first servo.

Noise Club at the World Museum, Liverpool

The DIY Music Day was a co-production between the World Museum in Liverpool, music producer Ross Dalziel and the PRS for Music Foundation. There were quite a few different groups involved, from a restored vintage fairground organ to members of the band a.P.A.t.T. playing some of the gamelan instruments in the museum's collection.

Noise Club was stationed in the insect house. What a great place for making noise, surrounded by bees and ants and all kinds of crazy stuff! This was part performance, part installation, part exposition. We placed pre-recorded compositions around the floor we were on (my favourite being behind the giant model of a fly, complete with moving head), then demonstrated some of the instruments we'd been working on recently; and, of course, always accompanied by the sounds of insects from around the world.

Listen to a recording of some of the day...

St Luke's all-dayer

To coincide with the Bold St Festival, we at Frakture decided to put on an all-day free improvisation event at St Luke's Church in Liverpool (better known as the Bombed-out-church). I played in four different groups on the day: i:Object, Noise Club, the Frakture Big Band, and the Infinite Monkey Orchestra.

Here's a video compilation of the day...

The Frakass Megaphone Choir

Every couple of months I put on a noise night in Liverpool called Frakass. For the August event, Phil Morton of Frakture and myself formed a megaphone choir. Anyone who turned up with a megaphone could get in free and would get to play in the choir. Just too funny!!!

Noise Club at Hazard MMX

Just starting to get round to uploading some documentation of my exploits the past few months. So here's the first bit, Noise Club's project, I Lie in Wait..., at Hazard MMX.

Hazard MMX is a yearly  festival in Manchester run by hÅb and greenroom. The Noise Club project was a playful game of sonic hide and seek. It was performed by myself and Adam Webster. Here's how we described it for the brochure:

Mischievous and playful, a chance discovery and a random event, it could change your life or you could just pass by, unaware. Part installation, part performance this interactive sound work lurks hidden, waiting to take you by surprise. Will you find me? I lie in wait...

After walking round Manchester all day, greatly confusing the happy residents of the city, we went back to greenroom. But we couldn't resist going back out to a nearby tunnel to have a bit of a play... amazing acoustics! Have a look at this short video clip of us...

Thanks to Tamsin Drury for a creating such a fun-filled event!