Amphibolous - Rubber Sole EP

Last year, Roger Hill challenged Amphibolous to come up with a track that responded to the legacy of the Beatles for his radio show, PMS. So we got together for a session and recorded a number of short, radio-friendly length tracks, inspired by our task at hand.

We'd got used to playing longer 20 - 30 minute pieces, that take you to different places along the way, so doing a short sharp 3 - 7 minutes was challenging, but fun. We were quite surprised what you can actually fit into that shorter timespan.

We picked one track to send to Roger - i'm looking through you too - but the others turned out too good to leave on the cutting room floor. And so was born the Beetles EP, rubber sole. We picked out the five best tracks, one for each of the four Beatles, plus a billy bonus for Stuart Sutcliffe, the fifth Beatle (or at least one of them).


1. i saw paul mccartney with my girlfriend
2. stuart sutcliffe left the beatles to paint
3. john lennon and i were throwing balls in the cold when i caught one
4. big in fashion george harrison
5. ringo starr was cleaning his dog with a brush when it turned black and vanished

With the EP mixed and mastered, it was time to get the artwork together. We searched the internet for beetles - an interesting activity, if you've ever got an hour or two going spare - and found André Bemand, who keeps, and runs a blog about, giant beetles.

So we got in touch with André to see if he would take a picture of some of his beetles on a boot (with a rubber sole). To our delight, not only was he up for it, he really went to town on it. In a stroke of genius, he created a little zebra crossing for the beetles to cross. And voilà!

Amphibolous are: Adam Webster, Ash Steel, Simon Jones.

Candy Cigarettes

Last year I teamed up with experimental theatre group, the Rat Pit, to create a new multi-sensory theatre piece for the If Only festival that I was part of the curating team for at the Bluecoat in Liverpool. The end result was a new 15-minute work, Candy Cigarettes.

Working together through a series of jams, exercises and improvisations, the Rat Pit (Carly Lindon-Forrester and Georgia Tillery) created an intense non-linear drama that explored adulthood through the prism of children's play, while I devised sonic and olfactory content to accompany and enhance the drama.

Designing smells to fit the piece was a particularly fascinating process. I wanted to keep most of the smells quite abstract, in the same way that the accompanying music was abstract, without an overly literal and simplistic interpretation of the unfolding drama. Instead, I wanted something that could bring a new emotional light to the action going on onstage.

Because we had to create a very concise piece to fit in with the nature of the night, a lot of the original material developed had to be cut... somewhat of a double-edged sword. The work became tighter and more focused, but some of the scenes didn't quite have the time to breathe they really needed. We got great feedback from the performance, and decided to create a full-length version with a view to touring it.

Georgia had started working at Creed Street Arts Centre in Milton Keynes, and they were very keen on the idea. So we all trekked down south for a week of rehearsals, development and, finally, two shows that expanded the work to a full hour. Reviews were great, and we are now planning to take the show to the Edinburgh Festival next year. There is a video of the full-length performance, but, while it's in the editing suite, here's the original from the If Only festival. Enjoy!

New Amphibolous Releases

Last month saw two new Amphibolous releases, in fact within a couple of days of each other.

The first was a release on the Classwar Karaoke label, part of their 0022 survey. In the just over a month since the survey's release it's already been downloaded more than 27,000 times. You can listen to the rest of the release here. Here's our track:

 

The second release was a track we created for Roger Hill's PMS show on BBC Radio Merseyside. He asked us for a track reacting to the legacy of the Beatles. It was actually quite a challenge to create a radio-friendly length track. We had a session in the studio recording a number of short pieces. The single release is the one we sent to Roger, I'm looking through you too. But we have a new EP coming out shortly featuring a few of the tracks. Going with the Beatles theme, the new EP is called Rubber Sole. The EP is all mixed now, and we're just working on the artwork, so the release should be within the next month. In the meantime, you can enjoy the single, with an intro by Roger, and the music video that accompanies it. The video was made with footage of a giant beetle by kraftwerkmod.





Unfortunately, Adam Webster has now moved to Poland, so Amphibolous is on hiatus at the moment, but we're planning a tour of Germany and Poland later this year, so stay tuned for more details.

South-east Asia Tour

In February I went on a short tour of South-east Asia, performing in Singapore and Malaysia. It was a fantastic tour, and I was very impressed by the standard, creativity and supportiveness of the local musicians.

The first stop in the tour was Singapore, a melting-pot of cultures and ideas. I played at the Independent Archive & Resource Center, an artist-led project that aims to be an archive of, and resource centre for, art theory and practices in Singapore. There was a very friendly atmosphere there, as different people dropped in throughout the day to read a book, make musical instruments, eat chicken rice, or just have a chat.

Interestingly, my performance took place at the same time as one of the largest protests in Singapore history, a country where protest is largely restricted. Even so, it was a packed-out audience at the IARC as I took to the stage. The evening consisted of a solo set, followed by a question and answer session, where the audience quizzed me about my work and ideas, then, finally, a group session with some local musicians.



A couple of days before the event, I went along to be interviewed by Jordan Johari Rais, who organised the gig.



Kuala Lumpur was the exact opposite of Singapore. Where Singapore is squeaky clean, and you can even go to prison for chewing gum, Kuala Lumpur is more how you might imagine a large urban centre in Asia, somewhat chaotic and brimming with activity.

In Kuala Lumpur I performed at FINDARS. Whereas the IARC had a very homely feel, with assorted random objects strewn about the place in a slightly bric-a-brac aesthetic, FINDARS was very obviously set up as a venue for performance. The graffiti up the stairs leading to the performance space set the mood, and the black walls inside created an amazing atmosphere to perform in.

The darkness inside the venue gave the ideal opportunity to work with some visuals I had been working on during the trip. The visuals were written in Java using a kind of stochastic fractal process. The other acts were all of a very high standard, and ranged from free jazz, to drone noise, to postmodern genre-defying cauldrons of goodness.

Here are some highlights from my performance:



To finish with, here's the collaborative set from my gig in Singapore. This is one of the best bits about playing in new places, getting to meet and play with different artists, exploring ideas, developing what we do.

Hot Hail in Istanbul

Here's a bit of a montage from my trip to Istanbul in May (yes, it's taken me a little while to post the video).



I played at Arka Oda, a venue on the Asian side of the city, in a gig put on by Batur Sonmez. It was a great night of musical collaborations. The event started out with a set by another Turkish musican, Korhan Erel, who played a fantastic set that was quite acousmatically oriented. Next I played a solo Hot Hail set. After that, we went into a collaborative set, starting off with a duo between Korhan and me, then evolving into a duo between me and Batur. Batur's music is more from a noise background, with continuous generation of sounds, so I acted as the bridge between the two styles. A fantastic collaboration, and a great night!

Oh Oca O

This month I released the first full-length Hot Hail album, Oh Oca O. It's been several months' work of recording, composing and editing, but it's all paid off in the end. The album is available from Probe Records in Liverpool, or from my Bandcamp site, where buy the physical album or download the digital release.




The album is an exploration of perception. Throughout, different aspects of the way we perceive the world are explored and manipulated: from the right-left sidedness of the brain, to notions of continuity and the way our mind perceives objects. Several new stereo techniques are developed and explored, and each track divides the sidedness of the brain's attention in a different way, opening new perceptual experiences.

Another theme of the album is the exploration of both the micro and macro worlds of sound. Everywhere is constant evolution, from the global level right down to microscopic manipulations. There are many layers of fine timbral nuance throughout the album, so for best results listen through headphones. Then you'll make the most of the stereo effects too then.