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.

Amphibolous - Occupying the Mainstream

Amphibolous' occupying the mainstream was a commission for If Only's two-week 'occupation' of Gallery 2 at the Bluecoat in Liverpool.

Adam Webster taking a spin on the turntables in Gallery 2

The piece consisted of an a cappella vocal performance by the trio that used streaming technology to create a unique audience perspective, seen from the individual points of view of the performers. To do this we taped mobile phones to our heads, sending the three video streams to a TV in the gallery and the audio to the sound system. The ultimate lo-fi hi-tech action.

The idea was to start as normal: a performance in a gallery. However, the stream allowed us to go exploring - through the rest of the Bluecoat, and out into the streets of Liverpool - while the audience inside the gallery could still watch the performance from the comfort of their seats. This also created a second audience, the people of Liverpool, who caught a primetime showing of a unique happening. Finally, after our adventures around town, we headed back to the Bluecoat for the grand finale.

The project offered a number of ideas to play with. Firstly, because the audience could see from each of our perspectives, we didn't have to always be together. We could split up, combine in different configurations, and come back together, creating a range of dynamics to be explored.

The piece was part improvisation, part composition. In order to exploit the different combinations, 'textures' and dynamics of the journey, we decided not to plan an exact route, but rather set meeting points along the way. We also came up with a number of strategies to create larger scale forms in the piece: when it would be more appropriate to start splitting up; when we should come together; points where we should run to increase the pace of the action.

The resulting piece was a lot of fun. It is always fascinating to see the response to public interventions like this. Well, you can see for yourself. Here's the video...



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!

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.

AudioChem: The Sound of Chemistry

AudioChem is a software instrument that lets you play the sound of the different chemical elements.

I wrote the software back in 2008 as part of my undergraduation dissertation. It takes the emission spectrum (see below) of each element and turns it into a harmony, creating a unique sound. The software was written for Apple Mac and runs on OS X, up to OS 10.6. The download link is below. I'd really appreciate any feedback on the software, as it's still really in beta.






DOWNLOAD THE SOFTWARE

AudioChem is a software composition. I call it a composition since it did not assemble itself: it required construction on the basis of aesthetic principles. It is an example of data sonification, taking information about the elements of the Periodic Table as its starting point. In this respect, it is a totally systematic work, and yet both aesthetic choice and aleatory form are intrinsic elements of its construction and final form. It is an example of a Gesamtkunstwerk: a synthesis of different artforms that links general and specific, aesthetic and intellectual, forms of expression to create ‘super-complete thoughts’, denoting actions, things and qualities all at once. It also uses continuous change within the form-rhythm-pitch spectrum, while separating itself into discrete, perceivable objects. In this way, it brought together many of the different areas of thought that preoccupied me at the time.

At the time I wrote AudioChem, I was searching for ways to organise microtonal harmony into cohesive 'tonalities'. There seemed four main approaches possible:

• The first approach is to use some sort of system, a set of formulae or algorithms. This was the approach used by the Serialists, for example, when tackling the issue of how to create cohesive 12-tone tonalities;
• The second is more akin to musique concrète. If we view the world as the result of a set of processes or algorithms, the end product will have a certain kind of unity that we then simply record in the field and play back at home;
• The third could be viewed as either an abstraction from, or an extension of, the second, collecting data from the real world to then turn into audible sound. This data sonification approach is the one I took here;
• The final one is to use the creative imagination to provide a cohesive unity, for example in improvised performance.

I later somewhat rejected data sonification as a really fruitful avenue of aesthetic investigation, for reasons it would take too long to go into here. However, the results in this piece were intriguing and certainly worthy of note.

In terms of the sound, the data displayed is the emission spectra of the elements: the wavelengths of light emitted by the electrons of each element as they drop to a lower orbit round the nucleus of the atom; these wavelengths are then transposed into audible wavelengths of sound.

Here is an example of the kinds of sounds the programme generates:

Amphibolous release on EM Records

The latest Amphibolous track is out now on EM Records' OuTpUt SeVeN compilation. Helping Blind People is the culmination of several recordings we made at a garage in Everton. It's a prelude to where our music is moving, and we're planning on working on a new album soon, as well as a track for the BBC, so plenty in store for all you avid listeners.

In the meantime, here is the release:

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!

Uaxuctum | Residency & Exhibition

Monday sees the opening of my new exhibition, Uaxuctum. The project is part of a month-long residency in the virtual world of Second Life, running from 1st - 31st August. The residency is sponsored by the Linden Endowment for the Arts. The work was created under my Second Life name, Cajska Carlsson. To visit the exhibition, you will need a Second Life account, which is free to set up.

Opening Event
Monday 6th August | 3pm Second Life Time
Tuesday 7th August | 12am British Summer Time
Venue link: http://tinyurl.com/uaxuctum

Uaxuctum is a visual re-imagining of a piece by the 20th Century Italian composer, Giacinto Scelsi.

Scelsi was a highly eccentric composer, living mostly in isolation, apart from an assistant who would write his music down. In 1966 he wrote Uaxuctum, a piece about "the legend of the Maya city, destroyed by themselves for religious reasons".

The re-imagining is an exploration of structure and form, light and dark... a mythical structure that will be torn down to make way for something new. With the death of each civilisation, a new one is born. The world progresses through these revolutionary upheavals, but rarely does a society chose its own destruction. Uaxuctum is a moment of choice lost in time.

As well as the opening of the exhibition, I'll be running some other events at the site during the residency. I'll post more details as they arrive.

Of Sound and Silence

Last week I organised a concert featuring John Cage's 4'33" and Yves Klein's Monotone-Silence Symphony, as well as works by local composers, including myself. The concert was the fourth in Frakture's series of acoustic music nights, Acoute, and took place on 7th June 2012.

In programming the event, I wanted to explore the relationship between Klein and Cage, between sound and silence. Both pieces were written within 3 years of each other. The composers were both interested in Zen Buddhism. Cage's piece was influenced by Rauschenberg's monochrome paintings and Yves Klein is most famous for his blue monochromes.

Klein's original version of the piece had 20 minutes of one continuous sound, followed by 20 minutes of silence. On the night, we presented a 'medley': 4'33" of all one sound, followed by John Cage's silence (apart from a rogue note in the third movement ;) You can watch a video of the performance below.

My piece, Of Sound and Silence, was written in response to Cage and Klein's. In it, I explored the idea of a  single note containing tension, tension that is only released in an explosion of harmony. I also explore 'silence' as a means to create highly textural, or timbral, music. One of the goals I set myself in this piece was a continuation of much of my work for orchestral forces of recent years, the democratisation of musical performance. Using a text score with a conductor, I set out to create highly complex textures and forms that would be impossibly virtuosic for the vast majority of performers.

A few years ago, I started using more aleatory techniques, alongside guided improvisation, in my pieces with this goal in mind. I wanted to create music with complex textures that could be played by musicians from a wide range of playing abilities. After discovering Stockhausen's text scores, I decided to try out the idea. Now musicians didn't even need to be able to read conventional notation, opening up performances to an even wider public.

One of the strengths of aleatory form is also its weakness. It's very easy to create textures that expand, diffuse, grow more complex and polyphonic over time, however the reverse is much more difficult to achieve. One of my aims in Of Sound and Silence was to find mechanisms that could coalesce the music, bring it together in moments of unity. This is something I will explore further in my next piece.

Here is a video of the performance:



The night also featured works by local composers, Richard Harding, Lucia Dunbar, Alex Raimi-Scott. If you go to the Klein & Cage video below, their pieces are also part of the same playlist.

Yves Klein - John Cage medley
Performed by the Novo Ensemble
Conducted by Simon Jones

The Geometry of Flux | UWA Centenary

The Geometry of Flux | UWA Centenary

Yesterday I entered the University of Western Australia's Centenary 3D Open Art Challenge, a prize for 3D art created in the virtual world of Second Life. A few years ago I was one of the winners of the UWA's Imagine art prize under my previous Second Life name of Snubnose Genopeak. Since then, the UWA has worked tirelessly to promote the Arts in Second Life, and I was pleased to be able to support their centenary celebrations.

For my entry, I wanted to celebrate not the UWA's past, but their future, and the work they have done to support cutting edge developments in art. My submission is a kinetic sculpture called The Geometry of Flux, and was entered under my Second Life name, Cajska Carlsson. It is an exploration of the future of form and content, a geometry that constantly evolves into ever new forms. The sound component of the installation similarly generates evolving forms in a continuous evolution. It was composed using only feedback, though this is disguised by the ethereal nature of the sound.

The exhibition will be open throughout June and July 2012. You can visit it by following this link. You will need a Second Life account, which is free.

Here is the description that accompanies the piece.

Form and content are linked together through a dialectical process in shining unity.

Constant evolution...

development...

a movement towards, but never reaching...

never repeating...

Discard the old semiotic forms of meaning, that endlessly recycle the experience of the ages.

Create a new form of sensory-motor meaning.

Meaning through direct experience : of the senses : of movement : construct a new world.

New Amphibolous release

We've just released the first Amphibolous single, He Leans to the Left. Well, I call it a single, but it's just over 20 minutes long, and with no B side, but then that's often the score with experimental music. It's available for free download, or you can by the mini-CD for £4.



The single was recorded in the run up to a gig we played in Manchester last month. It's one continuous take with very minimal editing, so is quite reflective of our live sound. The theme for the track was a record that Ash found in a charity show, The New Maths. Fantastic! There's some really interesting manipulation of a sine wave record that Ash used as well. Enjoy!

If Only...! There and Back Again

Last month I organised If Only...! with Roger Hill. If Only...! is a night of varied performance run at the Bluecoat in Liverpool. Two of my projects were included in the night, both interactive installations in which the audience would become the performers.

The first project was Inari Dive, a collaborative project with Japanese artist, Inari Nishiki, exploring the experience of diving. The project was Inari's brainchild. My part of the collaboration focused on the soundtrack. Participants would be blindfold and given wireless headphones, cutting off their senses from the outside world. They would then navigate through a labyrinth of ropes while the soundtrack played through their headphones. The track explores ideas of depth in different ways, and uses a new way of transforming sounds into each other I have been developing using Pure Data. Here is a link to the track:


The second project was The Sensorium of Sensational Scents, an olfactory-visual installation that used a range of perfumes I made from a wide variety of unusual ingredients. While smelling the scents, the participants' reactions would be videoed and projected onto the wall of the room, turning the audience into performers. I'll be releasing my range of perfumes soon, and they'll be accompanied by a free download code for my album, Oh Oca O. You can see some pictures from both installations below. The pictures are by Dan Williams.

In creating the night, Roger and myself wanted to explore the notion of performance. What is it? And who are the performers? We wanted pieces in which there would not just be audience members watching performers on a stage, we wanted to include work where the audience themselves would become performers, such as the blindfold participants of Inari Dive, navigating their way through the labyrinth. We also wanted to explore the idea of art as experience, so included projects that worked on a wide variety of senses. Sight, sound, touch, smell, equilibrium were all explored, and we finished the night with taste, as provided by Squash Nutrition. Here's a short video with highlights of the night's events:

 

Circuits Music Night

In October, I played at a new alternative music night at Mello Mello in Liverpool called Circuits. It was a really amazing mix of acts, covering a range from noise to electronica to hip hop. I'm looking forward to seeing more of these nights this year, but, in the meantime, there's a short YouTube clip from my set below.

Bradley Fold Allotments Project

Yesterday I went to Bradley Fold Allotments in Manchester as a visiting artist. The arts project is run by Elizabeth Wewiora, who invited a series of visiting artists to come and create work in reaction to the allotment environment. You can read more about the project on her blog.

I spent the day taking a lot of recordings of a variety of sounds from around the allotments. There was really no shortage, and you could easily spend more than one day recording there, but all good things must come to an end. Possibly my favourite part of the day was donning a bee-keeper's outfit to go and take recordings from inside a bee hive.

Now that all the recording is done, I'm working on a new piece using the sounds I've collected, which will be installed on the site for an open day showing work by the artists who have been to visit. The show is on Sunday 11th September 2011 and is open to the public during the day.

Here are some photos from my visit there.

Hot Hail on a Swan Pedalo at FON

Earlier this month, I played a Hot Hail set at the FON Festival in Barrow. I played in a swan pedalo of all things in a lake in Barrow Park! The 'open source' swan pedalo is run by Re-Dock, a group based in Liverpool right across the hall from my studio at Red Wire. Over the two days of the festival, John O'Shea and Dave Lynch broadcast a live radio show to radios stationed around the park, and also streamed live on the internet. My turn came on the Saturday. The swan pedalo makes for some great source sounds, being made of hollow plastic, so I put a contact mic on the pedal mechanism and also got the sound of the water lapping up against the sides. Then I got out my collection of objects and effects and performed a live set, which is quite tricky trapped in a small seat on the water with a life jacket on! Here are some pictures by Re-Dock of the project.

Black Forest Orchestra live at the Woodland Gathering Festival

Here's a recording of a set I played at the Woodland Gathering Festival in July with the Black Forest Orchestra. The group is made up of members from several other experimental music groups, Shaun Blezard from Clutter, Ian Simpson from Noise Research, and Glenn Boulter from Focal Gaol. The Woodland Gathering is a two-day festival run at Fellfoot Wood in the Lake District by Radio Black Forest. The recording was made and broadcast by Phantom Circuit, a programme broadcasting "strange and wonderful sound waves". Go to about 6 minutes in for the Black Forest Orchestra set.

Phantom Circuit #80 (17th Aug 2011) by Phantom Circuit on Mixcloud

I'll post some photos from the festival here soon, so watch this space...

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.

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.

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.

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.