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!

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.

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.

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.

Resonating vans, Neon Party in the Car Park

Here's some footage of last month's Noise Club gig in Dundee at Neon Party in the Car Park, which, as the name suggests, was actually in a multi-story car park in Dundee. Mike Loftus and myself were the performers.

During the gig I resonated a van that had been hired for us using feedback, manipulating the sound with the panels on the van and effects, while Mike, among other things, recorded sound live from the performance onto megaphones, which he then placed around the car park, looping the recorded sounds.

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...