iain armstrong • sound artist

Image: Antonio Roberts

I’ll be performing with BiLE on 27.01.12 (28.01.12 rescheduled) at Birmingham’s first Network Music Festival. This is set to be a fantastic 3 day festival of international artists discussing, presenting and performing new musical forms and ideas where networking is central to the aesthetics, creation or performance practice of the work. The programme includes Benoit and The Mandelbrots, Barcelona Laptop Orchestra, Glitchlich, Jack Harris and Samuel Rogers and more.

Also look out for the first SOUNDkitchen event of the year on 26.01.12 where we’ll be launching the Network Music Fetival with a selection of Brimingham based electronic acts including Juneau Brothers, Lash Frenzy and Freecode. There is also another opportunity to hear the SOUNDKitchen multichannel radio installation that I composed called Theatre of the Mind.

I will be playing with Antti Saario as Anvil & Stirrup at two events in the coming months.

The first gig is at Falmouth’s School of Noises on Thursday 19th January at the Jacob’s Ladder Inn where we’ll playing a live laptop set and a live electronics improv with double bass player Thanos Polymeneas who’s also performing on the night.

The second is Audiograft 2012, Oxford’s festival of sound art and experimental music. We’ll be playing a live laptop set at the Jaqueline Du Pré Concert Hall on 2nd March at 7.30pm. Also on the bill is our friend and ex BEAST composer David Prior and the fantastic Trevor Wishart.

The Audiograft festival runs from Monday 27th February to Sunday 4th March and includes sound installations and performances from the likes of Lee Patterson and Robert Curgenven, ParkinsonSaunders, Paul Whitty, Max Eastley, Jason Kahn and Patrick Farmer.

Here is a recording of the live laptop performance  I gave at SOUNDkitchen’s Cinema For The Ears on 23rd October 2011. The event was part of the Supersonic Festival in Birmingham.

This is a stereo reduction of a 10 channel set that was played over a multi-channel speaker system courtesy of BEAST.

Live at Supersonic by Iain Armstrong

This recording was made in the Temple of the Reclining Buddha, part of the Wat Pho complex in Bangkok, Thailand. The Buddha’s image is a massive 45 meters long and 15 meters high. The feet are 5 meters long and the soles inlaid with mother of pearl, depitcing the 108 auspicious signs of the Buddha.

Running parallel to the length of the Buddha are 108 brass alms bowls. Visitors can purchase 108 santang coins and pass along the line of bowls depositing a coin in each. These offerings are said to bestow blessings upon you.

In this recording you can hear the hypnotic, polyrhythmic sound of the coins dropping into the bowls against the background murmur of the visitors, all reverberating in the temple’s acoustics.

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This recording recently featured in SOUNDkitchen’s ‘Metal’ installation - a curated selection of field recordings on the theme of ‘Metal’ for their Cinema For The Ears event as part of the Supersonic festival in Birmingham

SOUNDkitchen have just completed a two day event as part of the Supersonic Festival 2011 organised by Capsule in Birmingham. We had our own space in the Zellig building for the weekend which was rigged out with a 20 channel loudspeaker system courtesy of BEAST. Under the title of Cinema For The Ears we programmed a range of events including field recording installations, multi-channel BEAST concerts and live performances from SOUNDkitchen members.

I performed a 30min live set on the Sunday afternoon. I was working with field recordings and prepared material that was predominantly noise based and experimented for the first time with handling this material over multiple channels live. Running Ableton Live I had 8 independent outputs mapped onto a circle of 8 speakers in the space and an additional stereo submix on another two channels going to the desk to be diffused over the whole system by SOUNDkitchen’s Annie Mahtani. It was quite an effective and manageable way of working, allowing me some control of the spatialisation of material in addition to the structure. I recorded the set and I’m working on a stereo reduction that will appear on here soon.

As part of the weekend’s events I also worked with Annie Mahtani on a collaboration with micro-cinema collective Imperfect Cinema. Inspired by their DIY punk roots Imperfect Cinema invited festival goers to record small amounts of footage of the festival on Super 8 cameras which they then collected, digitised and edited into a 15min film. Annie and I collected field recordings from around the festival and compsed a soundtrack for the film to be edited to - all in 48hrs! The final film was screened in the Custard Factory theatre on the Sunday evening.

I’ve just finished a commission from Sound and Music working on an audio installation project with the Bush Theatre in London.

Sixty-Six Books is the inaugural show in the Bush Theatre’s new home, an ambitious project celebrating the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible.  A cycle of sixty-six new works have been commissioned – plays, poems, stories and songs – each of which provide a contemporary response to the themes, stories and ideas in one of the sixty-six books of the Bible. Together they represent an unprecedented commissioning cycle in terms of the scale, range and quality of the writers involved.  They include: Archbishop Rowan Williams, Neil Labute, Wole Soyinka, Jackie Kay, David Edgar, Kwame Kwei Armah, Andrew Motion, Michael Rosen, Carol Ann Duffy and Billy Bragg.

I have recorded and produced twelve of the writer’s responses for inclusion in an installation that uses modifed telephone boxes as interactive listening stations. Users can select, and listen to the twelve responses at their leisure. The phone boxes include responses from Andrew Motion, Jackie Kay, Billly Bragg, Laura Dockrill and Michael Rosen. There are four phone boxes located: outside the Bush Theatre; in the foyer of the National Theatre; at Foyles Boookshop on the Southbank; in the West 12 Shopping Centre in Shepherd’s Bush.

The complete cycle of works will be performed at the Bush Theatre and Westminster Abbey from the 10-29th October. The phone boxes will be accessible throughout this period, during the opening hours of the respective venues. You can book tickets for the performances via the Bush Theatre website, the phone boxes are free.

Here is a short identification track I wrote for the project:

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I was delighted to be asked to join the fantastic BiLE in July. BiLE are a collaborative group of composers and performers of instrumental and electroacoustic music with a shared interest in live performance. They’ve been playing together since the beginning of the year and are developing a growing repertoire of pieces including existing scores, works written by members of the ensemble and improvisations. They have already played several gigs in the UK and Europe.

BiLE plays as a networked laptop ensemble with each performer contributing their own ‘instruments’ via a range of platforms such as MAX/MSP and Supercollider.  They often incorporate live sound sources and experimentation with gestural controllers such as iPhones, wiimotes and Xbox Kinect. Performances also include live visuals.

I played my first gig with BiLE at ArtsFest in Birmingham, Sept 2011. We performed in the impressive Round Room at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Here’s a short video of the performance by Antonio Roberts:

For more info on BiLE check out the website.

The next SOUNDkitchen gig is SONICpicnic on the 29th July at VIVID, Birmingham. We’re very excited about being in a new space and have an extended programme of performances, films, artist talks and food! The line up includes some of the SOUNDkitchen team, returning friends and exciting new acts.

We have a mutli channel listening room with a 16 channel speaker tree and I’ve contributed a piece that will be spatialised in this space.

More info on the SOUNDkitchen website.

Sunday 18th July 2011 was World Listening Day, an international call to spend some time listening to your soundscape on the anniversary of R. Murray Schaefer’s birthday. Schaefer defined the concept of the ’soundscape’ in his book Soundscape: Our sonic environment and the tuning of the world and helped establish the World Soundscape Project both significant in the formation of the area of study now known as Acoustic Ecology.

I wanted to participate in World Listening Day but it was raining in Birmingham. So I listened to the rain for some time and recorded the sound it made falling on the plastic rubbish bins outside my kitchen window. I used contact mics taped to the underside of the bin lids.

It was the first time I had recorded anything in a while. It was nice to engage with sound again in such a focused way, to spend time enjoying the pleasure of simply listening. I listened for quite a long time but you can listen to some short excerpts if you like.

Rain on Wheelie bin lid

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Rain on plastic rubbish bin lid

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The next SOUNDkitchen event is on Thursday 23rd June 2011 at Hare and Hounds. We are very excitied about our headline act Pleq who is joining us all the way from Poland. Pleq is the solo project of Bartosz Dziadosz, an experimental musician who combines elements of drone, down tempo, glitch and modern classical. He creates his work by fusing together independently synthesized sounds, often incorporating violin, the unexpectedly melancholic sound of a piano and sometimes female vocals.

Also on the bill is Birningham based Mark Harris, no stranger to SOUNDkitchen having performed at our opening gig with modulate and one of the contributors to our first collaborative project STONEsoup. He will be performing a solo laptop set.

Fianlly we are welcoming Leicester based turntablist and composer James Kelly to perform a live vinyl remix of his studio album Transformation of the Mind with live vocals from Ola Szmidt.

Check out the links and SOUNDkitchen website for artist bios and soundcloud audio samples.