iain armstrong • sound artist

I’ve just completed a new 5 minute piece composed especially for SOUNDkitchen’s STONEsoup event this Friday 4th March at mac, Birmingham. 12 sound artists have submitted up to 5 minutes of composed material or field recordings sourced in Birmingham. The contributions have been mixed by SOUNDkitchen’s artistic director Annie Mahtani into a one hour concert that will be diffused over the BEAST multichannel sound system.

My piece Tesseral Form No. 2 (Residence) draws sounds from my archive of recordings made around Birmingham city centre along with sounds sourced in a couple of houses I’ve lived in in Brum over the years. The work is the second in an ongoing series provisionally entitled ‘Tesseral Forms’ that uses articulated blocks of sound as a structural process much like the tiles in a mosaic. In this piece I was interested in the juxtaposition of internal and external spaces, domestic and public.

tessera |ˈtesərə|
noun ( pl. tesserae |ˈtesərē|)
a small block of stone, tile, glass, or other material used in the construction of a mosaic.

Click on the image for more info about the gig on the SOUNDkitchen website.

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Anvil & Stirrup’s ThousandUnfold has been selected for inclusion in an online jukebox as part of the Audiograft festival of sound art and contemporary music in Oxford this week.

SOUNDkitchen launches their first series of concerts with the Opening Banquet at the Hare and Hounds in Birmingham on 17th February 2011. Here is the flyer with info on all the gigs. More info, artist bios, audio etc on the website.

I’ve recently joined SOUNDkitchen. We are a collective of composers and sound artists with backgrounds in electroacoustic and experimental music. The organisation is the brainchild of Annie Mahtani, ex BEAST,  and is dedicated to promoting the work of composers and sound artists working in the field of sound.

We’re kicking off  with a pilot series of gigs at the Hare & Hounds in Birmingham and one at mac (Midlands Arts Centre) over the coming months. We’ve been busy putting together a programme of emerging and more established electronic music acts from Birmingham and beyond, mixing up current and ex BEAST composers with the likes of modulate, Nic Bullen and Simon Whetham.

I’ll be performing a live laptop set with Antti Saario as Anvil & Stirrup in the April gig and contributing to a new, collaborative composition for the gig at mac in March.

More details at soundkitchenuk.org

My piece Matchine has been programmed in the upcoming Inventionen 2010 music festival in Berlin, Germany.  Jonty Harrison and his crew of postgrads are touring the BEAST system for a series of 7 concerts from 29.07.10 - 01.08.10. My piece is being played in concert 7, 14:00 on 01.08.10 at Kirche St Elisabeth.

Anvil & Stirrup’s ThousandUnfold has been selected for inclusion in SoundLAB VII part of the NMF - New Media Festival 2010, Cologne.

Anvil & Stirrup’s first track ThousandUnfold premiered at Noise Floor 2010 festival on Sunday 17.01.10 at Staffordshire University, Stafford, UK.

I have been invited to present some music at the first Noise Floor festival being held at Staffordshire University on 16th and 17th January 2010. I will be playing Matchine and a new piece reworking some material from a laptop set I played at the ProjectXPresents, Digital Dystopia event in 2008.

My piece Matchine has been selected for diffusion in Nuit Bleue 2009 at the Saline Royale D’Arc et Sanans, France on the 11th July.

www.nuit-bleue.com