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.

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

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.