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.
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 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:
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.
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 Pleqwho 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.
The next SOUNDkitchen event is happening this thursday 17th March at Hare & Hounds, Birmingham. Featuring the first performance from BiLE (Birmingham Laptop Ensemble) and DJ Seb Merrick playing a mix of Balkan and electroacoustic music!
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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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.
