the hands are empty – & formerly held something Sonic study for a proposal, 2021

The focus of this sonic study is an unoccupied dwelling; my late parent’s house, the house I grew up in. Clearing it took on aspects akin to an archaeological process – the more you dig the more you find. With much of the content invested with personal experience it became an archaeology of memory.

Here I activated surfaces and objects by the act of touching, striking or mechanically resonating an object or surface revealing its sonic properties and timbres. Capturing the resonant potential of air through systems of mechanical and audio feedback – a process of listening as much as ‘sounding’.

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60/52:01-08(revisited) – 3 minute excerpt from 8’54” original presented at Decamp Volume Schlossgarten Stuttgart, 2021

At the beginning of 2021, in coronavirus ‘lock-down’, I began creating a series of weekly audio works. Something like a sonic sketchbook, or diary. Each piece would be one minute and nine seconds long; with the idea that by the end of the year they would total up to an hour’s worth of sound. Each would in some way reflect experiences, thoughts or encounters from that week. “60/52:01-08(revisited)” was a compilation of these individual works from the first two months of this year. It is a composition of manipulated field recordings, voice, found material and electronic sound.

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Metal and Air – 3-minute excerpt from 6 minute original for Sounds For and Empty House II (Amgueddfa Llwch, Wales), 2022

Metal and Air utilises part of a pre-existing recording made in Plas Bodfa, Wales in windy weather conditions. This was sonically processed via domestic heating systems in a different empty house; my late parents.

The original audio was first played through the central heating ducting from the ground floor and recorded via an upstairs vent. This was repeated with the new recording, this time with microphone and amp locations reversed. This second recording was subsequently transmitted through the body of a convection heater up in the house’s attic, recorded with a contact mic.

The finished work mixes all three re-recordings.

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Blues 4 dad, – 3-minute excerpt from 5 minute original, 2022

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Stairway
London College of Communication, UAL 

Stairway was an installation and durational performance. Stairway utilised an expanded spatialisation of an electric guitar’s output and explored the articulation of space and music made possible through this. It worked in, and with, a space generally viewed as a transitional, rather than performance or exhibition, space – namely a stairwell. The customised six-string electric guitar was fitted with a hexaphonic pickup providing six individual outputs, one for each string. Six guitar amps were distributed vertically within the installation each taking a feed from a different string. These amplified the playing of a series of solo instrumentalists recruited by the artist. These performers were on the lowest level, set away from the ‘playback’ space of the staircase. The musical content of the work was the first 16 bars of Led Zepplin’s Stairway to Heaven. This was played over and over as required to fill the 15 minute duration of each soloists hourly ‘slot’.