On Bunhill Row was commissioned by LSO Discovery in 2009 and features Harp, Flute and Viola. Inspired by the Debussy trio, it was commissioned to coincide with a festival exploring the influence of eastern music on French composers at the end of the 19th Century. This is a short extract of the first performance, featuring Laura Holt on Viola, Pat Morris on Flute and Hugh Webb on Harp alongside the LSO Community Gamelan group for whom it was written.
A second performance with Simon Desorgher (flute), Nic Pendlebury (Viola) and Serafina Steer (Harp) and LilaCita took place at the Colourscape festival on Clapham Common in 2010.

A short video of our Exploded Sound tests at LCC this week has gone up on YouTube. It gives quite a good idea of the experience of the piece (one of a number of versions we tried) in which three string chords are analysed and reduced to 32 sine waves, each of which is given a separate location through an individual loudspeaker. From outside the structure the chord is experienced as a whole. By wandering among the speakers individual fragments are heard surrounding the listener who experiences the sound from the inside. In this example three chords alternate through the gradual substitution of partials, so different combinations are heard at each moment. We also had fun with some choral sounds and analysed speech samples which had a very dramatic effect. I have uploaded a brief example of the speech onto soundcloud so you can play it by clicking on the play button below. The recording was made by walking among the speakers with the mic to reveal different perspectives (not available on iToys, sorry).

I spent the day setting up a 32 channel test version of the Exploded Sound project with Jamie Campbell who designed the hardware. The system worked well and I am developing content on it for a few days (If you want to hear it contact me, I’m having a bit of an open day on Wednesday!). The basic idea is to locate individual sine wave components of complex sounds in different positions in space. It forms part of my research at CRiSAP which focuses on the use of space to elucidate sonic structures. We tried a number of sounds and are very excited by the results!

The little film I scored for artist Jeremy Millar and dancers Ni Made Pujawati and Ash Mukherjee last year has now been edited and has appeared on the SEA Arts YouTube channel.
The film is an interpretation in dance of Antonin Artaud’s discovery of Balinese theatre at the Exposition Coloniale Internationale in 1931 which led to many of the ideas put forward in his seminal text The Theatre and its Double. The film is a first step in a larger project looking at western engagement with Indonesian Arts through Balinese Dance and Theatre.

The Exploded Sound is the term I use for a series of experiments into the spatialisation of individual partials in complex sounds. I first attempted some form of spectral diffusion in the Living Steam installation in 1998 and became interested in this area again a few years ago when I started working with the ambisonic cube at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts at Middlesex. Basically the project is about the manipulation of the spatial characteristics of sound and the consequent dislocation experienced by the listener. The image on the left is of a test run of a 32 channel version of the installation set up at LCC in December 2011 using hardware designed for the project by Jamie Campbell. I have put a little more detail on the tests here.

The Two of Us was my original contribution to the book, Playing with Words, a project curated by Cathy Lane at CRiSAP in the University of the Arts London. It was devised for the printed page with no immediate thought of live performance. It occupies two facing pages (see image at the top of this page), one containing a transcription of a message left for me by friend and fellow composer Gordon McPherson, to whom the piece is dedicated, the other containing a pseudo-manifesto statement structured around the text of the message.
The piece has developed a life of its own as a live performance which I have done at the Conway Hall, Tate Modern and at the German launch of Playing with Words in Frankfurt, from which the video was taken. This version is also on the live DVD.