Nye Parry

Another new work from Madi Boyd with my audio can be seen at the wonderful Kinetica Art Fair 2013 from next Wednesday February 27th – March 3rd. Fragment Cinema explores moving image as illusion, where the cinema screen is re-invented as sculpture and interacts with the film. Kinetica is at its usual venue Ambika P3, 35 Marylebone Road, NW1 5LS and you can find more details and book tickets on the Kinetica website http://www.kinetica-artfair.com/

On the 15th Feb I will be chairing a session at this symposium on field Recording

In the Field

Exploring the art and craft of field recording

British Library Conference Centre,
London, February 15th and 16th, 2013

A two day international symposium to open up and explore the practice, art and craft of field recording through a series of panel presentations, listenings and screenings.
Starting from the early days of field recording the symposium aims to relate the multitude of contemporary field recording practices to their historical precedents and investigate issues in contemporary practices including how field recordings are distributed to and heard by an audience; recording the unheard; mapping the urban and
questioning the extended nature of the field in a digital networked landscape.

Presenters include:
Ximena Alarcón, Joeri Bruyninckx, Angus Carlyle, Des Coulam, Peter Cusack, Simon Elliott, Felicity Ford, Helen Frosi (SoundFjord), Zoe Irvine, Christina Kubisch, Cathy Lane, Udo Noll, Francesca Panetta, Nye Parry, Davide Tidoni, Cheryl Tipp, David Vélez, Salomé Voegelin, Chris Watson, Claudia Wegener, Jana Winderen, Mark Peter Wright

Ticket information: Full two day pass £25 / £15 concessions
One day £15 /£10 concesssions
Book tickets in advance at http://estore.arts.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=100&deptid=175&catid=52

Curated by Cathy Lane, Angus Carlyle and Cheryl Tipp

A collaboration between CRiSAP http://www.crisap.org (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice) and British Library http://www.bl.uk/
Funded by the Sounds of Europe http://www.soundsofeurope.eu with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

For more information http://www.inthefield.org.uk

The symposium will also celebrate the publication of two new books On Listening and In the Field

Today we had the first rehearsal for Richard Baker’s new work for the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, The Tyranny of Fun for which I have devised the electronics. The piece, which re-conceives Ravel’s La Valse in the world of 80s Disco music features an electronic percussion part which utilises a specially built set of percussion mallets with accelerometer in the heads. The premier is on the 15th February at the CBSO Centre in Berkeley Street Birmingham.

Tomorrow I have a small piece entitled Solo, a Duet in Four Voices, in a little gig at the Old Operating Theatre in London Bridge. The concert focuses on specially commissioned work that uses aspects of this fascinating and historical space. The gig is at 5pm. My piece is for Clarinet + and utilises the unique layout of the space.

Madi Boyd’s amazing immersive 3D moving image installation The Point of Perception can currently be seen in Berlin. The show entitled: Synaesthesia 2, Space and Perception is on at the Art Laboratory Prinzenallee 34, 13359 Berlin and is open Friday – Sunday afternoons from 2 – 6 pm until March 10th. Its a satellite show for this year’s Transmediale festival. The piece now features a specially composed soundtrack by myself. Catch it if you can!

Here is a little installation from the Out of the Cage day at Trinity Laban Conservatoire last week at the Old Naval College site in Greenwich. The day was a centenary celebration of John Cage comprising 10 hours of simultaneous concerts, installations and happenings. My contribution consisted of a small bird cage hung high in a stairwell. Inside is a small speaker playing something that sounds suspiciously like birdsong. In fact it is a single sine-wave partial isolated from a recording of Cage reading his famous Lecture on Nothing. The piece uses similar partial tracking technology to my Exploded Sound project and if you listen very carefully you can hear Cage in the background.

Ok, so my intention to keep the news page updated with all my activities has been thwarted recently but I thought I should at least flag this one up! I am taking the Exploded Sound project to ICMC 2012 in Ljubljana next week. It will be the first real public showing after a great month of R and D at CRiSAP. The piece now exists in a glorious 64 channels thanks to the very hard work of Jamie Campbell on the hardware, and I’m very pleased with how it looks and sounds. It will be shown in the Jakopič Gallery (address: Gosposka 15, Ljubljana, Slovenia) from the 9th to the 30th September.
A new video of the project will be posted here soon.

Next Wednesday the 29th February I will be doing a one off performance with Michael Ormiston the Mongolian Khöömii singer, that makes full use of a unique 77 speaker soundwall in the London Science Museum. The wall belongs to the public perception laboratory Lottolab and I have been working there on a set of real-time processes that extend my Exploded Sound research. In the performance, the extraordinary sounds of Michael’s Mongolian overtones will be exploded into 77 separate pure sine waves each emanating from a single loudspeaker, forming a complex composition of dissected and reassembled voice. All sounds will be generated live and derived from Michael’s performance. The show is part of the Science Museum Lates and will be on the first floor, opposite the Cosmos and Culture Gallery from 8pm sharp for about 20 minutes so catch it if you can!

I’ve just made a little sound score for an exciting project by artist Madi Boyd for the Kinetica Art Fair. The project entitled The View from NoWhen (Spacetime) combines live performance with abstract holographic projections. Objects on stage will move, crumble or bend in relation to the gravitational force exerted by the performer. The space will appear to stretch, grow and shrink or momentarily reflect as it dances with the performer.
Performances will be on Wednesday 8th February 9:45am (press preview), Thursday 9th February at 6:30pm and Sunday 12th at 1pm followed by a discussion with the artist. Details here.

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!

I will be performing my little spoken word projects The Two of Us and My Name is Sarah Simpson (see Words category) at the last nonclassical night at TROY BAR, 10 HOXTON STREET N1 6NG on the 7th December, http://www.nonclassical.co.uk/?p=2067. The event features work by many of my colleagues at Trinity Laban Conservatoire including Dominic Murcott, Gwyn Pritchard, Stephen Montegue and Paul Newland.