Stockhausen's Spiral

Robert Dow's Soundings Festival gave me the opportunity to perform a version of Stockhausen's Spiral für Solisten on the 24 speaker diffusion system in the Reid Hall i Edinburgh on the 14th of May. My version is for synthesizer and the piece also requires shortwave radio. This has been in development for a few months and I was ably assisted, both in rehearsals and on the night for sound projection by Owen Green.

I built a quadraphonic mixer for the sound projection of this and other pieces.
It's based around two Panny & Giles quad panpots and uses some P&G faders from a Neve mixer as well as a Neumann aux send module and four Studer VCAs robbed from some broken 990 channel strips. It has oak end-cheeks rescued from an abandoned wardrobe.

The main idea is that it has a small enough footprint so that the sound projectionist only takes up one seat in the auditorium. For Soundings of course, with 24 speakers, we still needed the big DDA mixer, but for other four channel performances this mixer will be great. Chris Watson was the first to actually use it in a live situation and people seem to like it, which is nice.

This is a shot from a rehearsal. The photos from the performance didn't come out very well unfortunately.