Testing Testing performance

My piece Testing, Testing was to be performed in Coventry on the 23rd 24th or 25th of September 2011 but due to an alarming lack of information by the organisers - the actual performance date was not confirmed until the day before!!!), it was impossible to plan travel from Scotland so a number of us were compelled to cancel our various performances and papers.

What a shame!

Visit to WDR Studios Köln

After the Stockhausen Courses I managed to arrange a visit to the WDR Studios in Köln along with Juan Verdaguer and Ignacio xxxx as a guest of retired engineer Volker Müller.

The studio equipment was rescued by Herr Müller after the WDR closed the studio and wanted to throw it away!!!! Since most equipment was designed so brilliantly and at enormous expense, most of it still works perfectly despite being over 50 years old.

Stockhausen Courses 2011

6th to 16th August 2011 saw my second visit to the Stockhausen Courses in Kürten, and this time I took my synths and all the equipment necessary for a performance of Spiral. I was lucky enough to attend a whole seminar course given by Michael Vetter and Natascha Nikeprelevic on Pole, and Spiral. Michael Vetter performed these pieces dozens of times at the 1970 Worlds' Fair in Osaka and subsequently and has recorded an integral version of Spiral for the Stockhausen Verlag.

A highlight of the courses was getting to work on both Pole, and Spiral with Frauke Aulbert, although sessions were a little daunting to start with since I had to use my voice (which I seldom use in a musical context) instead of my synth.

Here we are working on Pole, using Michael and Natascha's notes projected on the wall behind us.


The other main course that I attended was the Intuitive Music Course run by Intuitive Music Weimar. This inspired me to set up an Intuitive Music group in Edinburgh on my return.

Interview with Rolf Gehlhaar

On the 15th of June 2011 I had the great privilege of interviewing Rolf Gehlhaar - composer (and Stockhausen's assistant from 1967-1970). Rolf gave me so much information and made such a great contribution to my research on the performance practices surrounding electronic instruments in Stockhausen's Mikrophonie I that I will be processing it for months!

Here's a screenshot from a short video I took in which Rolf demonstrates some of the filter and fader techniques used in Mikrophonie I on a mock-up of the original machines that I built as part of my PhD research.

Thanks Rolf!

http://gehlhaar.org/

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.

LLEAPP 2011 - UEA

This year's LLEAPP (Laboratory for Live Electronic Audio Performance Practice) was held between the 4th and 8th of May at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Organised this year by the wonderful Bill Vine (PhD candidate at UEA) this was well attended by postgrads from Edinburgh, Norwich and London, although, unfortunately, the Belfast contingent failed to appear this year.

We also had the provocative and challenging presence of Dr. Bennett Hogg (University of Newcastle) and Dr. Simon Waters (UEA) to keep us on our toes and to stimulate more heavyweight discussion, and Prof Georgie Born was also observing us as part of a large AHRC project.

Pingpong by lleapp
I worked on two ideas, one with Lauren Hayes and Anon based on structuring a piece around a game of table tennis.


3 minute(ish) pop song by lleapp

The other piece was structured around a three minute pop song and featured Owen Green on bowed box and voice, and Bill Vine on his custom electronic controller for computer. Listen here.


Videos of the LLEAPP performances are available on Vimeo, although this year's are not up yet...

LLEAPP videos

The end of the Tape Rooms

25th of April marked the closing of the Tape rooms, an analogue studio that I set up with a colleague in Bristol two years previously. It had a good run and we learned an awful lot about tape machine maintenance and picked up some valuable skills regarding studio techniques of the 60s and 70s.

Drezz has since gone on to set up another studio in the Stoke's Croft area of Bristol and I have been refurbishing the equipment and carrying out some modifications to the mixing desk with a view to setting up another studio once the PhD is submitted.