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.

Chris Watson workshop

Chris Watson was in Edinburgh from the 20th to the 22nd of April 2011 and gave a wonderful workshop in which he was amazingly generous with sharing his tips tricks and techniques on field recording. Having worked for the BBC for years he had brilliant stories and he has been able to develop some really useful and unusual techniques for recording all sorts of things.

I made some parabolic reflectors specially for this workshop and all three were used to excellent effect.


The focus of our activities was to record the dawn chorus in George Square in the centre of Edinburgh, and after a bit of editing we presented our recordings as part of an evenings concert for Martin Parker's Dialogues festival in Inspace.

Chris played a selection of sound recordings and soundscapes through a quadraphonic sound system and I lent him my homemade quadraphonic panner for the gig. He was able to pan the echo-location sounds of Orcas around the audience to create a thrilling underwater soundscape, and the whole range of sounds was absolutely fascinating.

Edison Cylinder Recording Session

Aleks Kolkowski, hardcore phonographer, invited me to his studio on the 6th of April to record two Edison Cylinders as a contribution to his Phonographies project.

For the session I used a homemade circuit based on the STEIM Cracklebox but with three similar circuits all joined together. The 9V battery powers a 12" Celestion G12 speaker and the sound is projected from there straight into the recording horn of the Edison Phonograph.

We recorded two pieces both lasting two minutes (the maximum length for a brown wax cylinder at 160rpm).  The first was fairly straightforward but for the second Aleks experimented with a sound-on-sound technique, actually cutting the groove in two passes.

You can hear the results here.










Photos by Aleks Kolkowski.


www.phonographies.org

trashcomplex.wordpress.com
blog.frieze.com/phonographies

Research Seminar - Liverpool Hope

Robin Hartwell very kindly invited me to give a music research seminar on 2nd of March 2011 at Liverpool Hope University.

The seminar was based on the research presented at the ICMPC in Seattle in 2010 and was entitled:
Noise and Fidelity: Poles Apart? or What we might have lost by getting computers to do things for us.

Robin is an excellent host and  had a great setup of a decent record player and some lovely old speakers - B&W or Altec (I can't quote remember), which sounded lovely and allowed me to play lots of records in an appropriate setting.