A short animation that I composed music for last year has won the Animation category at the Royal Television Society's Student Television Awards. Whoo! 'Ugly Happiness' animated by Manav Dhir & Jing Xin Lieu picked up the award at TV London Television Centre on Tuesday 9 February 2010. Sadly I wasn't able to attend because there weren't enough tickets, and I'm just a lowly composer...The film is an eerie and atmospheric work about the ultimately futile attempts of strange deformed monsters to recapture the lost happiness of childhood.
Directed by David Toop, 'Unknown Devices: The Laptop Orchestra' is an improvising ensemble of students and alumni from London College of Communication. For our performance at the Speaking Out symposium, we performed a selection of text based compositions, including works by Mieko Shiomi, Bob Cobbing, John Stevens and David Toop.
The event was held on 6th Feb. 2010 in the Tate Modern's turbine hall. Heavy... The text scores we used, and the recordings are below.
This is a very short and sweet animation by Anna Filipova that I worked on last year. The quality of the video here is poo, but Anna's original is very lovely...
ELSA is a nifty acronym(!?) for Emerging London Sound Artists - a jolly band of work-shy, tax dodging, student sorts (myself included) who are currently in our 3rd year of a BA Sound Art & Design course at LCC in London. We have recently pooled our substantial talents to unleash a monster compilation, to help fund our sizeable narcotics collection for the end of year shows. You can hear tracks from the compilation on the ELSA hompage by clicking the compilation link on the left. A strictly limited run of numbered CD's will be available shortly. Details on how to acquire one will follow.
I've just finished composing two pieces of music for a contemporary dance project that my mate Mandy Braden is producing. As a result of my research I discovered (googled!) a means of converting text .docs, (or most any file type) into audio. This has yielded some interesting results. The audio files themselves are pretty rough, but I've found uses for them after a bit of editing/processing. The programme I've been using to do the initial conversions is called Audacity, and it is free-ware for Windows XP & Mac OS X. I'll be going into greater detail on this once the performances are done and documented, but for now here is a taste of the music.
Cliff Martinez's score to the 2002 remake of Solaris is one of the most beautiful and memorable pieces of film sound in recent years. (If you are unfamiliar with it then I heartily recommend that you make yourself familiar without delay!) So much so however, that the actual quality of the sound design in the film is criminally overlooked. I'm a great admirer of sound design within the field of sci-fi and fantasy, and in the interest of self-betterment(!?)thought it about time I had a go myself. Below is a short scene from the film, upon which I have inflicted a gross misconduct, in the form of a re-imagined sound track. In space, no one can hear you scream...
Recently I was lucky enough to play with the Improv group Unknown Devices: The Laptop Orchestra.
Unknown Devices is an 'orchestra' of free improvisers playing laptop computers, analogue electronics, turntables, radios, minidiscs, strange sonic devices and (even) conventional amplified musical instruments, led by renowned improviser, musicologist, and author David Toop. It initially grew out of digital improvisation sessions run for LCC BA Sound Arts and Design students as a way of encouraging collective and collaborative music and sound making. Players are a mix of LCC Sound Arts and Design students past and present, staff and students from elsewhere in the University of the Arts. Unknown Devices has collaborated with players from London Sinfonietta on a number of occasions and projects. Earlier in 2008 Unknown Devices: the Laptop Orchestra was shortlisted in the Digital Innovation section of the inaugural Guardian Media awards.
My first opportunity to play with the group was at an event help at CRiSAP, a retrospective look at the work of the influential London Musicians Collective.
WHY! is a short film shot by Mark Wilenkin. Sound design & Foley on this was done from scratch by Matt Appelhans and myself. I took receipt of the film, image locked, yet with zero sound track. Nothing. Everything you hear on this film was recorded after the fact, largely in Surrey at various locations. (Particularly fond of the Church bells - played for us upon request for the purposes of the soundtrack by a very kind Vicar and his bell-ringers - natch). You can watch the finished film here - click on the central image, patience while it loads.
Summer 2009 I was commissioned to score a brief doco for the V&A museum. Barbara Hulanicki, founder of the iconic 60's fashion label Biba, chooses objects from the V&A collection that inspire her.
In 2009 I was commisioned to compose a brief piece that would accompany several short "talking head" style doco's that would be used on the British Council's website. Since 1938 the British Council has been responsible for the British Pavilion in Venice, showing British artists at the longest-running, most prestigious international art biennial in the world: the Venice Biennale of Art. From 1991 the British Pavilion has also been home to architecture exhibitions in the alternate years to the Art Biennale. On this site you can explore the rich history of the British Pavilion from 1895, including archive images, exhibition catalogues, essays, audio and film recordings, and links to more recent collateral presentations from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Artists featured this year include John Cale and Steve McQueen.
This amazing film was made by CSM film and animation graduate Mel Hseih in 2008. He asked me to compose a piece for it, which was an interesting (read - very difficult) endeavour as I had never synced such abstract imagery to audio so closely.
