Please Find Enclosed

A collaborative installation piece I worked on with photographer Alyona Lariovna at LCC in June of this year. Taken a while to get round to posting. Sorry!

Please Find Enclosed from Rory James [Corsair] on Vimeo.

The Dawn

My second collaboration with Director Manav Dhir and Sound Designer par excellence Peter Warnock. This one is bad ass. Fo' Sho!

Dawn from Rory James [Corsair] on Vimeo.

'Me Julie...

Over the Summer of 2010 I worked on a version of August Strinbergs classic play "Miss Julie". The play was adapted from the original and directed by Anna Thomson, an MA Theatre Direction student at St Mary's in Twickenham. The play explores the psychology of a passionate woman - Miss Julie. At the turn of the 20th century when psychology was a new science, Strindberg focusses upon the battle between the sexes, the class war and an amazing power struggle between Jean, the valet, and Miss Julie the aristocrat's daughter. Miss Julie must fall down or be torn down (or does she fling herself?) from her ivory tower. She is compelled to sink to the lowest depths...

The play was performed for two nights in June at the Battersea Arts Centre in London.

The Ugly Happiness

I've finally been given the all clear to post this, and very happy about it I am! We won the Royal Television Society award for best student animation last year for this one. Rightly so, the animation is beautiful. Enjoy!

The Ugly Happiness from Rory James [Corsair] on Vimeo.

Watching Millie

A recently completed LCC 2010 graduate film, directed by Tom Law. The sound and music are by Matt Appelhans and myself, respectively. Our version of the sound track wasn't used in the final edit, in favour of a more austere affair. C'est la vie.

Here's a sample from the soundtrack that wasn't used.

Watching Millie by CorsairUK

Blue Waters

This little gem has been M.I.A. for some time. I wrote this track in 2005(!) when I was sharing a house with my buddy Ventriloquist. He spent one hot summer night sitting out in our garden listening to this track on his mini-disk player over and over, and penned the lyrics in one sitting. The film was made a couple of years afterwards by Tom Collinson and deals with the nature of masculinity in a changing society.

S.A.V.E.

From a documentary I composed the music for in 2009 for the charity group WOMEN WITHOUT BORDERS. The documentary features 3 women: an ex-member of an Islamist organisation in the UK, a pioneer against violent extremism in Northern Ireland and a young woman affected by terrorism in Madrid. This Women without Borders SAVE / Sisters Against Violent Extremism feature was produced by Zia Trench.

"Aurora"

This is the sister piece to 'Transfer' (see earlier posts), performed on the 22nd March by 3rd yr Link Dance studenets at Islington's Urdang Academy.

From the show 'Projections'
3rd Year Link Dance group at The Urdang Acadamy. London UK
Choreographer: Mandy Braden.
Music: Orion By Corsair.

Yo MTV Rocks!

Towards the tail end of 2009 MTV came to the animation dept at LCC offering FDA animation students the chance to make an ident for the channel. The project was to be Christmas themed, and if MTV liked any of the student's efforts then they would air them for a month over Christmas. Myself and my buddy Peter Warnock were appraoched by Manav Dhir, and Caspar Seale-Jones, both on the animation FDA, to make the soundtrack to their submission. Peter took care of sound design, whilst I made the music. Ours was the only ident that got aired. Bo! Selecta-ta-ta...

"Transfer"

On the 22nd March, 3rd Year Link Dance students at the Urdang Academy in London performed two pieces for their degree show - "Projections". The two pieces were choreographed by the stupidly talented Mandy Braden and are entitled 'Transfer' and "Aurora". In her infinite wisdom Mandy approached me to compose scores for these pieces, and obviously I was suitably humbled at the opportunity. I can safely say that to sit in the audience on the opening night, watching 18 dancers throwing themselves around to your music is a goose-bump inducing experience, and one of my proudest as an artist. This video is of the 1st piece - Transfer, Aurora will follow shortly. (Film shot and edited by Chris Jones).

From the show 'Projections'
3rd Year Link Dance group at The Urdang Acadamy. London UK
Choreographer: Mandy Braden.
Music: Grey Sky Conduits (Lodestone Edit) By Corsair. Additional production & arrangement by Chris Redmond.

"It's in the game..." Unknown Devices at Tate Britain

On the 5th March the Improv ensemble I'm involved with played at Tate Britain as part of the Games and Gaming symposium. From the Tate website: "David Toop and Unknown Devices: The Laptop Orchestra (London College of Communication) explore the dynamics, technical and interpersonal demands of group collaborations using digital audio tools and ‘unknown devices’, creating an improvisation using an unusual variety of instruments, noisemakers and gaming equipment." Indeed...

Ugly Happiness Wins RTS Award

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.

Unknown Devices: The Laptop Orchestra @ Tate Modern

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.



Click Piece by CorsairUK




Graphic Score by CorsairUK




Boundary Music by CorsairUK




The Mediumship of the Listener  by  CorsairUK

The Modern Dinosaurs

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...

Or ELSA...

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.

Text this...

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.

Grey Sky Conduits by CorsairUK

Solaris re-imagined...

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...

Unknown Devices: The Laptop Orchestra

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!

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.

V&A

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.

Venice Biennale 2009

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.

Alive

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.