I have been blessed/cursed with an extremely loud laugh; a guffaw.

Symphony of Guffaws uses a variety of recordings featuring different types of laughter. The first recording session captured the sounds of me and composer Rob Bentall watching a comedy show. For the second session, I asked my wife to tickle me, resulting in laughs more akin to screams. The final sessions are a variety of fake laughs; I pretended to laugh, and then my wife mocked my laughter in an imitative fashion.

This short piece loosely follows a condensed symphonic form, but is also inspired by the etymology of the word 'symphony'.

Symphony of Guffaws

Grave Pastures is a piece for virtually any melodic instrument and fixed electronics. The version here features a synth as the melodic instrument. 

Ask me if you want to play this, and I can provide both a score (in the appropriate transposition/clef) and an audio file without the synth melody.

Please listen with headphones or good speakers, as there is a lot of detail in the electronics part!

Grave Pastures

The UK has been engulfed in a cladding crisis, and my home is one of the buildings affected. 

Throughout 2023 and early 2024, the cladding/insulation on my flat has been replaced. I have recorded the sounds of the drills, lifts, builders etc. and combined them with the mundane sounds of my building (e.g. alarms, extractor fans, the opening/closing of blinds).

Clad In Fire-Resistant Armour

Recordings were made at the park next to my flat on the 19th and 20th of August 2023. The title references the fact I was, at the time, getting ready to sell my flat and move somewhere new. 

Both the notated composition and the fixed media part were completed shortly after. The fixed media part features recordings of children (including a wonderfully curious girl who kept on playing with my recording equipment), me striking the top of a metal bin with my hands as if it were a drum, and a man playing basketball on his own. 

The notated piano part consists of 23 chords. The numbers associated with these chords (23, 9, 6 ,8) and the common pitch (G) are derived from my address, postcode, and the fact my flat is on the 6th floor of the building.

This is just a demo recording, and will eventually be replaced by a new piano performance, recorded professionally. If you would like to play it, feel free to contact me and I will send you the materials.

Goodbye Bins And Benches

In 2024, I travelled to France to study Bouffon (a type of clowning) at École Philippe Gaulier. I am a musician/composer and did this to improve my stage presence, but I learned much more than I had bargained for...

The course was incredibly intense and all-consuming. However, I did find time to record a lot of 'Bouffon' sounds - laughter, giggles, swearing, shouting, and other strange noises. A central part of Bouffon practice is to mock and parody people you hate. Hence, towards the end of the course, I made a short theatre piece about frogs based upon an infamous Alex Jones quotation 'I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin' frogs gay!' To support me, all of my classmates pretended to be frogs engaging in... er.... intimate acts. The theatre piece was a glorious failure, but inspired Frog Buffoons.

Frog Buffoons features an electronics part that combines the Bouffon audio with frog sounds in addition to the noises produced by a French frog children's toy. It is a very strange piece, but the Bouffon course was a very strange experience.

The fixed electronics part is improvisatory in nature, in that the source sounds are recordings of me and my classmates improvising. However, the way in which I used these recordings was also improvisatory; once I had placed a recording into my Digital Audio Workstation, I did not allow myself to delete it. I had to use it and make it work via processing and recontextualising. Finally, the live melodica part (which I play myself) is entirely improvised.

Frog Buffoons

The Leeds Cross stands in Leeds Minster. A sign in the minster itself describes the cross: 

“The pieces making up the cross were found built into the medieval structure during demolition of the church in 1838. The cross would originally have stood outside the church, together with other crosses, and may have served as a grave marker. It dates to the tenth century A.D., and is carved in the Anglian style. The wheel-head originally belonged to another cross, although the shaft would have had a similar top. All the crosses from Leeds appear to have been produced in one workshop, and also have artistic links with other pieces from Wharfedale, such as the Collingham, Otley and Ilkley crosses. 

The upper tiers show several probably Christian figures, the angel and patron possibly copied from Irish manuscript art. At the bottom of the main faces are figures from Germanic mythology. One panel shows Weland the Smith, who was captured by Nithad, hamstrung, and forced to work as a smith. In revenge Weland murdered Nithad’s two sons and made their skulls into cups which he presented to their father, and then made Nithad’s daughter, Beaduhild, pregnant. Weland escaped by means of a flying machine, which is here shown strapped around him. He is shown surrounded by the tools of his trade and reaching up to seize a female figure, possibly Beaduhild or a Valkyrie, by the hair and skirt. The juxtaposition of Christian and pagan iconography indicates the mixed nature of tenth-century society, although the figure of Weland was sometimes employed to represent Elijah who ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot.”

I recorded violinist and composer, James Gerrard, playing On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at. This Yorkshire folk song is based upon the hymn Cranbook; just like the Leeds Cross, it is simultaneously Christian and non-Christian. I also recorded James reading a sign describing the various sections of the cross, and combined these with recordings of bells, birds, and footsteps, all captured either in the minster itself or directly outside. I have attempted to replicate the cross’s beautiful, confusing, fragmentary character, and was inspired by its iconography, both Christian and non-Christian.

Originally From Another Cross

I was recording some material for another composition of mine, just outside Köln Cathedral. There were two dogs yapping at each other; I loved the sound, but it just didn't fit the piece.

I was asked to perform a piece for the Music Patron launch event at the Groucho Club in Soho, London. I decided to make a new work, using a tiny snippet of the discarded dog sounds.

German Canine Waltz Time

This piece was composed in response to the work "Walking in Air in Glasgow" by Emmanuelle Waeckerlé and Will Montgomery, part of the RMA Music and/as Process Conference: Environment, Space & Place (28th - 30th June 2024, University of Glasgow).

After being provided with provocations/guidelines on how to "walk in air", participants went for a stroll, and then were invited to "take some time to reflect upon our experience and gather our traces (words, images, recordings...)"

This composition is my trace. I respond not only to the prompt above but also to the conference as a whole. I recorded air sounds within and outside the Advanced Research Centre (ARC), both naturally occurring and artificially created (e.g. air conditioning units). Simon Hellewell's melodica harmonics feature prominently, as does the final note of his interpretation of my piece "Local Mosaics and Graffiti" (which I performed in the ARC atrium, alongside Emmanuelle, Simon, and many other conference participants). 

Other themes from the conference also work their way into the sound recording and composition; footsteps, birdsong, plantlife. 

On my "walk in air", I explored the city and found as many instances of the word "air" as possible, hidden within hairdressers, computer repair shops, menus featuring Thai red curry, and the Tennent Memorial (pictured) which contains the word in reverse. This mirror image is a reference, also, to the palindromic structure of the composition; arc-shaped, ARC-shaped.

Air Arc Air

I composed this piece for my wife's 36th birthday and premiered it at the Leeds International Piano Competition 2024 piano trail festival.

It is a 36-second backing track featuring some of her favourite sounds. It is designed to accompany the singing or playing of Happy Birthday (for the above concert, I performed Happy Birthday on melodica).

Kanako 36

As part of mjf hothouse 2023/24 Ben Cottrell participated in a number of 'flings'; short-lived collaborations with various musicians of different disciplines/genres. I was very excited when Ben asked me to work on a fling with him. 

We both work at Leeds Conservatoire; one afternoon we set up some microphones in practice room 303, and made sounds with everything we could find. Plant pots, chairs, windows, bins... we recorded everything except for the musical instruments, which were left untouched. 

This is my fling, and it is a piece about how I hated practising scales and arpeggios when I was a student. In writing the piece, the number 303 became important; it is 3:03 long and 303 beats per minute. If you listen to it 303 times, I will be very happy! 

Using the same recordings, Ben has made his own fling.

303 Flings (For Beginners)

On the 12th of May 2025, I was shocked to discover that my wife was a stranger (at least, according to Keir Starmer). 

I have sampled Starmer's speech, reversed it, slowed it down, and processed it in an (impossible) attempt to musically counteract his Reform-like rhetoric. This is an ambient composition that can be listened to in isolation, or used as an accompaniment to improvisation. 

Ben Gaunt

Pinned to spotlight

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