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

Music Composer and Educator. Working in Leeds, UK. I'm open to collaborating and working together with humans. No data mining or AI training is permitted from my work! Cheers, Andrew. Email me at: andrew.potterton@gmail.com

A composer of Brass Band, Concert Band, choir and orch. Still studying with OCA and developing interests. 

Ross Davidson is an award-winning composer of electroacoustic music who completed an MA in composition at the University of Sheffield in 2017. His music focuses on the creation of immersive sound-worlds, with an emphasis on forming rich relationships between the different spectro/spatio-morphologies contained within and expressed by these sonic environments. In addition to his electroacoustic works, he has also previously composed for film, theatre and contemporary dance.

His music has been performed internationally at festivals such as Ciclo de Música Electroacústica (Valdivia), Sound Junction (Sheffield), Ai Maako (Santiago), and The Engine Room International Sound Art Exhibition (London). This year he undertook La Wayaka Current’s artist residency in Guna Yala, Panama, where he made extensive field recordings of the beautiful tropical rainforest soundscapes. In 2017 his piece Veins Coalesce was awarded the student category prize in Klang!.
He has diffused his works as part of Sheffield’s biannual Sound Junction concert series, as well as at Ai Maako (Santiago 2016). His piece Veins Coalesce won the student category award in Klang! 2017, and was also selected to be played as part of The Engine Room International Sound Art Exhibition (London 2017). He also enjoys multi-media projects, having composed music for the theatre productions Jackdaws (Sheffield, 2016) and the adaptation of Breathing Corpses (Sheffield, 2017). He is a member of the duo AARD, an improvised live-coding and modular synth group, along with Alejandro Albornoz.

Frog Buffoons

Ben Gaunt