Track from new album, Plate Spinning, using found metals, samples and bass.

Ludic Limbo

An ancient multi-tracked piano composition from 1990, which forms the backbone to the track 'Exoskeleton' from my new album, 'Plate Spinning'. The poor tape quality was highlighted by the superior quality of the contemporary material built around it, and just didn't sit well with it, so it was excised - hence the title.

Piano Piece 1990

Opening track from my new album "Unnatural Actuality" Room Temperature RTCD12

Baiting The Hook

1 minute track made especially for Bruce Gilbert's 60th birthday in 2006, from edits of his solo work, interviews and the work of Dome and Wire.

60 Seconds (for Bruce Gilbert)

From sixty seconds to sixteen minutes and sixteen seconds, this piece made to mark Bruce's 70th moves away from my approach to the one I did for his 60th. It mines a number of sources mentioned in Kevin Eden's 1991 Wire biography, Everybody Loves A History - music he grew up with, the songs of Lena Horne and Frank Sinatra, and the music, pre-Wire, that influenced him in his 20s, such as Captain Beefheart and Roxy Music. I used these as a springboard to create electronic soundscapes, twisting and stretching edits and loops I'd made in Samplr on my iPad. Some edits were left recognisable, and form some of the rhythmic and melodic content, as well as serving as cultural reference points. The title is made from two halves of two anagrams derived from Bruce's albums Ab Ovo and In Esse. As a gift for Bruce, the piece was put on a 3” CDR sprayed white, with a cover design aping the periodic table, with the element number being Bruce's age, and the scientific number being his birthdate. Not sure how I hit on the idea, but there's a nice link with the fact that Bruce's album, Ordier, was released on US label Table Of The Elements.

Bruce had a fondness for war movies in the 70s, so that gave me free reign to explore various war noises and related references, including the theme tune from the 70s TV series The World At War. I wanted to broaden the mise-en-scene of the piece by including ads and sig. tunes from some 70s programmes, the shipping forecast, Monty Python, and some of my own field recordings to further enrich this plunderphonic tapestry. Some points of reference in terms of compositional methodology for me were elements of John Moran's 'The Manson Family, An Opera', Nurse With Wound's 'Sylvie & Babs', and early 80s Touch compilation tapes, with their penchant for odd confections of media snippets, loops and field recordings. Though not a conscious ploy, one of the Beefheart songs that I used, Veteran's Day Poppy, forms an interesting link with the WWII references. 

Some of the TV sig. tunes and ads get a bit of a space theme going, what with the appearance of The Clangers, Star Trek and Dr. Who, as well as the spoof sci-fi ad for a popular freeze-dried potato product, Smash (also a post-Bruce Wire song title). The William Shatner voice-over snippets, “to explore strange new worlds”,  and “to boldly go where no man has gone before”, can be taken as a lighthearted allusion to Bruce's sonic explorations. Cross-hatching some of the Sinatra material with the Beefheart songs threw up some fruitful collisions – a drum break from Moonlight On Vermont happened to nicely underscore a vocal snippet from Moonlight In Vermont, sung by Linda Ronstadt (born same year as Bruce). Amongst the studio goofery from Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica used in the piece, the “I run on beans” edit was echoed with a 70s ad for Heinz beans (“Don't be mean with the beans Mum, beans means Heinz !”). Some of the elements in this piece are woven a bit deeper in the mix, and won't necessarily reveal themselves on first listen. Other elements move around the stereo field to create a sense of momentum in a soundworld I like to think of more in terms of a radio play or cinema for the ears. It must be  heard on a decent hi fi with good stereo separation, or on good headphones – not computer speakers…



Bovine Oboes (for Bruce Gilbert)

'Napalm Calypso' was composed to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Paul Burwell's death. It was  created with a mixture of his solo work and work with the Bow Gamelan, interview material and slices of some of his favourite music and exerpts from films and TV shows he enjoyed. 

The solo extracts are taken from his 1979 album, 'A Mummified Person With A Pleasant Smile Is Kept In A Cupboard In The Vestry'. The Bow Gamelan material is taken from a documentary about the 'Offshore Rig' performance of 1987, made for Channel 4 arts programme Alter Image, some footage of them performing on the concrete barges at Rainham Marshes in 1986, and from my own bootleg of the 'In C And Air' performance at the ICA in 1986, some of which includes Paul talking to me afterwards. 

It also includes my field recording of tidal wash at the Forty Foot in Sandycove, Co. Dublin in June 2016, with foghorns sounding. Dublin Bay as stand-in for Thames Estuary. The latter being a place where Paul & Bow Gamelan did various gigs. Water was also my means of transport between Ireland and England when working in London in the 1980s, as I used to travel by boat from Dunlaoghaire to Holyhead, so it forms part of my initial connection between Dublin and London and between Paul and myself. Before cheap air travel. Before internet and mobile phones. Less clutter, less distraction.

Paul loved Kung Fu movies and Westerns and was a big fan (like myself) of Apocalypse Now, which I've sprinkled liberally throughout the piece. The film soundtrack includes some great explosions, which are entirely in keeping with Bow Gamelan's penchant for using fireworks as a form of percussion. Someone once memorably described Bow Gamelan as 'like a cross between Turner and Apocalypse Now'. I like how the sound effects in the film creates a deep, widescreen sense of landscape, with the constant battering ram of near and distant shelling puncturing the air.

I only met Paul a couple of times, so I hardly knew him, but I took to him straight away. I liked the cut of his jib. His friendliness, openness and free-spirited nature was inspiring. When I re-watch Bow Gamelan footage for the nth time and see him interviewed I feel a great fondness for him. This piece is a tribute to that - my way of saying, 'Thanks Paul'.

Some of the elements in this piece are woven deep in the mix, and won't necessarily reveal themselves on first listen. Other elements move around the stereo field to create a sense of momentum in a soundworld I like to think of more in terms of a radio play or cinema for the ears.

Therefore, it must be heard connected to a proper amp/speaker set up or headphones (not computer speakers) with good stereo separation. 

Thanks to Anne Bean and David Toop for suggesting the sources, which include:. 

Film:

Apocalypse Now (1979)
The One-Armed Swordsman (1967)
Kwaidan (1964)
Woman In The Dunes (1964)
Bad Day At Blackrock (1955)
Rashomon (1950)

TV:

Hancock's Half Hour
Dad's Army

Music:

Baby Dodds drum improvisations
Buddy Rich drum solo
Jet Harris & Tony Meehan: Diamonds
One String Sam: I Need 100 Dollars
Screaming Jay Hawkins: I Put A Spell On You
Albert Ayler: Ghosts
Roderick MacLeod performing the Scottish piobaireachd, 'Old Men Of The Shells'

Radio:

Orson Welles narrating Joseph Conrad's 'Heart Of Darkness'.

Napalm Calypso

This piece celebrates Wire's 40th anniversary, which falls on the 1st of April, the date of their first gig as a four piece in 1977, at The Roxy.

It's a light-hearted, affectionate tribute which takes edits of songs from the first phase of activity ('77 - '80) as a springboard, tapping into various suggested cultural reference points, and interviews with the band, which are threaded through with humourous asides via Max Wall, Peter Cook & Dudley Moore, Monty Python, Steptoe & Son etc., the music of The Beatles, Captain Beefheart, Roxy Music, Small Faces, Frank Ifield, Helen Shapiro and other conceptual/thematic tie-ins.

For example, my way of deciding on what elements of field recording to include were to scan lyrics and draw out some salient aspects. The image of water features a fair bit, a train (Other Window), fireworks (French Film Blurred), shark ('A dorsal fin breaks the water..'), but instead of an actual shark recording, I used some of the Jaws soundtrack.

There were some unintentional synchronicities, such as when Colin is talking about The 15th, and the clip about decimalisation happening on the 15th of February 1971.. which also ties in with the fact that he says 'if I had a pound..' Cut to Taxman, cut to Rob's redundacy, cut to Cream (as Rob was a Ginger Baker fan), cut to Heartbeat, as Rob is the heartbeat of the band... and so on. I used some of Ligeti's music too, suggested by the fact that Colin remarked in Kevin Eden's Wire biography about MikeThorne's breadth of producer's experience encompassing everything from 'Ligeti to X-Ray Spex'. 

The decision to limit the Wire source material to the first phase was taken for a number of reasons: firstly, in time-honoured Wire tradition, to keep it simple.  Secondly, it's the period where I initially discovered them, via a schoolfriend who lent me a copy of 154, and my head was turned. 

The spaces opened up by this record, musically and lyrically, were places I wanted to inhabit. I felt in my element. I was smitten. Gilbert & Lewis' inscrutable and intriguing cover design, coupled with Dave Dragon's art direction created an artifact that seemed to fit the music perfectly, but not in a literal way. I loved the openness and clarity of the Futura Medium font used for the lyrics. 

Thirdly, the piece marks the 40th from the point of view of origins rather than an exhaustive overview. Something more chronologically comprehensive would've taken me considerably longer. Anyway, more than enough of a rich seam to mine in the first phase !

The piece functions more like a radio play or film for the ears, with a cast of characters that enter and leave at various points. The song edits are deliberately brief, which ties in with Wire's charcteristically stripped approach. They enter the scene, then exit stage left. There are jump cuts, cross-fades, subtle layerings, superimpositions, cross-hatches, buried fragments, partial echoes, glimpses, traces, imprints - parts of which will not be immediatley obvious on first listen. It's woven densely as a rich plunderphonic tapestry. A filmic trawl through various points and connections, a sonic constellation.

The title functions on a number of levels for me: on a basic level, it refers to the idea of a radio play being literally scenes you don't see, but hear. The strip-mining and re-combining of older Wire material to make 'new' tunes – ore from yore - could be taken as scenes unseen (harvesting the Harvest years). On a general level, the orchestration of all sources creates unique scenes. 

There are also the theatrical echoes within the cover of Chairs Missing, with curtains framing the flower adorned table, lyrical echoes, 'never lacked a sense of theatre..', 'please don't turn a deaf ear..' 'symphonic in persuasion' and the 'unseen ruler'. Wire also famously flirted with absurdist theatrical elements at the end of the first phase, as captured on the Document & Eyewitness live album.

Scenes Unseen

A track from my latest album, A Congregation Of Vapours, released by Farpoint Recordings on the 23rd of May 2012.

Composed with speaker feedback, no-input mixing board, DIY electronics, amplified metals, field recordings and processing.

Echolocation

Final track from CD album, 'Invisible City' published by Project Press in 1999, as part of Project Arts Centre's 'Off Site' series of artists' projects. The album comprised of four compositions made from field recordings made around Dublin 1997/98.

Invisible City Part 4

Maiden Error is from a new album, Trembling Embers, which is a 50 minute solo album featuring 10 compositions based largely around live and studio improvisations recorded with self-built 4 &amp; 6 string devices, zither and processing via Samplr for iPad. These pieces have been developed by adding field recordings, metal percussion, bass guitar, orchestral samples and further processing.

The first four tracks are playful exploratory excursions into the dynamics of the instrumentation and how simple edits with little or no processing can be woven together to form pieces with a particular momentum and personality. The strings, which have in some instances been prepared with crocodile clips or metal rods, have been played with rubber mallets, tubular steel, wood, violin bow, battery-driven fans and e-bows.

The next three tracks take the processing a good deal further, where there is little in the way of untreated sound – it has been transformed into new shapes and dimensions which depart some distance from the source sounds, especially the track Jumping Compass, which takes the processing to escape velocity where files are cooked, burnt, chopped, diced and re-configured in a manic game of sonic pinball.

The remaining tracks expand the methodology further by adding field recordings, bass, metal percussion and occasional subtle shadings of orchestral samples. These tracks use a combination of treated and untreated improvisations to create richer compositions that tend toward a more slow moving, pacific, widescreen feel.

Strings also appear as part of a field recording, which features on Tilled Until Tide Turned, where an aeolian harp constructed by artist Mark Garry was recorded on the grounds of DIT college at Grangegorman in Dublin. Their wispy, ethereal tones lent an otherworldly air. Other field recordings on this track include descending steel steps into Vatnshellir deep cave in Snæfellsnes and flapping masts in Keflavik, both in Iceland, and in London, train station announcements at Rainham and walkers and cyclists in Greenwich tunnel. Paradox Lost features the sound of swing doors and automatic doors recorded in Dublin and London, along with struck metal railings, pigeon wing beats and ever present air traffic over London.

Maiden Error

Vacant Possession (2019) 14' 10”

This piece has been woven from field recordings, radio recordings, answering machine messages and concert recordings made in the 1990s, and also includes some TV and music from the time. The field recordings were originally made for my CD album for Project Arts Centre, Invisible City (1999), as part of their 'Off Site' series of exhibitions during building renovations.

Going back to these recordings twenty years later is a curious experience, a time machine to different times, where, in a digital surgery of grafting and transfusion, presences are reanimated, spirits invoked, vacated spaces haunted. It's a sonic seance, a poltergeist's pantomime, an entropy tango. I'm reminded of how Iain Sinclair pithily described the editing process for London Orbital (2002), his film with Chris Petit: “The choice was stark: become a digital mudlark, rummaging through exhausted footage for retrievable images. Fool's gold, dropped down the toilet bowl of the culture.”

This piece functions like a radio play or cinema for the ears, where hybrid scenes are stitched from various parts of my record of the decade, and different characters appear and disappear. Though the recordings were not part of any attempt to exhaustively document the decade, merely part of an ongoing continuum of recordings of things that interested me. Edits from solo and collaborative performances of mine colour the second half of the piece. Wading through the tapes, there were some things I'd completely forgotten (and glad) I'd recorded. 

Certain signature sounds are salient parts of the landscape for me, and work like 'soundmarks' or sonic landmarks. The particular texture of Dublin bus engines, and the call of the Moore Street traders that is pure music to me, no need to loop it or add to it, it's music 'in the field' in the best sense, part of a continuum of village vendors calling out across time the world over. Their calls are almost gone now, sadly, in a changed landscape and regulatory framework where traders, since the beginning of this year are not allowed to pass licenses down through families, as they had done for decades. I fear it's the beginning of a process that will see them eventually leached out in favour of larger developments. 

Radio was more a part of my media landscape then, and hearing certain sig tunes really takes me back – Morning Ireland, Gay Byrne (the point where I switched off), Myles Dungan on Today at Five, Scrap Saturday (satire the likes of which we have not heard since). Callan's Kicks, try though it might, just doesn't cut it like Dermot Morgan et al used to so hilariously. 

The 90s was a time of enormous flux and upheaval in the built environment, and thankfully I had the presence of mind to photograph various sites around the city as they underwent significant changes. Looking back over these, I'm reminded how much dereliction, open space and abandoned property there was (going back 20 years or more). It was a gap-toothed city, with areas steadily accumulating value till the developers swept in for the kill. Signage on some empty properties would flag it as 'vacant possession', meaning there were no sitting tennants, the building was well and truly empty, and free of any potential impediments to development.

Photos can be viewed here: 

https://flic.kr/s/aHsksFuf6s


Fergus Kelly 
January 2019

Vacant Possession

This stereo sound collage about Joy Division was made to mark the 40th anniversary of the release of their first LP, Unknown Pleasures on the 15th of June 1979. It is best heard through a decent amp and speaker set-up or good headphones – not computer speakers.

It borrows from Grant Gee's 2007 documentary for interview material, and uses edits and treatments of songs to form the backbone of the piece. It is further developed with archive recordings, film and music references, including Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now (interesting phonetic near-match of the names Kurtz and Curtis), Eraserhead, Stroszek, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Popol Vuh and The Doors. 

It also uses field recordings of the Pennines by Jo Kennedy, with her kind permission. This is related to the key part that the band's producer, Martin Hannett, played in their music. He is portrayed in Michael Winterbottom's 2002 film, 24 Hour Party People, as recording 'the silence' on the moors, and brought a highly individual sensibility to his role that involved recording lift shafts, flight cases and breaking glass, as well as using all manner of studio wizardry to create unique acoustic spaces for the music to exist in, that lent it an otherworldly air. 

I've used the VLF recordings of Stephen P. McGreevy, a form of natural radio - electromagnetic emissions in the very-low-frequency band caused by massive discharges and their after-effects in lightning storms and by the solar wind buffeting the earth's magnetic field, visible as Aurora Borealis and Australis.

I've also used my own electromagnetic recordings made from computer drives, ATMs, ticket dispensers and overhead tram lines. These two forms of electromagnetic recording  relate to the radio signal CP 1919, the first pulsar discovered in 1967, the successive visual readouts of which features on the cover of Unknown Pleasures. 

I've always been more attracted to the sense of the uncanny in Joy Division's music and the science fiction element, as I always saw it - I never liked the gothic take that was later established, not helped by the cover image on Closer, it felt too prescriptive. 

The perfect cover of Unknown Pleasures is just so opaque and intriguing – especially as there's no obvious relationship with the music - and the inclusion of the Ralph Gibson photo on the inner sleeve further enhances the sense of intrigue. Joy Division's music felt propelled into a near future, yet still somehow rooted in the present, whilst indebted to its past - of its time yet outside of it, and still sounding incredibly contemporary four decades on.

Yet that cover image carries uncanny echoes of ECG readouts of unstable brain chemistry which echo Curtis' epilepsy and bipolar conditions. Instead of 'side 1' and 'side 2' on the original disc stickers of Unknown Pleasures, there is 'outside' and 'inside', one white on black, the other its inverse. Black album cover, white inner sleeve – a series of binary pairings/digital switchings in the design weirdly reflecting Curtis' inner states.

'Day for night' is a set of cinematic techniques used to simulate a night scene while filming in daylight. This title works as a reflection of that switching, and the production alchemy and sense of the uncanny – real/unreal – in the music, as well as the story, of Joy Division. Recording sessions would generally stretch to the small hours and Bernard Sumner was suffering insomnia at the time, staying up till 5am.

Day For Night

Numb Burn is the opening track from my new solo album, Gleaming Seams. This is a 49 minute collection of 10 compositions based around studio improvisations with found metals and plastics, drums, cymbals and gongs. These have been edited and combined with treated electromagnetic recordings of ATMs, computer drives, ticket dispensers and overhead tram lines. Field recordings have been woven in at some points, as well as brass, snare and orchestral samples to further enrich the sound colour and dynamic of the compositions. 

Some field recordings have been made on my mobile when I had nothing else to hand, and involve raw captures of fleeting conversations in shops, on public transport and elsewhere. I like the idea of these sounds being one of many sonic stratas of city life, one that all manner of stories and personalities emerge from, interspersed with all other sounds, a layer of life whose profile and consequent noise floor has risen steeply with the inescapable and increasingly prolific presence of mobile phones, and all the loud, one-way conversations they shove unbidden into urban space. 

The various found metals and plastics are part of a collection going back over 30 years, including hub caps, washing machine parts, steel conduit, plastic tubing, car suspension springs, circular saw blades, sundry steel and aluminium vessels, beer barrels, Burco boiler (water heater), heavy plastic water canisters, tumble dryer drum and brass military shells. The gunfire and radio comms sounds on Camouflage were sourced from training websites.

Field recordings from various sources include the local bottle bank being emptied, action calls on film set, theatre set construction and backstage sounds, Millenium bridge in London and skateboarders in Barcelona (the latter recorded by Ben Gale and used with kind permission), bumblebees and carpenter bees, crickets, binaural mics inside large Wavin pipe (all recorded in Croatia), and late summer evening birdsong along Dublin's Royal Canal.

Numb Burn

Edit from the live CD <a href="http://www.roomtemperature.org/releases/rtcd8.htm">Trinity College Chapel 8 October 2005</a> featuring Fergus Kelly (cabinet of curiosities), David Lacey (percussion/electronics), Dennis McNulty (computer), Paul Vogel (computer)

Trinity College Chapel 8 October 2005 (extract)

Plundered Lumber is a 52 minute album comprising 13 tracks using mostly bass guitar and metal percussion. It's a return of sorts to a form of composing last used about 20 years ago, where an emphasis on rhythmic interactions and melodic interplay was the main driver. I've used little or no processing (apart from some delay and reverb) and no field recordings. Some delays were added after, some used during recording, as a phantom rhythmic element to play against.

The percussion comes from my store of found metals gathered sporadically over the last 35 years (much less in recent years with more restricted access due to municipal recycling – a weird irony !). I've always loved the idea of creating things from discarded materials, building from scratch, and exploring the unique sound colours and textures of industrial materials, a lot of which are richly resonant. 

Untrained, I play bass entirely by ear. I'm under no illusions that I possess any particular skills necessarily, but simply work from the point of view of what sounds good to me and improvise in the moment. I would never describe myself as a 'bass player', and my timing might be a bit fluid at times, but at least I can keep the bass in tune with a handy phone app. At the same time, I wouldn't go as far as Brian Eno and describe myself as a 'non-musician'. I've always loved bass though, and think it's a beautiful instrument; earthy, sensuous and sinuous, infusing the music with a pulsing blood warmth. I'm reminded of what Shellac's bassist Bob Weston said when asked at a Dublin gig in 2017 what he liked most about the bass - “It sounds awesome.” Over the years, certain bassists have really made an impression: Holger Czukay, Tony Levin, Jah Wobble, Barry Adamson, Mike Watt.

I wanted to keep things fairly simple with these compositions, structurally and melodically, leave space and maintain a sense of clarity; create clean, uncluttered arrangements. Sometimes I did build things up, but generally ended up stripping them back. I also wanted to keep them short. I had made initial forays into this in 2012/13, but only got as far as a handful of multi-tracked bass riffs that I wasn't sure what to do with, so they got shelved until I decided where they could fit.

These were used as the starting point for some of the pieces, most were built anew. One of the earlier pieces, Astral Indices, which also had percussion and was more complete, is left untouched as I felt it needed no further elaboration. The other untouched piece from that time, Uncurl An Edge, is my approach to creating a very simple composition but in long form with subtle changes over its duration, a regularity which is gently altered and disrupted, much in the manner of Morton Feldman - an industrial version, using mostly sliced beer barrels and bass. The higher pitched sound that occasionally flits back and forth is a plucked egg slicer.

The album title existed in a notebook I keep for potential track and album titles but, though I never make obviously illustrative titles, this one was unusually suitable in that I was partly raiding my archive to create new work, making good use of things left lying around; dusted down and pressed into service and galvanised with additional material.

In terms of revisiting older methodologies, I decided to spray paint original artwork onto the CDs themselves rather than print onto them. I've used some of the metals employed in the compositions – which creates a nice bit of conceptual continuity – sawblades whose serrated edges make graphically strong images. No repetition occurs across the edition, all are unique.

Metrognomic

2nd track from new album 'Unsound Fictions', released 11.11.20, using found metals and plastics, car springs (mounted on aluminium water heater) & inside piano (with preparations).

Coded Enclosure

Fergus Kelly is a sound artist and improvising musician from Dublin. He has been in numerous shows around Ireland, and has shown in Canada, America, Germany, Finland, Holland and England. He has done soundtracks for film and theatre and received many Arts Council awards. He is a founder member of The Whispering Gallery collective for the promotion of improvised and electronic music in an Irish context.

His work spans a variety of contexts: performance, installation, soundworks for tape, CD, radio, and public spaces. His work was performed by The Manhattan Marimba Quartet in The Kitchen, New York, in 1991. Radio broadcasts include A.A.R.T., Dublin, 1994 and 1998, HEARING IS BELIEVING, Liverpool, 1995, HORIZONTAL RADIO, Alberta 1995, RADIO GAGARIN, Hamburg, 1996, RESONANCE, London 1998, YLE RADIO Helsinki 2000,
DRIFT:RESONANT CITIES, Edinburgh, 2004, and LYRIC FM, Dublin 2012/13

Other highlights include showing in the EUROPEAN WORKSHOP RUHRGEBEIT in Recklinghausen, Germany in 1990 and 1991, and the AUDIO VISUAL EXPERIMENTAL FESTIVAL, in Arnhem, Holland in 1993 and 1995, participating in THE TUNING OF THE WORLD conference in Banff, Canada in 1993, and performing in SIX WEEKS OF SOUND and IN THE EYE OF THE EAR II, both in Chicago in 1996. He performed at various INTERMEDIA festivals and sound art events in Cork from 1988 – 1999. He showed in IRELAND AND EUROPE in Dublin in 1997. In 1997 and 1999 he performed in Dublin and Cork with UK sound sculptor Max Eastley.

He performed in SONIC EYE in Helsinki in 2000, and WINTER, in Dublin in 2001, and IRISH ART NOW in Chicago, also in 2001. He showed in City Art Centre's HAUNTED in Dublin, 2003, and in Temple Bar Gallery's FULL CIRCLE show in Dublin, in 2004. He curated VOLUME 2 (a week of sound) for Temple Bar Gallery in 2005, performing with Max Eastley, and regular collaborators David Lacey and Paul Vogel. He performed in the I&E festivals in Dublin in 2005, 2006, 2007 & 2009. 

He also showed in The Digital Hub’s CAPTURED in Dublin in 2006 and performed in a duo with David Lacey in the TULCA performance festival in Galway in 2006, APOSTATES in the Belltable, Limerick, DARKLIGHT Festival and VOLUME 4 in Dublin in 2007. In 2007 he was selected joint winner with Ian McDonnell for electro-acoustic composition in CRASH ENSEMBLE’s Free State concert in Dublin. In 2009 he performed in London with Max Eastley and Mark Wastell.

He showed in FUTURESONIC and ARTRADIO, in Manchester in 2007. In 2011 a soundwork was featured at the ALCHEMY FILM FESTIVAL, in Hawick, Scottish Borders. A soundwork featured in  NOWHERE ISLAND RADIO, UK, and A QUIET POSITION, curated by Jez Riley French, as part of a broadcast during the AV FESTIVAL in London, in 2012. 

BREATHING ROOM, a sound/light installation was presented in The Goethe Institute in Dublin in 2012. A soundwork was featured in THE HILLTOWN NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL, Westmeath, in 2012. New soundworks were featured in MAYFEST in London, FREE STATE 7, Kilkenny Arts Festival and (H)EAR FESTIVAL 3, Heerlen, Holland in 2013. He performed solo in Berlin in 2013, as part of the FUNCTIONAL SOUNDS conference.

In 2014, his soundwork, CONCRETE SONORITIES was featured in the URBAN SOUNDSCAPE AND CRITICAL CITIZENSHIP conference in Limerick. This piece has also been selected by Darren Copeland from NEW ADVENTRES IN SOUND ART to be developed for performance on a surround sound system in Toronto later in 2014.

REPETITIVE STRAIN INDUSTRIES (Fergus Kelly, David Lacey & Jurgen Simpson) performed in PERSPECTIVE 2000 in Belfast, and in the INFUSION and FIX festivals in Limerick and Belfast in 2000. They also performed at SCOIP 2001 in Tralee, and in SUMMER, in Dublin, in 2001.

Soundworks on CD include: GBH (1993), which appears on RANDOM ACCESS SOUNDWORKS, PRESSURE (1994), appears on AUDIO ARTISTS RADIO TRANSMISSIONS. He appears in collaboration with Garrett Phelan and Carol McKeon on SOUNDWORKS III (1998). A solo CD, INVISIBLE CITY (1999) was published by Project Press, as part of Project's Off Site series. 

Recording under the name REPETITIVE STRAIN INDUSTRIES, his work has been featured on compilations released through Charnel Music in San Francisco, Meeuw Muzak in Maastricht, and Staalplaat in Amsterdam. The album NETS IN THE TRAWL was released by ND in Texas.

In 2005 he established a CDR label and website, Room Temperature, as an outlet for his solo and collaborative work, producing the CDs UNMOOR (2005), MATERIAL EVIDENCE (2006), BEVEL (2006) (with David Lacey), A HOST OF PARTICULARS (2007), STRANGE WEATHER (2007) and LEACHING THE PITH (2008), SWARF (2009), FUGITIVE PITCH (2009) and LONG RANGE (2010). 

His latest CD , A CONGREGATION OF VAPOURS, was released to critical acclaim in 2012 on Dublin sound art label Farpoint Recordings. He is currently working on a new album for release on his label later in 2014.

http://www.roomtemperature.org
http://www.asullenrelapse.blogspot.com
http://www.soundcloud.com/fergus-kelly
http://www.flickr.com/photos/55867717@N00/sets/

.

Fergus Kelly

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