First studio collaboration between Philippe Petit (electronics/sounds/vocals, Marseilles, France) and Peter Hollo (cello/electronics, Sydney, Australia).

Further live and recorded work to follow!

More of Philippe's work: https://soundcloud.com/philippepetit/

Philippe Petit & Peter Hollo - Opus 1

Improvised live at Diffuse @ UTS as part of a round-robin performance. Thus it segues from a beautiful session from Gail Priest of microphone feedback with glasses of water (plus subtle vocals), into a solo cello and loop pedal improvisation, then joined by drummer Alon Ilsar at around 10:45 with gesture-controlled effects and electronic beats.

Thanks to the collaborators as well as Roger Mills & Nathan Wilson, who also performed on the night, and Jon Drummond, who convened the event.

This track is now available on an EP I released on Bandcamp called "in a cold cottage, in the dirt, in outer space". Click Buy link if you wish!

The mechanical bird yearns for outer space (raven with Gail Priest & Alon Ilsar)

I was practising again (so rare!) and this pedal remix of lockstep occurred. It's a kind of (less-)evil twin of https://soundcloud.com/frogworth/clkclkclkclkpostpestlcklck

Obviously this is totally unmastered or anything. Spontaneous bullshit, that's what you're here for after all.

lurkstep

Rehearsing for an upcoming gig (Omicron giggin' folks!), I improvised this piece with amplified cello through my trusty Line 6 DL4 looping pedal, with some added stereo FX provided through Ableton.
In the second half I'm leaning in to the un-designed effects of overdriving the pedal's feedback, which in turn modulates the pedal's ability to output the underlying loop.

against it

Recorded live at Cafe OTO on the 12th of July, 2014 at show that also featured Philippe Petit with Mia Zabelka and Jono Podmore, and The Golden Age of Steam.

For the Bown Hollo duo, Peter Hollo's cello is sent through Ollie Bown's custom software, with a Novation Launchpad as foot controller for loop recording & playback, and an iPad for additional effects. The processed/looped cello sounds are therefore able to meld perfectly, and in sync, with Bown's sounds which draw from his drum'n'bass background with Icarus as well as his more academic leanings.

Ollie Bown & Peter Hollo - Live at Cafe OTO

From the album:
the night is dark, the night is silent, the night is bright, the night is loud

Multi-tracked cello plus field recordings.

Endless thanks to Chris Hancock, who recorded it and mixed it with me. Recorded at Music Feeds, previously the mighty Megaphon, in St Peters.

the night is dark, the night is silent, the night is bright, the night is loud

vale

Demos for my new album/ep/mini-album/thingy.
Two samples are shooting around in the background in a couple of AudioMulch's bubble blower contraptions: a Baby Cham a capella and some of Lara's vocal from a recording of Trust by my band FourPlay String Quartet. Random fragments from limited portions of each file are spat out and then fed through a bouncy delay effect.
Over this audio environment I improvised a looped cello line - through pickup and into loop pedal, and then into the sound card. A number of granular effects are used to gradually destroy the loop as it evolves itself - with a bit of hopping between controlling the effects and building on the loop...

01 - in Marrickville, in the dirt v2

Demos for my new album/ep/mini-album/thingy.
Piano was recorded one Monday afternoon in preparation for a performance. Initially I wasn't sure whether I was going to then overdub cello, but the stark simplicity of this piece led me to keep it as a reprieve from the cello.
So the "performance" means loading up the piano recording into AudioMulch and knowing it well enough to control the various parts of the patch for best effect. As you can see, this is the third version I recorded, and for now feels like the best.
My usual liking for granular effects and subte bouncy delays... I think the success of this piece comes from the original progression, in which (as with the one in luminous) I deliberately forced myself into slow repetition, so that the evolving effects can do their thing in an almost static environment. As the occasional beautiful changes are introduced in the piano, the effects patches can add to the transcendent quality.

02 - and so it goes... v3

I was practising and this "pedal remix" of lockstep somehow happened, so here it is

clkclkclkclkpostpestlcklck

Now available on Futuresequence's SEQUENCE4 compilation. Available for FREE download along with 41 other brilliant pieces of music!
http://www.futuresequence.com/releases/sequence-four/

Edit now also now available on the album New resolution http://raven.bandcamp.com/album/new-resolution

As I sat down this evening to practise for an upcoming event, I played a short, lopsided bassline to test the loop pedal. I started improvising over it and realised it needed more repeats to be properly usable. So I shunted down to halfspeed to accommodate four times through the bassline and started layering over it.

It sounded pretty nice, so I stopped, hit record and started from scratch. And that's what you're listening to, as fresh as I could make it.

Buy new resolution

sleeping dogs lie

Recorded live at home, cello through Ableton with Keith McMillen Softstep 1, Roland EV-5 expression pedal, RME Babyface, Rode NT5s.

play through you

Created for <a href="http://www.futuresequence.com/releases/sequence-four/">SEQUENCE4</a> but <a href="http://soundcloud.com/frogworth/sleeping-dogs-lie">sleeping dogs lie</a> was accepted instead.
Now available on Feral Media's <a href="http://feralmedia.bandcamp.com/album/10-a-decade-of-feral-media">10th anniversary compilation</a>.
Also available on the album New resolution: http://raven.bandcamp.com/album/new-resolution

Layers of processed cello and melody! Pretty proud of this one to be honest.

headache music #1

My very first beat made in Ableton. Still learning the ropes, just a simple piece of ambient early-'90s idm.

Edit now available on the album New resolution: http://raven.bandcamp.com/album/new-resolution

Replicant

Last year I was fortunate to be invited to write a work for a short animated film produced by first year students in the University of Technology Sydney's new Animation degree. The result was <a href="https://soundcloud.com/frogworth/faux-na-ve-journey-of">faux-naïve journey of alrightness</a>.

This year they invited me back to produce some music for a more substantial work by the now-second-year students, with the rather wonderful opportunity of having it projected onto the side of a warehouse at Pier 4 on Hickson Rd in Walsh Bay (where Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney Dance Company, Sydney Philharmonia and others reside) as part of the 2013 Vivid Festival.

If you're reading this between the 24th of May and the 10th of June, 2013, this will be showing (on a loop) nightly at that location, in amazingly bright, hi-definition, with my music echoing around the water, concrete, wood and metal. I strongly recommend checking it out!

The music is cut up and re-arranged for the purposes of various short animation pieces, so I'm presenting an edit here with the full thing - really three related tracks in one.
If it becomes a fully-fledged raven track it will be in a different form, so enjoy this here and only here!

Mary on the Rocks

Peter Hollo is raven.
cello, piano, loop pedals, laptop processing, post-classical, drone, folktronica, noise, dubstep, breakcore...
Also plays cello in FourPlay String Quartet, Tangents and Haunts, and with Sophie Hutchings, Close to Forever etc.

raven

Popular tracks