Jess14ed

Touretteshero - whole year - clock ticks

Touretteshero - Whole Year - Footsteps

This is an AI attempting to recreate Yellow Submarine by the Beatles

Land of Tub Marie

Solar Flare - rough mix

Hidden Fields at ZKM - complete

Chomly

Unfold end test

Yorke Noisewall

Yorke End Dec

Unfold to Centre - full - vers. 7

Unfold to Centre - full, with cue

Unfold to Centre 8

Soma Residue Space

Unfold to Centre 9

Seven waves

I made this piece in just under a month, in the studios of the Groupe de Musique Expérimentale de Bourges in (unsurprisingly) Bourges, central France. It was December I think, and the town was cold, misty, mysterious, and seemingly weirdly deserted. I spent nearly all my time in the studio, with just the odd break to wander the empty streets. It put me in a strange, not altogether unpleasant, introspective state of mind, which I think is really what the piece is all about. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

GoldGlow concerns the contrast between the outer world perceived by the senses and the inner world of the imagination and emotions. It concerns a particular winter numbness, when the ego seems to retreat into itself, and the mind to take on an internal life of its own, sometimes with little connection to external reality.

Two layers of sound make up the the fabric of the music. On the surface is an outer layer of virtually untreated environmental sounds, all recorded one December afternoon in Bourges and presented in almost the order in which they were recorded. These sounds are thus very specifically linked to a particular place and time. Beneath is a glowing core of abstract sounds and instrumental sounds, deliberately chosen to have as little direct resonance of a particular time or place as possible.

The relationship between the two layers is very fluid. Often they are completely independent, each following its own musical flow. Sometimes an event in one will trigger a change in the other, sometimes one might temporarily take on some characteristic of the other, sometimes they will be linked by a common articulative shaping. But there is always a barrier between them, and they are never allowed to come together to form a completely homogeneous texture.

Additional Notes

• Commissioned by the Groupe de Musique Expérimentale de Bourges (France) , and was realised in their studio Charibde.
• Created using a Macintosh Pro-Tools based system, and extensive use of several effects processing units such as an Eventide H3500. In addiotin, some Sheppard tones were generated at EMS on an Ircam Signal Processing Workstation.
• Premiered at the Palais Jaques Coeur, Bourges.
• Performed at the ICMC in Hong-Kong.
• Received an honourable mention at the Prix Ars Electronica.
• Broadcast as part of the NOW festival.
• Released on a Sargasso CD.

Goldglow

I wanted to work exclusively with vocal sounds, but to try to ignore entirely such things as words and sentences. Instead I decided to concentrate on ways in which the human voice communicates without recourse to the intricacies of language. I wanted to dig down to the deepest level and lay bare a universal language of squeaks and grunts, which might communicate emotion in the most direct manner, with as few civilising niceties as possible!

I had two primary influences: The first was that of various Dada writers/performers, in particular Kurt Schwitters. Some of the vocal patterns that I used as my source material were based on quotations from Schwitters’ Ursonate, which was a particularly strong influence.

The second was that of early animated cartoons, such as those of Tex Avery. I wanted to make something that had the same kind of manic and visceral energy as an Avery cartoon, the crude caricature and capricious, free-form narrative, and, of course, the humour.

In the composition of the piece, I also concentrated very much on abstract ‘musical’ parameters, in particular rhythm. In this, I was also inspired by the rhythmic patterning of Ursonate, but took such patterning a stage further using basic Stravinsky-esque cell techniques.

Vox mecanix

Manic

This was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 as part of a series of ‘Nocturnes’. I guess traditionally a Nocturne might be something close to a lullaby – I wanted to go for something rather less restful, reflective of the 24-hour culture of a modern city. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

The initial spark came from a turn-of-the-century novel by Paul Lepin, entitled Severin’s Journey into the Dark. Severin wanders the night-time streets of old Prague in search of some kind of salvation, but instead finds only deeper and darker depravities. Lepin describes these restless nights as ‘the burnt out ends of smoky days’.

My aim was to capture the spirit of Severin’s wanderings, but to superimpose the contemporary backdrop of a modern-day metropolis such as Birmingham or London (two cities where I spent many restless nights wandering in search of source recordings!). I wanted to evoke the Dionysian intoxication and exhilaration of the metropolitan nightscape, the noise and bright lights – but also the darker side; the dirt, the sleaze, the violence; and the sense of irresponsibility and dispossession the city night breathes.

The action begins in an almost deserted shopping mall, just as the last shoppers leave for home…
 
Additional Notes
• Commissioned by BBC Radio 3.
• Made during a residency at EMS, Stockholm.
• Premiered by Philip Mead and Simon Limbrick in Birmingham and broadcast on Radio 3.
• Performed by Kristine Scholz and Magnus Einarssohn at the Electronic Art Festival in Stockholm, and broadcast on Swedish Radio.
• Selected by the BBC for presentation at the International Rostrum on Electro-Acoustic Music.
• Performed at the ICMC (Michigan).
• Toured in the UK by York-based ensemble Black Hair - this is a live recording of one of their performances

Burnt Out

This is a piece for four voices and what we called at the time ‘tape’ (ie pre-recorded electronics). It’s a very dense piece – I was very influenced by Luciano Berio at the time, in particular his 60s postmodern masterpiece ‘Sinfonia’. This piece weaves an incredibly complex web of elements together – there’s no way the listener can hear everything at the same time, so they are left to pick their own way through the ‘labyrinth’. I really like this idea, and the way it can turn what is essentially a linear experience into a non-linear one. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

It’s about time, and our perceptions of it. It’s about history, stories. The text is an amalgam of literally hundreds of sources – ‘stories’ – whilst the tape employs recognisable sounds to tell a story of its own. All these threads are interleaved and overlaid into a rich and complex narrative tapestry. The multiple stories, seen as illustrations, articulations, of the passing of time, reflect time as a multi-dimensional phenomenon of probabilities, possibilities and impossibilities, flowing at different speeds for different people in different places and situations.

 

 

Additional Notes

• Commissioned by Sonic Arts Network.
• Performed on South Bank, then toured nationwide.
• Broadcast on Radio 3.
• Selected by the BBC for presentation at the International Rostrum on ElectroAcoustic Music.
• Revised version performed by Electric Phoenix at IRCAM and by Singcircle at the Dartington International Summer School.

To the last syllable

I got interested in the idea of live sampling in the late 90s, principally through messing around with STEIM’s LiSa application. This program offered a very interesting new approach to sampling where you have completely open access to a sample buffer, so you can start playing a sample back before you’ve even finished recording it (kind of like Sky plus, I guess). You can have lots of fun recording and playing back sounds in various strange non-linear ways, and can have all sorts of seperate recording and playing back going on at the same time, acting on the same buffer. Cool but confusing..

Mostly I do this with live musicians, but here I'm using a bunch of scratched up charity-shot vinyl

Live Sampling 1 - Dirty Vacuum (vinyl)

Live Sampling 2 - Keith Tippett

Live Sampling 3 - Paul Dunmall

Live Sampling 4 - Dirty Vacuum (vinyl)

All generated in real time in response to the movements of visitors to the installation

Collective Reality - recording 2 hours of installation

This is the sound of the molecular dance of atoms and molecules and energy that surrounds us.  Obviously we don't really know what that sounds like, but I was given the unique opportunity to work with - and turn into music - real scientific data produced by the danceroom Spectroscopy installation, a unique project that gives users the chance to interact with a scientifically-accurate subatomic simulation based on the work of physicist Dr David Glowacki.

This is two minutes taken from two whole days of dS at the Barbican last year - it was quite hard to choose those two minutes!  What I really liked was the way the sound seemed to ebb and flow in a very organic and satisfying way - this didn't seem to have anything to do with what I did, but rather the underlying energy of the system and the people in it.  In this two minute section I think you can hear the ebb and flow in miniature.

You can also hear the three main kinds of sounds.  The high tinkling sounds are the sounds of individual molecules.  Actually, everything else is made up of those sounds and they tend to turn into a big harmonic wash because there are thousands and thousands of them.  The longer notes in the middle (sound a bit like a flute) are the sounds of groups of particles, when a cluster forms - this tends to be a single person, so they get their own 'note' to play with.  And the lower 'sweeping' sound is from FFT data - you'd have to ask Dave what that means, but basically it's only produced when a group of people all move in the same way.  This obviously didn't happen so often, so this became the most 'special' sound.  I found it amazing that people seemed to discover they could do this almost intuitively together though, which made the installation have a really nice social dimension to it.

danceroom Spectroscopy - installation sound snippet 1

Spring, Somewhere

Downbeat track for socially-distant dancefloors

Joseph Hyde

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