With Titan, Michael Begg won the New Music Scotland Award 2018 for electroacoustic sound art work.

These recordings derived from the audio installation that was housed in the wheelhouse on top of the Clydebank Titan for the 2017 Sonic-a Festival. Titan is available on CD directly from Omnempathy (https://omnmepathy.com) or can be found on iTunes, Spotify, etc.

The work was a commission from Cryptic.

Michael Begg’s “monumental” work includes extensive field recordings from the site and its surroundings and the sounds of aeolian harps that were created by Begg to harness the winds that frequent the wheelhouse and viewing deck, 150 ft above the River Clyde.

From Cryptic’s Sonica literature…

High over Clydebank, in the wheelhouse at the top of the Titan Crane, Michael Begg presents a site-specific installation that transforms the iconic structure into both musical inspiration and musical instrument. The crane symbolises past and future, both a monument to an industrial age of unprecedented feats of engineering and exploration and, today, signals a prospective epoch of ambition, imagination and outgoingness. In Begg’s piece, the crane and its environment become the basis for a work for electronics, cables, strings and breaths, playing on the material of the structure and the voice of the wind that sings around the elevated wheelhouse.

Titan Crane

Titan

For each of the live shows on our five-date tour of Italy in October/November 2018, we adapted the performance to each of the very different venues. As well as the acoustic properties of the space and the PA system, we incorporated something of each venue's character, and at Mikasa, it was the creaky stage, which opens and closes this recording.

Thanks to everyone who made this possible: Daimon (Simon Balestrazzi, Paolo Monti, Nicola Quiriconi), who organised and managed the tour, as well as performing their own fine shows, and to Antonio Altini at Mikasa for the attention to detail.

Live at Mikasa, Bologna, 3 November 2018

Five minute excerpt of The Alchemists by Black Glass Ensemble
The work was premiered at The Queen's Hall Edinburgh on February 13th 2020 and was broadcast the same evening on BBC Radio 3 Unclassified.

Michael Begg: scores, data, keys, electronic erosions, shells, e-bow autoharp
Ben Ponton: field recordings, electronic forensics, pebbles, lap steel guitar
Aisling O’Dea: violin
Julia Lungu: violin
Clea Friend: cello, voice
Neil Cuthbertson: trumpet
Jen Cuthbertson: French horn
Douglas Caskie: tuned and bespoke percussion

The Alchemists. BBC R3 edit

Michael Begg is a sound artist, composer and musician based in East Lothian, Scotland.

https://linktr.ee/michaelbegg

Titan

Michael Begg

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