The opening piece of music & fx for a play at The Lowry 2011. The show was about men who went though he war, their lives and the consequences of it. It was producded by Luke Bailey and a young person theatre group.

The Grandfathers Scene 1

Written for a circus and dance company, Circle ascent, whom i work closely with and often perform live with.  Our show is in the development stages and we are working together to find an avenue to expand and build this beautiful performance. This piece is inspired by acrobatic and phisical play, fun and joy. 

A sketch/idea for playful piece to open the show.

Playing With Laa's (For Circle Ascent Circus Company) Extended Version

During their militant campaign, suffragettes launched a broad series of attacks against artworks in various British art galleries. Taking suffragettes’ actions as a starting point, the Iconoclastic Jukebox explores the act of art destruction in various perspectives.
Vandalised Beethoven, bit-crushed Mozart, ethereal screams, ladies’ testimonies and smashing sounds make up seven miniature pieces that constitute the “jukebox” ’s music collection. Along with music, contained in the small wooden box, are also seven paintings that have been historically attacked by the Suffragettes, each one corresponding to a different sound piece. This audio-visual assemblage is complemented by fragments of text relative to art destruction.

Burning Buildings

Vandalise Art?

A set of miniature compositions by Trigger Happy & Υorgo Stenos, exploring intersections between composition and improvisation through text & graphic notation. Perfromed by Trigger Happy at Ionian University's Studio, Corfu, GR, 2018. Recorded & edited by Υorgo Stenos

0:01 - Sound Race | 0:57 - Miniature | 3:18 - Clicks | 5:00 - Grains | 5:57 - Strikes | 7:00 - Open Triggers | 9:14 - Transform | 10:49 - Fixed Triggers

Blockwork (for Trigger Happy)

One heat sink and two bass drives, recorded with four microphones in an IBC (a big plastic box). This is a shortened, stereo version of the original which was composed in 5.1 surround-sound format by Stephen Summers (that's me). This piece is just one of a series based on recordings of heat sinks and electro motors in various situations. 
Here, the spectral content of the metallic sounds and the spatial effects of the reverberation chamber (the IBC) are enhanced by the slowed playback, although the four-microphone effects are mostly lost in this stereo mix.

The recording of a heat sink being struck by a flail- attached to the blade of a rotating fan- is slowed down to 50%, 25% and 12.5%, reversed and filtered. 

Dissipators
Heat sinks and fans with flails are the core elements in the Noisy Toys workshop kits, which contain only upcycled junk from discarded electronic goods. I have run this workshop in countless schools and STEM events over the country for several years and have often been surprised at the interesting musical patterns that emerge from this simple system as people move the objects around. OK so I suppose I got a bit obsessed with fans and heat sinks and the patterns that emerge at the edge of chaos when the objects are placed at just the right position.

Space
Two microphones are placed in the ears of Benito's head- these are directly connected to the front stereo pair of speakers- and two are in the top rear corners of the IBC- which connect to the back stereo pair. In this stereo mix much of the spatial effect is lost of course.

Bass
The bass frequencies produced by the bass drives are very low and may not be audible at all on some systems- for example playback through a laptop or pad. Use some decent speakers.
The bass drives are computer hard drives used as electromagnetic signal generators- the audio signal being taken from the power connections. 
One of the bass drives is manually spun, the other is motor controlled and can play specific pitches. Some of the bass sounds were played back at X2 and X4 speed through a monitor in the IBC and then re-recorded and slowed back to original speed to add natural reverberation.

Eternal Cosmic Heat Dissipation

horizontal drop

dark hole

Recordings of the 'Sound Kitchen' Installation in Gorky Park Moscow for Polytech Festival, May 2018. Featuring the Minister for Stupid Ideas (Cardboardia). This interactive installation was built with Russian artist Anna Novozhilova in collaboration with Cardboardia, and was the first re-build of the Acousatron (v4) and our first international installation. In the recording you can hear many of our classic instruments, and a few new ones cobbled together with whatever we could find.
More photos and information about the Acoustron: https://noisytoys.org/installations/acousatron/
More information about Cardboardia:
http://www.cardboardia.info/?lang=en

Polytech Festival Moscow 2018

noisytoys

Related tracks