Vekt, from the album Liquid Architecture.
Release date: July 2025

Vekt

Tired

Ride

Musically, the work explores the disruption and abrupt termination of repeated patterns to suggest short episodes of pulses and rhythms that are never fully resolved or developed. 
Most of the sounds in the work come from recordings that I made from inside an upright piano, and inside a clock. These sources are juxtaposed with short samples of Baroque string orchestra. Patches in Reaktor and Max were used to create spatial movement (in the 8-channel version) and rhythmic modulation of playback position within each sound. 
The title of the piece comes from a line in Norman MacCaig’s poem ‘Sounds of the Day’, where the dark sounds in the poem, and silence that follows them represent the intense pain of grief and loss. The relevant extract from the poem is:
When the black drums rolled, it was water
falling sixty feet into itself.
When the door
scraped shut, it was the end
of all the sounds there are.
You left me
beside the quietest fire in the world.
(Norman MacCaig)

black drums rolled (2019)

Live at Angel Field Festival 2019 (BBC 6 Music Fringe). 

A & J play OK.

A Book On My Shelf (live at Angel Field Festival 25/03/19)

This is a piece written for an Arts Council of England / Sonic Arts Network commission in 1999. First performed by BEAST at the ICA in London (20th March 1999), and then subsequently on BBC Radio 3 (March 2002). SansCulture was my first experimental piece combining the sound world of electronic dance music, with musique concrete composition techniques. I love the sound of analogue drum machines and synthesizers, so this was a labour of love to assemble thousands of samples from different instruments to create new patterns and odd-sounding grooves. Ewan Stefani

SansCulture (1999)

Inspired by a legend from the contryside of Venezuela and Colombia. "Bolefuego" is the spirit of a woman that was burned alive in her home, along with her two children due to her inmoral behavior. She attacks travelers. Those facing her are advised not to pray; unlike other evil entities, the Bolefuego is attracted by prayers.

Instrumentation: two marimbas, two vibraphones, two glockenspiels and a bass marimba.

This piece was premiered by "Les Percussions Claviers de Lyon" @percussionsclaviersdelyon

This recording is from the general rehersal.

Photo by Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis on Unsplash

BOLEFUEGO for mallet percussion quintet (2020)

I went on a sound walk early on Saturday morning to record the surrounding dawn chorus.  I offer it here as something of a spring gift for those of you that can't get near to a park etc as we are in social isolation

Prestwich Clough Dawn Chorus

Polaroids and Violence

The first demo of a piece I am working on inspired by my isolation experience during the COVID19 pandemic. 

Designed to make the listener feel like they can escape!

Other influences:

- Rey's Theme by John Williams
- The soundtrack to The Last Of Us by Gustavo Santolalla

Other Information:

- Mixed on Logic Pro X on a MacBook Pro 2019 using the AKAI MPK MINI

- Inquiries: gabrielanicolamay@gmail.com (Contact me if you would like to borrow for video projects)

Isolation - Demo

Incidental Rendition is a sonic reflection of the Ritherdon factory at work. Composed for headphone listening, the piece presents the manufacturing process as a metaphorical symphony; the factory’s tools and machines are the instruments, the people working in Ritherdon are the ensemble performers, the background noise is the reverberant concert hall resulting from the factory’s architecture, and the order of the process is the conductor.

Our walk begins at goods in, where the sheet metal enters the factory through the roaring roller shutter performed by Danny P. We briefly pause at the entry to absorb the bustle of the delivery bay, until jolted by the alarming entry of Terry on the Lansing E15 moving a new delivery. Then we walk past Pete on the Masterplat Robopac who is gingerly enveloping a freshly assembled enclosure in its cellophane cocoon before it is sent on its way. Approaching the punching machine station, Jock is on the controls of the Trumpf Trumatic 5000R, heard slowly awakening, steaming and whirling while stretching its mechanical arm. With Jock retrieving the relevant programme from the Trumpf’s memory, it begins its first solo with a sequence of calm yet complex percussive patterns. The punched blanks then move on to the press brakes, where Dawid, Aadam, Jason, and Harry jangle them in the Edwards Pearson PR100. The menacing roar of the Bosch GWS 880 follows, while Andy and Oggi grind the steel sheets, before they are rolled to Tony and Ross in the welding booths, who provide an electrifying performance on the Thermal Arc 400SP. Moving deeper into the factory, we reach “No man’s land”, an area of rare calmness and eerie stillness. No performers are present. All we can hear is the factory’s heartbeat, the electricity regulator, with its minimalist pulses providing the whole operation with vital energy. Moving away from “No Man’s Land”, the calmness is broken by the ensemble of machines making up the paintshop, performed by Matt, Rhys, Filip, and Aaron. The quartet includes the clicking percussion of the overhead conveyor, the pressurised streams of the wash, and the compressed harmonies of the spray booth, while all are enveloped by the constant drone emanating from the stoves. The last piece in the process comes at assembly, where Pete, Paul, and Jan shape Ritherdon’s products into their final form, all under the monophonic songs played on the Technika Digitalradio. Walking through assembly, we reach our starting point, where the Trumpf greets us with its second solo, a pounding crescendo of industrial-strength beats. Stunned by the thunderous performance, we are then soothed by the familiar sounds coming from the Masterplat Robopac, where Pete packages the latest batch of steel enclosures. We follow them out on the loading bay, sent out the same route they came in as sheet metal though Danny P’s roller shutter.

nicolaellis.com
manolimoriaty.com

A Book On My Shelf (live at Angel Field Festival 25/03/19)

Patchwork Rattlebag

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