A few years ago now, summers in England, and particularly in Wales, were littered with events known as free festivals. At such an event, a few hundred people would gather together in a field for a weekend and have experiences. To accompany these, there was always music and no festival was complete without the looping guitarist. 

The looping guitarist was a guy who, inspired by Robert Fripp and John Martyn and unconsciously channelling Terry Riley, would set up on a small sound stage at about 2 a.m. with an acoustic guitar and a Roland Space Echo and noodle into the night until the last of his audience slumped into unconsciousness.  The technique employed was simply to improvise some phrases into a long, slowly decaying echo, soaked in reverb, and then play along to whatever came back out of the speakers.

Lying in my tent, listening to these pleasant modal wanderings bouncing about a chilly field, it occurred to me that it might be more interesting if the accompaniment could vary – still using events that the guitarist had already played but not necessarily repeating them in the order in which they had occurred, or one that he or she could predict. 

These thoughts came back to me when I started to experiment with hexaphonic guitar and inspired the design of my first piece for this instrument, called Out of the Loop.
 
Sound is recorded simultaneously from the conventional pickup  on an electric guitar and from a hexaphonic pickup via a breakout box. The conventional sound is heard in real time but the six channels from the hex pickup are stored in a buffer on computer. The computer then chooses events from the different strings and plays them back at varying times to form an accompaniment. The accompanying sounds are pitched shifted away from the original as the piece develops.

Stereo reduction of eight-channel original.

Software uses MAX 6 and IRCAM Mubu.
Breakout Box by Bill Baxendale  (http://billbax.110mb.com/) 

Out Of The Loop

Abklingende Rührung

Skins

Glass Dandruffs

Interview with Charles Gershom & Ed Wright By BBC Radio Wales about the Sonic Wave Lab, for the Llawn 03 Festival, Llandudno, 2015



BBC Interview Sonic Wave Lab

The Rush of the Brook Stills the Mind for multi-percussion and live, interactive electroacoustics takes its inspiration from a poem with the same title by Wally Swist. The percussionist’s virtuosic foray through Swist’s evocative work pairs acoustic and electroacoustic forces into a single entity. The Rush of the Brook Stills the Mind was commissioned by percussionist Scott Deal and is dedicated to him.

The trail flashes
	with sluices of snow melt.
		Silver-green undersides

of hemlock lift in the wind.
	A warbler’s electric call
		climbs all the way

up the mountain slope.
	That hidden waterfall 
		we promised to see

this spring unrolls bolt after bolt
	of runoff that splashes
		veils of watery lace

over stones. The canopy
	creaks with pine siskins.
		Mist rises above snow.

The aloneness almost too much
	for one man. The surge
		of the brook crashes

around boulders; a sink hole
	swirls and dips. Ripples
		cascade in a basin

under deadfall to plunge
	into a froth of torrent.	
		A nuthatch debugs

a fallen branch that rocks
	in the current; and a mayfly
		is blown above the spray.

--Wally Swist from Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love, published by Southern Illinois University Press (2012). Reproduced with permission of the author. All rights reserved.

The Rush of the Brook Stills the Mind

A work composed for the Hermes Ensemble under the composition workshops at the University Of Birmingham. The piece explores lace works as an inspiration for the development of form in a piece and my continuous interest in absorbing musical material from traditional songs from S.Miguel (Azores).
Hermes Ensemble, conductor: Koen Kessels, University of Birmingham
(Permission from the Hermes Ensemble)

©Lace work by Filomena Cardoso (S.Miguel Island, the Azores)

Cinq Étapes Sur Une Ligne I (2014)| permission by Hermes Ensemble

Upon entering the campus of Trinity College Dublin it is striking how much the character of the ambient sound changes, as the din of traffic and pedestrians which dominates outside the college walls recedes into the background as you emerge from the narrow passageway of the front gate. This sense of liminality and of passing through a threshold into an entirely different space is the focus of this tape piece entitled Of Town and Gown. This soundscape composition is constructed from field recordings made around the outskirts of the campus, which are then manipulated, processed and combined with a sound from the heart of the university, namely the commons bell located in the campanile. In this way the piece explores the relationship between the university and the rest of the city (between town and gown) through the blending and relating of these different sounds from both inside and outside the college walls.
- Enda Bates - March, 2016

This is a stereo excerpt from the original composition for 8 loudspeakers. 

Commissioned by Trinity College Dublin as part of the Trinity Creative Challenge 2015.
https://www.tcd.ie/trinity-creative/ 


Of Town and Gown (stereo excerpt)

An orchestral piece with singing fish and hydrophone recordings of me singing and playing metal instruments as heard underwater

Katherine Betteridge's Album

Turas

Female singer, sitar, tamboura and tabla. Done with supercollider from Lua2SC.

Morning In India

Richard Garrett is an english composer living in Wales. He started out playing noisy rock music, then jazz. Now, he makes the computers do all the hard work. 

He is currently studying for an PhD  at Bangor University.

Projects to date include:

Lightening Rock Technology Collective (album 'This is no Game' 1984)
Gilles Petit (singing)
Welsh Jazz Summer School
Generative Music:
       Robot Sculpture (CD 2001)
       Dark Symphony (Installation with Brian Eno et al. Linz 2003)
Workshop in Algorithmic Computer Music (Dave Cope, Peter Elsea 2004)
Weathersongs:
      Album (CD 2006)
      Installation (Wales, Italy 2007)
nwdlbots (pronounced "noodlebots) - generative software for Ableton Live (2010)
AudioSprayGun - generative sound creation/ spatialisation device (2013 - )



Out Of The Loop

Richard Garrett (Wales)

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