Please use headphones or nice speakers with a subwoofer and keep in mind soundcloud, unfortunately, really compresses this file.

The electronics blooming from the acoustic in a symbiotic, intertwined creature like lichen.

Speaker Spit (2021-22) for large ensemble and electronics

Francisco Alvarado • electrics guitar
Cécile Le Talec • objects

Under the trees in the garden of the St Étienne Church in Beauvais, like the lines of a drawing in space, appears Flux, a sculpture imagined by the artist Cécile Le Talec for this site. Around and through it, the greenery, the columns of the building, the church enter into its composition.

The sculpture is made up of stainless steel threads which give the illusion of having been led like weft threads between warp threads, as they would be called for a loom. Together, they form an extraordinary mesh. The city's drapery and textile activity will undoubtedly have inspired the artist. Flush with the ground, without a base or foundation, the sculpture evokes the light form of an organdi canvas or a large drape, which would have come to rest in this green setting.

Or would it, on the contrary, be a lifting of the ground? Throughout his creative residency in Beauvais, the artist collects sounds of the city, draws and writes in a notebook about the history of the site. She records the flocks of bells, the song of blackbirds and starlings, and sees the material thus brought together as a whole, in an approach of synthesis of the arts.

Cécile Le Talec thus invites the composer Francisco Alvarado to imagine, in turn, a second work: an original composition, created according to his musical and personal interpretation of the spectrographic form of the sculpture. This sound creation, inseparable from the work, will be played during the inauguration as part of a performance.

For the two artists, an invisible link seems to connect the line of the first drawings, the stainless steel wire of the sculpture and the acoustic wave generated by the music. As if the whole thing was moving and vibrating in the air until it produced a visual and audible sensation in us.

FLUX [2023] • for electric guitar, objects & electronics

Growth

Finally returning to Italy (Sardinia to be precise) post Covid in a couple of months to go on residency. In anticipation of this adventure I will upload a few Italy based works from festivals etc that i have made over the last few years. This work  premiered as part of the 2021 Helicotrema festival. Official arty wanky explanation below:
'Whilst my yearly travel to Italy from my hometown of Hobart in Australia is halted due to the pandemic I have been increasingly aware of other more subtle forms of travel. In particular, how sound itself travels has become an important aspect of my research with more sound files being sent across the globe and conversations with other artists via zoom and mobile phone replacing the face to face communication I have been used to. 

Sound travels at 1225kms an hour but ever since radio broadcasting was developed we can hear things from anywhere in the world instantly. Sound can ,in a way ,also time-travel - I can play recordings from the past and re-live the experience of being there. 

With these ideas in mind I wrote (the work  using a live stream audio stream from Venice that was mixed with a live local recording 13.5 hours (the time the sound would have taken to travel to Hobart) after it was broadcast. This combined audio recording of Venice and Hobart formed the raw material which was manipulated and arranged to evoke some of the many sensations of physical travel - movement, wonder, fear, enchantment, loneliness and adventure. 

Unedited field recordings from my archives are introduced at the 4 minute mark - one of the Grande Canal sent to me in 2019 and one of the main highway in my hometown which I sent to a colleague in Italy in 2020. These recordings capture the main routes of travel in their respective cities and bridge the past with the present creating a sound collage that travels through time.

In keeping with the theme of how sound travels the entire piece was written and mixed in 13.5hours, echoing the time it would take for sound to travel between Hobart and Venice.'

Viaggio di andata

Here's another track from our new album .... https://kirby-ward.bandcamp.com/album/rat-palace-sessions
The Rat Palace was our studio from when we first started seriously working together in 2016 until the landlords decided it was time for the artists to go and the tourists to come. It had been Mat's base since 2009 and hosted dozens of artists and musicians since it first started in 2006.
As the name suggests the place was run down, lacked various things like hot water, proper access and heating but it had a vibe, and the people we shared the space with all felt and helped to create it....Art was everything, day after night after day for years.
These 7 improvisations are a tiny fraction of the jams we had there, just a few highlights from 100s of jams. They are raw, unpolished and unconcerned with anything outside the moment. We rarely 'rehearsed' as such at the Rat Palace - just played.
Things come and things go - Vale Rat Palace, you were amazing.

Kirby/Ward - Swamp Fuzz

a live cut from our recent Rat Palace Sessions Album Launch. The piece is an improvisation based on a track from the album - which of course is also an improv.  So we are going down the rabbit hole here performing improvs based on improvs, each time changing into something slightly different.

Kirby/Ward LIVE - thumbs

Aporia is an ongoing Internet collab project based around the piano/bass duo 'KIrby/Ward'. Occasionally we capture something at rehearsal that we send to dummer Dane Renshaw (Japan) and guitarist Bruce Musser (U.S.A) to add their respective talents too. Its usually pretty spacious and dreamy : ) This time however the piece we sent out was really busy and instead of trying to pare it back we thought fuck it lets go full hog and make it super busy. So we asked Guitarist Axel Weiß (Germany)and Saxophonist Phil Bywater (Australia) to join the party. So The sextet was born. Of note is that none of the players heard any other parts of the work other than the original Piano/Bass recording, and in the  case of the Saxophones poor Phil didn't hear anything at all! I just used some work he had sent me. So all those nuanced interactions are complete sonic chance. as always Aporia may or may not record more music

Aporia #3 (Sextet)

Étude - SORA (2024)
for 8 soloists

Credit: Internationale Ensemble Modern Akademie 2023-24
Conducted by: Yannick Mayaud
Audio Engineer: Markus Güdel

premiered at Lucerne Festival
Photo Credit: © Lucerne Festival/Priska Ketterer

Étude SORA for 8 soloists

I am made of broken wood (2024)

for Flute, Clarinet, Piano, Violin, Violoncello & Objects

Written for the Plural Ensemble.

Live Recording l International Music Festival of the Canary Islands. 
Conductor: Fabián Panisello.

12nd October 2024, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

I am made of broken wood (2024) for quintet and objects l Live Recording

paw-marks in wet cement (2015–17), for piano, two percussionists, and amplified ensemble.
Performed by Wilhem Latchoumia, and the EOC conducted by Daniel Kawka.

I am made of broken wood (2024) for quintet and objects l Live Recording

José Luis Perdigón de Paz

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