Welcome to my archive of Sonic Art.
Electroacoustic improvisation
Soundscape composition
Biography
Noctilucent
With nemeton:
An act of disappearing in its own creation (performed as part of the Digital-Analogue Cambridge (DAC) Festival in 2001)*
This day of electricity (performed as part of the Digital-Analogue Cambridge (DAC) Festival in 2001)*
The Seventh Fire (performed at Bleepfest, November 2002)*
Strandloper (performed at 'self assembly', Kettle's Yard Gallery, February 2003)*
*Pieces performed with LEAPS (the Live Experimental Arts Performance Society), Cambridge
Windmill mix (improvisations recorded in Hindringham windmill, Norfolk, with Peter Anderson, based on field recordings made in the local vicinity). June 2002. Featured on Vermillion Sounds, Resonance FM.
nemeton vs Darkroom remix released (Autumn 2004) on the CD 'Darkroom: the DAC mixes' on the Burning Shed label
Arish Mell (based on live improvisations, integrated with field recordings), CD-R released on Noctilucent, June 2006. Featured on 206Radio Radio Art festival, Feb. 2006. More details here.
Foam. Performed live at the Sonic Arts Expo 2006 at Manchester, Saturday June 24th, as part of an event at Victoria Baths. The performance involved live sampling and processing of the sounds of people walking around the building. CD-R released on Noctilucent, June 2007.
Recordings of all of these pieces are available on CD-R. All are Copyleft.
With ZAUM
I am currently playing with free improvisation group ZAUM. A CD was released on Slam records in October 2004, entitled 'Above our heads the sky splits open', which was one of the CDs of the year both in The Wire and Jazz Review. The group performed a nation-wide tour in the autumn of 2004, and additional dates each year since then. For full details, click here.
CD release 'The little flash of letting go', Live at the Spitz, London, released November 2005. Again attracted a very positive review in The Wire. More details click here.
CD release 'I hope you never love anything as much as I love you', on Amazon Music, 2007. 'Quite simply the best British improvised record in more than a decade', The Wire, Aug 07
Zaum at interactive art event, Bridport, Feb. 06. Photo Lynn Davy
With Pipeworks
A very memorable concert given as part of the Hampshire Water Festival, in August 2004, featuring compositions by Karen Wimhurst.
Photograph featuring the wonderful Nick Crump playing his famous Boghorn.
With Safehouse
I am currently also performing regularly with the Safehouse Collective which meets regularly in the Lighthouse Centre, Poole. I helped produce a CD which was released on the Safe label in 2006. More details here. Safehouse2 CD released 2007, details here.
At Unsafe
Unsafe2 Festival of Improvised and Experimental Music, details here. Unsafe3 festival, details here.
With Spiral
Collaborations with the pianist Mary Potter. Performances in 2006 at Safehouse and at the Study Gallery, Poole. Here is Mary on MySpace
With No context
Improvising laptop ensemble. Here in concert at the Sound Festival, Dorset, July 2007. Check out this MySpace site
Soundscape composition focuses on the use of field recordings to explore the inter-relationships between sound, nature, and society. As defined by one of its leading practitioners, Hildegard Westerkamp, its 'essence is the artistic, sonic transmission of meanings about place, time, environment and listening perception'. For further insight into what soundscape composition might mean in theory and practice, the reader is referred to Hildegard Westerkamp's wonderful writings on the subject. I also strongly recommend 'Sounding Art', a marvellous recent book by Katharine Norman, which features a literary soundwalk with Hildegard. You can read my review of this book, by clicking here.
For details of my own approach to soundscape composition, details of recent works, plus other links and resources click here.
I fell in love with electronic music after hearing Kraftwerk on the radio at the age of ten, back in the days when they still built their own instruments. As a teenager I had a room full of ancient reel-to-reel tape recorders, playing impossibly long tape loops, and a primitive synthesizer built inside a biscuit tin. I have played around with synthesizers ever since, often blending electronic sounds with field recordings. Nowadays everything happens on a laptop, in my mind the most remarkable and powerful musical instrument ever invented. But perhaps not quite as much fun as constructing tape loops used to be.
In recent years I have mostly focused on soundscape composition, but I am also very interested in using electronics in live performance. Summer schools at COMA and Dartington Hall were a big help in learning how to improvise and to perform with other musicians. For a time I was active with LEAPS (the Live Experimental Arts Performance Society), performing regularly in the Cambridge area at a variety of different events. The absolute highlight was performing an extended improvisation in the Cambridge's Museum of Technology, located in a Victorian pumping station, as part of the Digital-Analogue Cambridge (DAC) Festival in 2001.
More recently, having moved to Dorset, I have been performing with the Safehouse Collective which meets regularly in the Lighthouse Centre, Poole, and the free improvisation group ZAUM. I am also a member of the electroacoustic improvisation duo nemeton and the improvising laptop ensemble No Context.
I have been a member of Sonic Arts Network for many years, and am also currently a member of UKISC, the UK acoustic ecology group, which is affiliated to the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology.
Contact: Adrian Newton
