Sarah Angliss - My Electroacoustic World

Describing herself as a composer, musician and robotic artist, Ivor Novello award winning artist Sarah Angliss talks to Caro C about her route into Electronic Music and how she utilises sub-frequencies, robotics and her own effects in her compositions and live performances.

Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:30 - Classical And Folk Beginnings
00:00 - Discovering Electronic Music
07:52 - Studying Infrasound
12:26 - The Brown Note
14:40 - Augmenting Acoustic Sounds
17:46 - Using The Theremin As A Controller
19:28 - The Bela Board
20:48 - Using Robotics In Performances
26:20 - The Science Museum and Daphne Oram
30:05 - Radio 4 And Echo
33:58 - Current Projects
35:28 - Working With Synthesizers

Sarah Angliss Biog
Sarah Angliss is an Ivor Novello Award winning composer, performer and robotic artist working in television, film, on the live concert stage and in theatres across Europe and North America. Her recent work includes the music for Romola Garai’s feature film Amulet - a terse, electroacoustic score which explores the sonorities of voices and ancient instruments, revealing and augmenting them with Sarah’s distinctive digital and electronic techniques. 

Sarah’s music draws on her lifelong interest in European folksong, cybernetics and esoteric sound culture. These inspire her progressive and strikingly original music. Her work reflects an eclectic musical background. A classically-trained composer who specialised in baroque and renaissance music, Sarah cut her teeth performing on the UK folk scene. Her desire to get inside notes and finely manipulate sound then build her own automatic music machines led her to study electroacoustic engineering, then robotics, alongside music – fields that continue to inform her unique compositional style. Sarah received the Visionary Award from the Ivors Academy in 2021 and a Paul Hamlyn Award for Composers in 2018.

Website: www.sarahangliss.com

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/sarahangliss

Twitter: @sarah_angliss

Instagram: @sarah_angliss

Caro C Biog
Caro C is an artist, engineer and teacher specialising in electronic music. Her self-produced fourth album "Electric Mountain" is out now. Described as a "one-woman electronic avalanche" (BBC), Caro started making music thanks to being laid up whilst living in a double decker bus and listening to the likes of Warp Records in the late 1990's. This "sonic enchantress" (BBC Radio 3) has now played in most of the cultural hotspots of her current hometown of Manchester, UK. Caro is also the instigator and project manager of electronic music charity Delia Derbyshire Day.

URL: http://carocsound.com/

Twitter: @carocsound
Inst: @carocsound

FB: https://www.facebook.com/carocsound/

Catch more shows on our other podcast channels: https://www.soundonsound.com/sos-podcasts

Creators and Guests

Host

Caro C

Caro C is an artist, engineer and teacher specialising in electronic music. Her self-produced fourth album 'Electric Mountain' is out now. Described as a "one-woman electronic avalanche" (BBC), Caro started making music thanks to being laid up whilst living in a double decker bus and listening to the likes of Warp Records in the late 1990's. This 'sonic enchantress' (BBC Radio 3) has now played in most of the cultural hotspots of her current hometown of Manchester, UK. Caro is also the instigator and project manager of electronic music charity Delia Derbyshire Day.

What is Electronic Music?

Welcome to the Sound On Sound Electronic Music podcast. On this channel we feature some of the pioneers of the industry, interview musicians and talk about retro and current gear.

More information and content can be found at https://www.soundonsound.com/podcasts | Facebook, Twitter and Instagram - @soundonsoundmag | YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/soundonsoundvideo

Hello and welcome to the Sound On Sound podcast about electronic music and all things synth. I'm Caro C and this time I'm talking to Ivor Novello Academy award winning composer Sarah Angliss. Sarah is a rather unique UK based creative technologist and composer with an array of skills and interests.

Sarah is classically trained, a folk music performer, plays instruments such as keyboards, recorder, and the theremin, but also studied electro acoustic engineering, max coding, and robotics as she builds her own automata music machines. We'll hear from Sarah about how all these fit together to create her ethereal sound worlds.

Here's a taste of Sarah's music to get her started. In this extract, Sarah is using her robotics to play birdsong.

Sarah Angliss, welcome to the Sound on Sound podcast. Thank you for joining me. Oh, it's great to be here. Great. Well, I've known you for a few years over the various events. I think it was an Ada Lovelace day where we met women in STEM music tech. Events. Yeah. I think there's something really interesting about what you do because you define yourself as a composer, a musician and a robotic artist.

So can you tell us a bit about how you started off more classically trained, folk based, and then sort of went down the rabbit hole or started embracing more electronics and robotics? Yeah. Well, I mean, I've always had the two strands since I can remember. I mean, I was really, really into music as a kid. I didn't come from a sort of family that.

were classically trained or anything. I come from a Welsh family where there's sort of, you know, it is the stereotype where we all sit up and sing at any, you know, drop of a pin sort of thing. And I was really, really into music, but at the same time, I was quite an oddbod, especially for a girl in my sort of childhood days, because I was really into building things.

And I was like, all the other kids were like playing with their teddies and stuff. And I was the weirdo that was like, literally building sort of contraptions across the garden to catapult my teddies across the garden. And then I also had a tape recorder, an old sort of cassette tape recorder, and I used to sort of make all these sort of imaginary recordings about the moon and all of this.

And that was just my sort of thing, and I didn't know that that was unusual. And, um, Everybody assumed I was going to be a classical musician. And as I say, I, I did get very into folk music. Cause my family used to go to folk clubs, which was a bit of a thing when I was a kid and I was very, very into the sort of the English folk tradition.

And I would be what they'd call a floor singer. And that was where. Between the sort of professional act, you'd get up and you'd do a number. And that sort of gave me a really good grounding in, not only how to put a number across, but all the sort of details of the sort of total theatre of a performance because you think, yeah, that.

performer when they came in, you could hear a pin drop because they held the room. And then, and then I just got an intuitive sense of what you needed to do to really, really hold a room with a piece of music. And so that was all ticking along and every thought I'd go to music college, but of course, at the same time, all my, geeky stuff was going on, and I really sort of bucked a trend, again, for sort of young women at the time, is that I got into electronics and I started building circuits and stuff like that.

And then I had this sort of epiphany, this is like in my teens. I was about the most unpopular girl in the class in my teens. My dad recorded this thing off the radio because he thought, he heard it was coming up and because of all the stuff I was into, he thought I'd find it interesting. And it was this recording about house post nuclear war, where the house had all the inhabitants had been vaporized, but it was like an intelligent house and it was still going and the clocks were talking and the house was talking to the inhabitants.

It was actually a sound piece based on Ray Bradbury's house. And now there will come soft rains, which is about precisely what I've described. And it was by Malcolm Clarke, although I didn't know that at the time, from the Radiophonic Workshop. And so I'd like had this sort of light bulb moment when I heard this thing, I thought, Oh my God, I don't know what the hell I just heard.

It had like vocoders and things like that in it, which I'd never heard in those days, you know, coming from Watford where we didn't have any of that. And, um, I thought that is what I want to be doing, but there wasn't a sort of way that you could just do that. You know, you couldn't just say, Oh, you know, can I go to college and become one of those?

And so I went to the library and look stuff up and. Yeah, it was quite interesting when you look at where, where I am now is the thing I found in the library was nothing of any use except for this one photo in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians. And it was that really famous photo of Daphne Oram leaning over the eramics machine drawing and she used to be in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians under synthesizer.

And it was like, Like, you know, all my neurons sort of firing at once, and it just sort of kick started this thing where I got really into physics, really into electronics, alongside my music making, and then instead of doing what everybody assumed I was going to do, and head off to music college and, you know, do composition and piano and stuff like that, what I actually ended up doing was a an engineering degree.

I studied electro acoustic engineering because that was the only way in my head I could think nobody's going to give me the keys to these studios. But if I make myself like an indispensable technician, you know, like the person that knows everything in the studio, knows how to build things, knows how to make sounds and all that, maybe I'll get in via that route into some big studio.

Because in the time that we're talking about, which was the sort of, uh, uh, late 80s. You know, you couldn't really afford a home studio. You kind of had to get to the gatekeepers who'd let you in, and I was trying to get through the gate. Anyway, so I got, I did my degree and it was all great and all that, but actually there was nothing at the other end.

By that stage, the Radiophonic Workshop was unfortunately, sum it up as like a geezer with a sampler. I mean, it just wasn't the radiophonic workshop of my dreams. And I just sort of went into the wilderness for ages, worked in the building industry for a while, did all sorts of stuff, worked at the science museum for a while, but I was always sort of trying to claw my way back into making music.

And then slowly, slowly I did and very, very slowly. And in fact, I, I kind of was, it was like, I think if a class what I was doing is outsider art. I mean, it was like this really weird amalgam of classical stuff. and electronics, which now sounds completely ordinary, but I didn't really have a, a network or a structure that I fitted into.

So I was doing things like setting up this big infrasound project because I was trying to find ways to get funding as an engineer to do what I really wanted to do, which was compose and explore the sort of, uh, outer reaches of sound. And, uh, and then just, uh, gradually, gradually got more of a name for myself.

And then. And then the robotics was another swerve, which I can talk about if that's of interest, I can talk a bit more about that. Yeah, let's do that. But first of all, I'd like you to tell me a bit more about your infrasound explorations. Yes, I mean, this is, so one of my very first projects was infrasound, as in one of my very first projects that had any sort of public profile beyond, you know, the folk club or the pub.

So what happened was, as an acoustician, if you go to like any sort of pub, School textbook on acoustics, they always say this thing, I actually see it in music books as well, they'll say that we hear between 20 and 20k, like we don't hear anything below 20 hertz. And in acoustics, we were always told that the stuff below 20 hertz was like the junk noise, the stuff that annoys people, it's like the throb of the lorry outside, you know, the annoying pipe, you know, in the, from the factory, it's the stuff you've got to get rid of.

Meanwhile, I got. I was thinking, but hang on a minute, if you go to somewhere big like St. Paul's Cathedral or, I don't know, the Royal Festival Hall or something like that, and you look at the organ pipes, some of them are so big, they're deliberately being made to make stuff below 20 hertz. So if we're being told that we can't hear it, but we kind of feel it and it's annoying, why have we been putting it in music since the time of Bach?

So for me, this was interesting enough, I thought, oh my god, so there's this weird thing that we're throwing into music that you kind of feel more than you can hear and we're spending a hell of effort making these pipes to do it but we don't know why. And then I started talking to organ builders and they were saying yeah it's kind of like the god stop it's like the moment in the music where you like put your foot down and the whole room vibrates and like puts shivers on the back of your spine and we've all we've all felt that if you go to Chartreuse and you hear the big cathedral organs there.

But then the real kind of mind blowing thing coupled with this is I've got a couple of old friends, one of whom's Richard Wiseman, the parapsychologist, and I got talking to him about this and he said, well, you're not going to believe this. Um, there's a physicist called Vic Tandy. who sadly is no longer with us, I should say, a physicist called Vic Tandy.

And he's also been interested in infrasound because he's been finding it at ostensibly haunted sites. So I thought, Oh my God. So we've got this sound that we've never fully researched. It's like unfinished business in music and acoustics. And we're finding it at ostensibly haunted sites. We're putting it into sacred music to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.

So that's got to be interesting. So that's what I did. I got the National Physical Laboratory, I got a pianist, Jeannier, on board, and I got some parapsychologists on board, including Richard. And we made Infrasound and we laced live performances with it. And then we got people into the room. We did two massive concerts in the Purcell room.

And we didn't tell people where the Infrasound was. And we sort of varied where the Infrasound was from concert to concert. And we just asked them what was going on, the audience. And, uh, sure enough, Very tentative evidence, but we picked up tentative evidence that, um, it really creeps you out. Yeah, in all sorts of ways.

It sort of creates a sense of presence and it creates a sense of, um, sort of electricity in there, like a feeling something's in the air and you can't quite put your finger on it. And so it's not surprising that if you're in a spooky building and it's there and it might be for no particular reason, it might be because the wind's blowing across the door and it's acting like a Helmholtz resonator, the room, you know, it could be which was happening with Vic Tandy, that there was a faulty ceiling fan that's making it.

Or maybe it's something genuinely spooky. We don't know what's causing it, but it's, it's giving us this feeling. And organ builders worked this out before they knew what infrasound was. They worked out, you know what, if we make the pipes this long, it really, really does something. And so to me, it was like, It was like really rich pickings and it's become a sort of a sort of lifelong quest really to research it.

It's very difficult to research because, um, the generators are chunky and expensive and we had to build our own and I store, I had one for about 10 years and then, um, I just couldn't afford to store it anymore so sadly it's been broken up and it's now been turned into a set of chairs in a, um, music venue in Brighton.

That was its last sighting. So it's very much about how we feel sound. We don't just hear it, which obviously, uh, Dame Evelyn Glenny talked about that, didn't she, as a deaf musician, as a deaf person. And also that, um, that Rupert Neve talked a lot about, um, how just because we can't hear the frequencies doesn't mean they're not affecting us.

I'm very interested in the material below 20 Hertz. And it's a bit like. sort of stepping into a dark pool when you listen to it. So if I did a frequency sweep down, which incidentally would not work on a podcast because we're going so low, but if I was doing like boo like that, there's a point at which if we kept going down and down and down, you know, below the bottom of the piano, below the frequencies you're going to hear in the big nightclub subwoofers, there's a point at which we get to 20 Hertz and it's a really strange it must be like moving from red into near infrared.

It's like we get to 20 hertz and then it's like, oh, where did the sound go? But you realize your ears aren't hearing it. It's not hear sound anymore, but you're still feeling it. And you've probably been feeling all the other stuff too, but suddenly all you've got is what I call the feel sound. And it's really palpable.

And it's also palpable because we have to really go, we have to get really high levels to even make it perceptible. And that was quite an issue with the experiment because you're on the edge of. Dangerously high levels, not in the ways that we, when we had physicists warning us off the experiment because they thought there's this thing called the brown note that everybody talks about.

And I can remember when I was doing this experiment, walking into Tottenham Court, a shop in Tottenham Court Road that's no longer with us, things turnkey. I'm trying to buy these speakers, and I said, do these ones go below 20 hertz? They go, oh yeah, yeah, but you don't need that. I said, no, no, I need the ones that go below 20 hertz.

I'm working around the sort of 15 hertz region. And they got the manager out to warn me off, and he said, all right, you really shouldn't be messing with the, with the brown note.

And that's an obvious reason why they called it that. And I had physicists saying it was deeply unethical, the whole experiment. I mean, it's fantastic. And I kind of, it's like, I've been working with it ever since. I mean, it's been in lots of my sort of theater work. I always get it out when I can, when there's space to use it, I will use it.

You know, brilliant. And I think what's really interesting about your music, your own music, whether it's for, for a commission for film theater and et cetera, as well as your own albums, is that. It almost, it might not seem electronic music, but there's always electronics involved. You talk about how you're really interested in the live augmentation of acoustic sound.

Yes. So how does that work where it It is always in the background, if you like, or it's always behind the sound. Yeah. It's not even that it's behind the sound, it's that it's acting on the sound. So, you know, if you go and hear one of my performances. I'll play an instrument and you'll be hearing me live.

And while you're hearing it live, you're also hearing an unusual augmentation of the live. So it might be that I'll suddenly stretch it like licorice for no apparent reason, other than it sort of fits the narrative in some way and then sort of snap it back again. And so, I mean, you know, electronics, you know, outside, you know, synthesis, you know, when we talk about effects units, that's live augmentation, you know, that's about, you're not really in a big echoey room, you know, you've, you've put your tape echo on or you put your, you know, digital echo on.

And I think it's really about stepping beyond the usual suspects, you know, your reverb and your delay, both of which I love, and thinking about new augmentations and thinking about how to make new effects where it's not just so crazy, it might as well be random. I'm always trying to find that magical point where you think, I don't know what she's doing.

I don't know what she's doing, but I kind of do know what she's doing. I like it when the audience know there's a cause and effect because they can see, especially with live, where they can see me moving in the room, like in front of my or whatever. And I think I've never heard this effect before and it's freaking me out in some way because I don't know what it is but I kind of get that when she moves her arms like that the effect goes like that.

So an example would be, a really simple example, I think it's on YouTube still, um, there's a piece I wrote, I read in the Cathedral and I wanted to do something with the theremin and birdsong and so what you're hearing is it's trying to make a sort of um, it's actually based on a really old film that I love and um, I wanted to create this sort of happening where you sort of hear me on the, um, theremin.

And sometimes you're hearing the classic live theremin, classic, ooh, you know, theremin sound. But sometimes what I'm doing is I'm switching between that very rapidly and me using the theremin to control birdsong. So sometimes you're hearing a classic, you know, sawtooth. swooping about in a sort of theremin tastic way, and then sometimes it's not a sawtooth, but it's something bird like, and yeah, it's Blackbird's song, and what I'm doing is I'm using the theremin as a pitch controller and a speed controller and a volume controller for Birdsong, and so I'm thereminising Birdsong.

So that's an example of an acoustic sound that I'm Augmenting electronically. And how are you actually doing that then? How are you actually turning the thein into a kind of controller? I first worked that out quite a long time ago and I'd probably do it slightly differently now, but the way I'm doing it just 'cause if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Is that I am, I'm not using CV out, I'm actually doing what The Fast Fourier transform. So all the time I'm playing, I'm doing an FFT. On my signal saying what's the frequency now, what's the frequency now, what's the frequency now, and then mapping that onto a scrubber, you know, a scrubber of the speed and the pitch, and it just works, and it was like, the day I tried it first, I started off doing it with sort of spoken word.

And sometimes when I do more sort of cabaret events, you'll still see me doing it with like hypnosis tapes and things like that. And, um, yeah, it just kind of works. And I thought, why? Yeah. And people get it because it's so obvious. You think, Oh my gosh, she moves her hand up and the whole world sort of speeds up and then she moves her hand back and it speeds up.

And so it feels a bit like I'm sort of conjuring an acoustic sound, but you could equally do that with CV out. I mean, there's lots of ways you could do that. You don't even need a laptop. I mean, I work a lot in Max MSP. And again, that's just because it, it suits the kind of stuff I'm doing because I like to be able to prototype things really, really quickly.

And I can make my own effects and prototype them really, really quickly in Max. And I also now, Increasingly, uh, embed max within live. So I'll use max for live and that's just something I've ended up with. It's just my sort of working method, but you know, you could equally, I could do that on something like a Bella board these days, you know, in fact, I might end up doing that cause it'd be less luggage, you know, A bella board?

Yeah, so bella boards are, if you're into such things, are definitely worth investigating. I've got my first bella board at the moment and I'm playing around with it. So a bella board is a little microcontroller, costs about a hundred quid, and it's been, I think it was designed by Queen Mary University, I'm not sure exactly.

It's been Optimized for audio processing so it's got really really low latency so if you want to do something where you have a sensor and you have a sound or you want a sensor and a controller for your synth say like a voltage out and it's very bespoke and you want it in a box that hasn't got a screen attached to it then the Bella board is the way to go and Bella will run things like um, Iran Iran all sorts it will run pure data which of course is very close to max it will run.

Super Collider. It'll run all sorts. And it's a really interesting development. I mean, it's like what you want an Arduino to do that it can't do. I love Arduinos, but Arduinos aren't much cop for live sound processing, but this is all about live processing. And it's got like a bunch of audio ins and outs and MIDI ins and outs all built in, so you don't have to do Do that all from first principles.

It's derived in a box and, and you can address the ins and the outs like you could with a sound card. And it's about the size of a matchbox. Awesome. So that's taken me onto your automaton robotics kind of world. I wonder if you could tell us about a couple of projects I've seen you perform a couple of times with your other inanimate beings on stage.

Tell us about a couple of projects or examples of that wonderful work. Yes. I mean, the very obvious example, because it's the biggest one, which I. gig with is the carillon. So, um, it's, um, it's a tabletop instrument with about 28 bells in it and they're roboticized and they play polyphonically. And that's, that's all you need to know really about it sort of technically.

And, uh, but the reason I made it was, um, go back to the Max thing. I got pretty whizzy at Max, you know, 15 years ago. I can't say exactly when, but anyway, a number of years ago. I got pretty whizzy with Macs and I was going out a lot doing what I'd call laptop performances, and there are some really, really good laptop performers out there, but I am not one of them, because I've been brought up in the sort of embodied performance tradition of playing instruments, and I just could not get on with it as a performance method because it just felt really impoverished, like I couldn't get I couldn't hold the room in the same way that I can when I've got an instrument in my hand because I lost that, again, I lost that sense of cause and effect.

This, she moved like this and the mute and the sound world did that, that had gone. They just saw me like the old stereotype. Is she checking her emails or was she performing her music? And so, um, I thought, well, how can I take the good bits of generative music and automatic music and computer music and put them But give it a physical presence.

And so yeah, so I started building an automata that could be coupled to things like Max MSP, but be physically present in the room, like moving, heaving objects that did stuff. And so the carillon works. What I like about the carillon is that if I'm playing, it sort of frees up my hands. So if I'm playing the theremin, the bad version of it would be, I'd be playing the theremin and there'd be a backing track.

And that's okay, but that only takes you so far. But if I'm playing the theremin, and the backing track is being played by a robot that's in front of you, it's something like, it's something that we're sort of starved of. We've sort of, we don't see enough sort of moving physical music machines. And um, it to me it sort of adds another layer of magic and also it adds another layer of what i call aleatoric charm in that it's quite unpredictable it never plays perfectly evenly because it's it's all all this all the beaters are on springs and so it's got sort of it's got a liveness and a sort of slight shonkiness to it that i just i can't get through sampling and it and it sounds i mean they're beautiful bells because they're like really like the cheapest bells i could get and they're from like hungarian school bells so they're not you know equally tempered.

They're, um, an unusual, uh, just temperament of some kind. And, um, they just make this sort of really interesting sort of, what I call a sort of metallic haze. And again, because it's a machine, not a human playing it. Yes, I can, I can play a keyboard and make them play, but what I tend to do is I write, um, algorithms or just, you know, literally just score some music and stick it into MIDI, and I run that through the bells, and they can play like ridiculously fast, so I can, I've got all these sort of, um, effects I've worked out, I call them doubles, which is sort of going back to sort of the early music idea of where you play a tune, and then you do what they call like a double, which is where the, where you sort of go do do do do do do, you put in a note in between do do do do do do do do, but you tend to sort of make it a note far apart from do do do do do do do, And they can do that, but you know, they can do sort of like, you know, quintuples and things.

And so it's like, it's very exciting because you hear it playing and it all sort of feels almost sort of like, you know, Victorian playroom twee. And then suddenly it just goes off and it just makes this sound that is too fast to even sort of interpret as harmony. It just feels like a sort of haze. And I just, I just love that effect.

Wow. And how many bells are there on the carillon then? Well there's 28 at the moment but I've actually got a few more that I couldn't squeeze in and over lockdown I pulled it because it's gigged and it's gigged and it's gigged and it's completely falling apart now. I've just pulled it apart to re jig it and I'm trying to get some slightly smaller motors so I can squeeze some more in because I'd quite like to extend the range of it.

So every bell has its own motor? Yes, every bell has its own motor and I mean they're dirt cheap motors so this has been the biggest problem. If you spend a lot of money on motors, you don't have the problems I do, which is when I turn up at a venue, I have to recalibrate it, which I've got really fast at, but it's like tuning every string.

I have to, you know, have to sort of work out the, um, positions, the strike positions, because they, as it travels in the back of the van, it goes out of position. And there's a fix for that, but that would cost like 30 quid a motor. So I'm having to sort of find fast, cheap fixes, and just always carry around spares and things.

So really you went from like seeing Daphne, a picture of Daphne Oram in a book. Um, she was an early electronic music pioneer. She was also an inventor and a maker herself, as well as a composer. And, um, yeah, important key figure here in the UK, especially, um, founding, co founding the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

So you kind of went for that, her being a figure of inspiration, if you like, or a springboard for your own career, to then, when writing the foreword to the reissue of her book, An Individual Note. How did all that come about? I'd say there's several strands. One was that when I graduated, if you imagine, I thought, yeah, I've got all these skills now.

This is my big moment. And I knocked on the, you know, I've been composing since I was a kid. I had scores and everything, and I knew how to throw a piece of music together. And I knocked on the door of some of the big academies, you know, like the big, uh, postgraduate music places. I said, yeah, yeah, I've studied electroacoustics and ah, I'm really into music and electronics.

And they literally just closed the door in my face. In fact, one said, well, we've never heard of you. We've never heard of your course. Bye bye. And I didn't have any money at all. So I had no way of setting up my own stuff. And so, um, I ended up in the wilderness for years and years and years and one of those places that took me to was the science museum where I started to research electronic music while I was there because you know, they've got like Lemons Mellotron, they've got an ARP, is it 2500?

The really beautiful, enormous one that Hadid plays and So many delights, I can't even begin. And yeah, and I sort of got a bit of a name among the curators as the person to go to if something weird arrived. You know, I can remember when a fair, there was a phone call about a fair light and one of the curators who worked on like mechanical industry or something, he said, Oh, there's this bloke calling.

He wants to give us this thing. It's called a fair. I said, get it, get it, get it, get it now. And so I would like to think that I've done my small part to save. our sort of material culture. Uh, and anyway, so I was sort of known as the sort of go to person for that. And I wrote a few papers on the Mellotron and I wrote quite an, quite a long paper actually about early sampling culture and comparing it to what happened with musicians with the advent of sampling and the advent of cinema.

Long story. But the big thing was that the science museum, long after I'd left, got a call because Somebody had found Oram's original eramics machine languishing in a barn in France. And Mick Grierson, who was at Goldsmiths at the time, and I think it was Joe Hutton as well, they helped the Science Museum to acquire it.

And so I was brought in, and I don't think I think I was just brought in as, as an electronic musician out there who might have something interesting to say because I could also look at the tech and go, Oh yeah, that's a such and such circuit, you know, and it was such an enormous moment. I literally had to sort of hide behind a filing cabinet and have a cry.

I mean, I cannot, it was literally like, um, yeah, I, I can't even explain what it felt like because it was like, it just took me back to that day in the library. And then, on the basis of that, I probably wrote a few things here and there about Aurum, and obviously I was out performing, and I had quite a few more high profile things around that stage, like stuff at the National Theatre and things like that.

And so, I suppose I just seemed like a person to bring in, because I've Like Aurum, I have a classical background and I have this twin track thing where I'm also got, um, I'm a circuit builder and I have an electronics background. You also did a Radio 4, BBC Radio 4 documentary about Echo. Can you tell us a bit about that?

So you must have done a lot of research around Echo and different varying Echo machines. Yeah, I mean, the reason for doing that was, I mean, I've done a few things with Echo. Radio for on sound culture and the start and I think it sort of relates to what I was saying about where acoustic sound can be electronic sound.

I love that sort of meeting place and I'm always really drawn to parallels between electric and pre electric sound culture and so I was really interested in looking about, um, about like our addiction to echoes. So, you know, So I'm always talking about my childhood, but it's just, I think there's a shared experience.

That whole thing when you're a kid of going through the subway and going, echo, echo. And it's something we all understand. It's like one of our very first sort of acoustic adventures, if you like. And I sort of used that as a starting point. And then I looked at, you know, audiophiles and, and how addicted we are to echoes and the lengths that we have gone to, to, you know, get the, you know, I'm sure there's a few readers that have shelled out more than they should have done on, say, a Roland Space Echo or something like that, which is not, which is deeply impractical, but we're addicted to the sound of it, aren't we?

And one echo is not like any other. And so I was really interested in that, and then I started to delve, and that's, that's why I proposed the series to them. Because I was delving into 19th century literature and 18th century literature about the echoes, and there was this one story and it was just phenomenal.

And it was just sitting in an acoustics text textbook from about 150 years ago, and it was about this bloke in Italy who was on the grand tour and he was looking for echos. He was like an audio file. He like, he didn't go to, you know. He didn't go to the audio shop to get his echos. He, he would go to Italy to find them, you know, like in valleys and churches and things.

And I found it interesting 'cause incidentally, one of my jobs when I was in the sort of musical wilderness, I was in, uh, a building acoustician. And we used to have to have a license from the home office 'cause we had a gun, which we would fire. in the way that everybody knows now, to um, pick up the fir tree response, like the echo, the flutter echo in a building, to sort of pick up the information about the acoustics.

Sort of slightly redundant way of working now, but that's what we did when I was working. And this bloke, he was going around Italy, firing his gun, and he went into this building, and he fired his gun, and it made the most beautiful echo he had ever heard, and it was like this sort of forest clearing, this funny little, I think it was like a Huntsman's Lodge or something.

And he loved it so much, he got all his money, and he paid for the building to be taken apart brick by brick, and brought back to England. I mean, if you think, this is, talk about, um, vintage gear. He paid for it to be taken apart brick by brick, and brought back to England, and sort of, rebuilt in his sort of grounds of his stately home, you know.

And then there was the day when he went into the building and fired the gun again, and the echo had gone. And then the last line was, we'll never know whether he heard the echo ever, because the second shot was into his head. It's like, oh my god, I thought we had it bad. Wow. Yeah, but the thing is, it's a horrible story, but at the same time, it's We know that feeling of the length that you will go to, if you've got addicted to a sound and you know that there's one piece of kit, that one piece of kit you need that will enable you to make it.

And actually it's a perilous thing. You've gotta watch it because actually there are a million other ways to make things and sometimes you can end up the one more piece of kit and I'm ready Brigade And, and I, I say. just make what you can with what you've got. Totally. Yeah. So what projects have you got going on at the moment then?

I've had a huge long pause because I, I did pick up COVID and had a very bad run with it. Um, but I'm now picking up the threads again on, um, an opera that I'm writing. And that's again, a wild departure from what I normally do, but I'm really grateful to Orbra that they took me on as a bit of, um, bit of a curveball, you know, as an electro acoustic composer.

I'm writing an opera and that's gonna, in theory, be on the stage in 2023. There's a film I worked on just before lockdown and I was delighted to see that it's actually gonna be seen. So it's called Amulet, it's a horror film and I did a very, um, in your face female vengeance vocal track rich score for it with a lot of electronics and the carillon which you can hear and this film went to Sundance.

It was, it was written and by directed by Romila Garai.

And I understand you're also starting to actually invest in actual synthesizers. Yes, bit of a turn turnaround. Um, yeah, I can't say much about it yet, but I have got A job that is an absolute thing of joy. And I would just say, watch this space. I'm waiting for the commissioners to give me the green light to share it with everyone.

But let's just say one of the first things that I've been doing in the background. is looking for the sort of wildest synthesizers I can find. And I don't mean like the most expensive fancy ones. Like, you know, I haven't, I haven't been investing in like an ARP 2600. Although if Korg are listening, I'll send you my address.

Uh, but, uh, I've actually been looking for the sort of slightly out there, unloved ones. So things that are very untamable and definite whiff of sort of West coast about them and also things that, uh, Without wishing to be rude about the makers, Slightly Naff wouldn't be out of place in a Berlin nightclub in about 2005.

And I can't explain it. It's almost like verging on chip tunes at times, the sound I'm going for. And a lot of it is actually about really, really squelchy, Joyfully squelchy and chaotic synthesis. And it's a job like no other. And I literally, it's like Christmas come early. Not just because I've got a budget to go and buy some synthesizers.

And just have a bit of wild fun, really. Fantastic. Fantastic. Oh, it's lovely to hear about your adventures in sound and music. And, um, wish you all the best with your continuing voyages. Oh, thanks for listening. And yeah, and thanks to SOS, which I have dipped into on many an occasion when I wanted to work out where on earth to put a microphone.

Thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes for further information as well as links and details of the other episodes in the electronic music series. And just before you go, let me point you to soundonsound. com forward slash podcasts. Where you can explore what's on our other channels.

This has been a Karo C production for Sound On Sound.