New! The MrWobblyHead Project

I have been quiet for a while - mostly because I did not have anything to say. I often wish more people would take that approach. However, it is time to say a number of things and I will start with this...

I am really excited!

And that is because I am working with my new project, it's coming together nicely, it has two lovely gigs and is ready for lots more. I haven't been this passionate about writing and performing music since DepartureLounge and here I am with all sorts of people wanting a piece of the action. 

Go on, what is it? 

It's called The MrWobblyHead Project and it pulls together musicians from very different backgrounds in a part scored part improvised environment (let's stop worrying about the mechanics and make music but allow mechanics to happen when they need to.) 

www.mrwobblyhead.co.uk/project.html 

Nobody has heard it yet, except us so I cannot and will not share any sound yet ... But we are playing at Cafe 164 / Leeds Gallery,  in Leeds on Friday 23 January 2015 for Leeds Print Festival : http://www.leedsprintfestival.com

Then, we will be performing in a very different pumping, kicking, rocking show at Belgrave Music Hall for IFIMPaC (Leeds College of Music) on Friday 13 February 2015. It's going to kick arse and has a lovely surprise special guest to help us rock the 4x out of it. 

We are all really excited about this adventure and we want you to be part of it. You can contribute your voice (and I mean your words spoken by you or your family see rules below) to this by sending me short quotations up to 20 seconds to me in a Dropbox link to seratoner@gmail.com and we may or may not use them in the show. 

 (We will not be able to pay for these, so you accept that you own the material at the time of submission and that it is your own voice, or that of someone who has agreed to allow you to use it, and you hand over any intellectual property in the text or any recordings to us ... In other words don't send stuff if you want to be paid and don't send me stuff that belongs to anyone else. I want words and voices please!)

That's how you programme electronic music

I just attended the final concert at the Di-stanze festival in Leeds and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Here's my review.

Joanne Armitage kicked things off with an on the edge bit of Live Coding. It took a few moments to get going during which some code appeared and reappeared on the screen, but when it did get underway there were some cool sounds. Key set the scene for a programe expertly curated by Ewan Stefani and James Mooney. 

I always enjoy Ewan Stefani's work for its pace and upfront approach to material. Three Abstractions kicks and it kicks hard. Being run over by a train is one hell of a thrill on a multi-channel genelec system, but this is not just a gimmick. The dialogue of rhythmic entities inside the material works really well. DT/P borrows from electronica while remembering the masters of electroacoustic music. It's actually rather funky and received an excellent reception as it should. 

After a brief interval Pascall Ansell as Panelak took his trousers off. Barefoot in a hand made dress he twitched erratically at the mixing desk walking to and away from the mix position during the performance returning with a white mug which somehow worked brilliantly to cut through the arseclenching sterility of norms in sound diffusion. The two tracks he performed interleaved in the  second half are glitchy experiments in sound design which exist somewhere in the void between modern dance music and sound art. I couldn't take my eyes off him throughout and my ears were assaulted in the very best way. This is pumping, thrusting, music which is as beautifully crafted as it is lo-fi. Panelak left me wanting to hear more and to dive into his singular world of performance art. This is refreshing stuff and he is one to watch! (I have since listened to his album Heimat - and you must get a copy! It's bonkers and brilliant and I may have to review it under separate cover.)

Alannah Halay in person is very quiet. This sweet introverted exterior is in significant contrast to her The Ridge is Beyond the Edge. Described as 'a state of limbo induced by the act of 'waiting to wait' within a timeline that is not straightforwardly linear', Halay works with clocks and voices announcing time and counting in a thunderous and nightmarish composition which took me to the feverish place of not sleeping. I loved this full frontal snapshot of psychosis.

In stark contrast, Oliver Thurley's Burrow "draws inspiration from one of Franz Kafka's last short stories The Burrow in which the narrator struggles to locate the source of mysterious noise which breaches the stillness and security of its home. Gradually fear begins to overcome him that an unseen 'beast' approaches". It is a startling moment when the room is injected with high frequency sine waves just on the edge of our hearing. You can feel it in the bones inside your head which is a strange sensation which seemed to make the room itself incredibly loud. Punctuation came from a series of beautifully detailed thumbing a of strings and tiny details. Thurley's work suggests he may just become a legend of the craft in future.

The show closed with a blast from the past with Rob Mackay's compelling Voicewind, written in 1998. This superb demonstration of all that was brilliant about electroacoustic music in the late 90's is a concise and well paced outing based on a text by Sophocles. The natural world collides with a choir of human voices in a tale of human frailty and hope in the vastness of the universe. Powerful and uplifting stuff. 

A brilliant bit of programming by Mooney and Stefani which showcased an exciting  and diverse set of composers on a lovely sound system. Panelak, Halay and Thurley have been on my mind all evening which speaks of the power of their work.  More please! 

The problem with music tech in the wrong hands.

Music Technology is great. I love it. Electronic toys and tools allow us to make some awesome music. However, there are a couple of things which really get on my tits about the way some people use it.  This is particularly focused on that strange little world of electroacoustic composers and acousmatic fossils. Others seem either content with the issues or too afraid of the electroacoustic Mothers' Union to say anything. So I am going to pick on 5 things which wind me up: 

1. It just doesn't work

If you are going to give your work (or other people's for that matter) in a concert, check that you can load up your laptop really quickly and the software will come up fast enough. Make sure that you have full compatibility with that oh-so-fancy soundcard that venue is using and that you have installed the correct drivers. 

When I go to a concert I want to be entertained and intrigued. Aside from the stand up comic in my head ripping the shit out of you for being a bellend, there isn't much entertainment in sitting in a technical rehearsal for the concert you are already giving. It's embarrassing and it's foolish. Not sure it will work? Don't do the piece. 

I know things go wrong from time to time but in electroacoustic music there are far too many fails, far too much bad planning and a total lack of musicianship. If you write music because you are not a perfowr then for the love of God stop trying to perform it. Oh and don't turn up in a dirty t-shirt and ripped jeans looking like you slept in the bin store! It's rude to your audience. 

2. Be in control of your laptop

Be sure that you have turned off your screensaver, disabled anything which will ping or make an unwanted addition.

If you have system sounds turned on after day one of owning a laptop I have to question your ears in the first place... These are crap sounds inflicted on us like the lift music of errors they shouldn't be there and definitely not in a concert. 

3. Hide the bloody cursor!

If your ever so clever reinvention of electroacoustic music (with the same chords, pedals, bleeps, squeaks, wind, water and kicked leaves as you used in the last piece and the one before) has a big visual of the 'score' (why the fuck do I want to read the score when I should be listening?) at least have the respect to hide the cursor so I don't feel like I'm watching it over your shoulder in the kitchen. 

4. Use tech as a tool and write music! 

If you think that your laptop, your studio, your surround rig, your mixer are musical instruments forget it. They are not. They are tools to capture, cut, copy and paste. 

The strange notion of 'instrument' means that you people don't think beyond the really obvious and it all sounds the same after a bit! Spend more time on the material and less on the at ever so clever patch in max msp which doesn't actually do anything more clever than proprietary software and hardware. This is using software as a dildo and does not make your music great. 

5. Don't be late

The reason that only your mates come to the concert is because you treat the audience like your mates at a party. Make the show go up on time, be welcoming and friendly but cut out the in jokes. Plan your time so you have a good 20 minutes to settle the room after rehearsals. Don't keep the audience waiting half an hour while you tit about with software that you should have working days in advance. Look at massive pop shows which are far more complex in their use of tech. They wouldn't dare have a catastrophic failure using the same gear that you have. It's bad planning and it's embarrassing. Thanks. 

Dr Paul J. Abbott is a composer working with electronic and experimental music. He is gobby and opinionated about music and doesn't really care if his opinions bother you.