Rewind

2019

fixed medium - 3rd order ambisonics

11’06”

Commissioned by:

BEAST

A commission from BEAST FEaST 2019, whose theme of how past methodologies and technologies inform(ed) future creation (“rewinding in order to fast-forward”), allowed me to approach this new way of working, using innovation and memories of my own compositional methodologies as an aesthetic rooting of the work.

I spent fifteen days working in the space (The Dome Room at the University of Birmingham) where the piece was to be premièred, which also allowed me to re-assess the notion of “studio”. Sound materials used reflected the past, using sounds taken from pieces created in the studios at Birmingham over many years, creating new recordings of environments that had remained essentially unchanged for 40 years and other tropes such as starting the piece with a 1kHz test tone (ubiquitous in the 1980s) which is granulated and distributed into three-dimensional space (practically impossible in the 1980s).

Thanks for sounds to: Anonymous, Jonty Harrison, Jo Hyde, Andy Lewis, Adrian Moore, Alistair MacDonald, Nick Virgo, Rachel Williams.