June 28, 2013
I’ve been calling myself a ‘composer’ for about twenty years now, starting from when I went back to music college as a trumpet player but got sidetracked into writing music instead of playing it. On my website you’ll find early pieces like ‘Rate-limiting Step’ for cello & harp, or ‘Studies of Nucleate Boiling in Thin Liquid Layers (Part 1)’ for chamber ensemble. This is what people usually think of when I say I’m a ‘composer’: someone who writes contemporary score-based music for classically trained instrumentalists to play.
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June 24, 2013
Very happy today. Been working on some electronics for the show. For me as a creator, this is a big part of what Why Scotland, Why East Kilbride is about: exploring my nostalgia for teenage evenings spent with a soldering iron, a cup of coffee, and a Hawkwind album.
Some pics below: trying to get my SN76477 prototyping station back up and running.
June 21, 2013
Some of the publicity put out for the show has perhaps been unintentionally slightly misleading! I did have a dream of having a French horn section in the show, but that dream has been realised through… technical means :)
Instead of live players, I’ve invented the ‘Horn-a-Tron’. This is a Pd patch which plays back midi horn sounds alongside video clips of sixteen horn players – with thanks to Steve Park for the horn vids.
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June 17, 2013
A couple of interesting connections between the show and the University of Strathclyde. The first is – and I didn’t spot this till the other day – it’s actually mentioned in the original movie. At around 16 minutes, during the segment where Bruce and Mark visit the National Engineering Laboratory, there’s this exchange:
NEL Employee: We’ve got about three hundred and forty engineering graduates and scientific workers here, so we can tackle all sorts of engineering problems.
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June 6, 2013
Exactly a month to go now to ‘Why Scotland, Why East Kilbride’, my Cryptic Nights show at the CCA. Today I met with Steve Ford, who, as well as playing bass is going to be doing the live audio chemistry. Here’s an example of the kind of thing we won’t be doing: Somehow that one never got through the risk assessment :)
January 27, 2013
Here’s a screenshot of something I’ve been working on today for ‘Why Scotland, Why East Kilbride’:
Regular readers of this blog (ahem) will recall that this all started with a piece of music I heard in a dream, for a double rock band plus a big squad of french horns. Well, the double rock band is doable, but the french horns were going to be impractical for the gig.
So, I’m building a sort of video sampler.
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January 19, 2013
We’ve just had the first rehearsal for ‘Why Scotland, Why East Kilbride’, which is a new piece I’m putting together for Cryptic Nights, 4 & 5 July of this year. This piece is a fantasy: an reimagination of my own East Kilbride childhood, as expressed through the medium of my alter ego Edward ‘Teddy’ Edwards, unsung hero of early British electronica.
The musical starting point for this piece was a dream I had, where I heard a fragment of music for what seemed to be a double rock band plus an orchestral horn section.
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