Martyn Ware
Remember the Human League? Remember Heaven 17? Of course you do. They're still around, for a start. Martyn Ware, founder of both, has become one of Britain's leading figures in electronic music. Now he's dragging 23 artists around the country on a mission to explore the future of sound.
The Future of Sound 2007 brings immersive performances and presentations by artists, musicians, sound designers and scientists to a mainstream audience for the first time ever. Major venues from The Sage Gateshead to the Royal College of Art in London are hosting events. The sound-mad creators all started their hefty nationawide tour in Liverpool on 7 December and will be snaking their way across, up, down and across Britain hitting Goldsmith's College in March and their final destination, Queen Mary's College, on 12 April. They're even taking themselves to Long Beach University in Los Angeles. The trance-inducing echoes of Neolithic burial sites are as we speak clashing with celestial sound art installations. Someone's even doing a concert of the brain.
Each evening will be a unique experience with a changing line-up of performances and presentations. More of a forum for the discussion of new and convergent art forms, the Future of Sound 2007 is not designed to make a profit but the Arts Council England are supporting the tour's administration and running costs. The Director of Interdisciplinary Arts, Bronac Ferran said, 'There is nothing like Future of Sound with its heady mix of sheer sonic pleasure and an educational glimpse into the processes used by its fine selection of artists and producers. As more and more people wake up to the power of sound, Future of Sound gets it just right - looking ahead at possibilities to come later this century, while not neglecting the important developments of the past. There's been an excellent response from venues to the tour and I know that audiences will have great fun sampling this sonic cocktail.'
Archaeologist Paul Devereux's discovery that Neolithic burial tombs resonate at a trance-inducing 110Hz frequency shows that our prehistoric ancestors used their environment and ritual sites to create their own mind-altering sounds. LSD evangelist Brian Barritt joins him and artist/musician Flinton Chalk, whose Avebury stone circle band, TC Lethbridge, included current members of Jason Pierce's Spiritualized, to present sounds inspired by archaeo-acoustics, a new field of archaeology. (They recently discovered that some of the stones at Stonehenge are 'ringing stones' and that Maenclochog, the village in Wales where the stones originated, means 'ringing stones, in English. No one had made the link before, which is hard to believe.) Together they are actually putting the audiences into a full-on trance. "I felt totally stoned for half an hour afterwards," said one participant. "You know when someone asks you a question, and you only realise they asked you that question about ten minutes later? It was very weird."
Luciana Haill
Artist Brian Duffy has created sophisticated new electronic instruments from abandoned children's toys. Anna Hill has made an interactive 'nerve centre' artwork on board the International Space Station that will interpret scientific data collected on board - the public interacts with the artwork through a website. Luciana Haill is using her Interactive Brainwave Visual Analyser to produce the first ever concert of the mind by registering brain activity to trigger live 'spatialised sound'. Recovering from viral meningitis as a teenager, Haill became obsessed with the human brain and now translates cyber dreams into reality utilising medical biofeedback technology. She uses innovative Bluetooth Interactive Brainwave Visual Analyser interfaces to record brainwaves and then arranges multimedia interactive controls and feedback. The IBVA is harnessed like a cognitive Theremin, using HZ and Amplitude as 3-D coordinates in sonic signatures.
Martyn Ware, who has brought this collection of bizarre and astonishing work together, has featured on recordings totalling over 50 million sales worldwide during his 27-year career as a musician. He's worked with Tina Turner, Terence Trent D'Arby, Chaka Khan and Marc Almond. In 2001 he founded Illustrious Co. with Vince Clarke of Erasure to "exploit the creative and commercial possibilities" of their unique 'Heightened Reality' three-dimensional sound technology and bespoke musical composition in collaboration with fine artists, the performing arts and corporate clients. Ware was part of the collective representing Britain at the Venice Architectural Biennale in 2006. Echo City was an "urban register" describing Sheffield at a variety of scales from 1:1 to 1:10 million and Ware's soundscape projected Sheffield's relationship with the world at large.
He's also a member of the BAFTA Interactive Committee which is where the seeds for the Future of Sound were planted. "BAFTA gave each of us the opportunity to create an event, any event, within reason. I had been re-purposing my career in a more artistic vein ever since Heaven 17, and around about the turn of the Millennium I realised that the quality of popular music was getting worse and worse. I was, on the other hand, coming across a burgeoning underground community of sound artists as well as artists who occasionally work with sound. And it came to me that there are an amazing amount of collaborative possibilities with visual artists and practitioners of all genres - I'm constantly amazed at the levels of creativity in Britain at the moment."
"The Future of Sound is about how sound is developing in collaboration with all the other disciplines. The explosion of forms is what I wanted to show, but in an entertaining way. 'As long as I can be the MC', I said to myself, and say 'Scores on the Doors' like Bruce Forsyth once in a while, the rest will just take off. I wanted to bring their convergence of sound and art, and science and art to a big audience, not just bring the convergence to the converted. Without wanting to sound preachy, I do actually feel like a bit of an evangelist in the field. The benefits for humankind are manifold."
Crikey.
Laura K Jones
Check with the venue for a confirmed line up or visit www.futureofsound.org
Artists involved are:
Brian Barritt | Tim Head | Tal Rosner | David Bickerstaff | Anna Hill | The Sancho Plan | Jason Bruges | Timothy Lambert | Simon Schofield | Andy Cameron | Modified Toy Orchestra | squidsoup | Flinton Chalk Mouthful | Troika | Paul Devereux | Chris O'Shea | United Visual Artists | Brian Duffy | Ross Phillips | Chris Watson | Luciana Haill | Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner
TOUR SCHEDULE
Events run 7.00-9.30pm except at The Sage Gateshead, which will host two shows, at 1.00-3.30pm and
7.00-9.30pm. Contact venues for booking and line up information.
18 January, Millennium Galleries, Sheffield www.sheffieldgalleries.org.uk
25 January, The Sage Gateshead www.thesagegateshead.org
8 February, Norwich Arts Centre, Norwich www.norwichartscentre.co.uk
1 March, Goldsmiths College, London www.goldsmiths.ac.uk
15 March, Royal College of Art, London www.rca.ac.uk
12 April, Queen Mary, University of London's, London www.qmul.ac.uk
The Future of Sound 2007 tour is a partnership with Cybersonica. Cybersonica is London's annual festival of electronic music, sonic art and audiovisual fusion. Now in its fifth year, it is a leading international event for anyone interested in the theory and practice of how new technologies are shaping and changing the way musicians, DJs, VJs, digital artists, audiovisualisers and creative software developers make and present their work. For more information visit www.cybersonica.org.
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