Frome Moog Coop

Fantastic night at my first We All Play Synth in Bristol, the long-running live electronic night that was basically an EMOM before EMOMs were a thing.

I’d planned a fairly ambient set, but being second-to-last on the bill, and hearing how hard and energetic everyone before me had been, I realised I might need to rethink that slightly. I still started relatively down-tempo, then worked things up into a couple of pieces I’d never played live before, including something written at Tim Exile’s workshop last weekend after the Jon Hopkins playback, and Sidechain Harmonium, an old work-in-progress built from four sampled harmoniums sidechaining each other over a simple 140 BPM kick.

It was also great to bring in some field recordings from Cornwall, including banger racing at United Downs, alongside a sample from an old 45 about the Helston Flora, or Furry, Dance.

The room was pretty boomy through their enormous rig, so there was a fair bit of live wrangling with the FX pad, but listening back I’m really pleased with how it turned out. Plenty of food for thought for the next one.

A massively inspiring weekend at Tim Exile’s incredible studio and workspace, Timbers, just off Hackney Road.

Five of us spent the weekend with Tim for a workshop with a deliberately loose brief: creative pathfinding. How do you find your way out of the fog when you’re working on something and aren’t quite sure where it wants to go next?

The diversity of projects in the room was brilliant.

One involved a natural-language system for creating musical loops on the fly, which inevitably led to us trying to make a drum pattern sound like a horse?!

Another was an extraordinary cross-fading, looping ambient machine that was extremely up my street. Elsewhere, we explored the sonification of data from the Aurora Borealis, amongst many other things. Taken together, it was a pretty remarkable demonstration of just how far these technologies can be pushed when they’re put in the hands of curious people.

Much of the daytime was spent collaborating, experimenting and vibe coding small projects. Then on Saturday night, after dinner and an incredible spatial-audio playback of Jon Hopkins’ Ritual over Tim’s system, we each performed some version of what we’d been working on.

Mine was a collection of autobiographical soundscapes, performed using the new portable rig I’ve been assembling.

One thing became very clear to me that evening: just how much a visual element can add to a performance.

I’d had dashcam footage playing behind my set, and that became the seed for the next experiment. I’ve since started developing a web app that listens to the outgoing MIDI from my OP-XY and interprets it visually as blooms, distortions, warping and crinkles. The first tests worked surprisingly well, and I’m very excited to see where that goes.

I can say with some certainty that I wouldn’t have come up with it without the ideas, conversations and general cross-pollination of the weekend. That, I think, was really the point.

A special shout-out to the other Richard in the group too. After years of dabbling with musical equipment, he gave his first ever live performance on Saturday night. It was clearly a significant moment for him, and a real privilege to be in the room for it.

I’d highly recommend keeping an eye on what Tim Exile is doing. Alongside workshops like this, he seems to be in a constant process of probing at the edges of what’s possible with music, technology, interfaces and creative practice.

I came away with a head full of ideas, a new project I hadn’t expected to start, and a strong reminder of what can happen when you put a small group of curious people in a room together and give them permission to explore.

My third time at Breezeblockbeats - this one felt really positive - I felt I had a rich seam of recent work to draw from, and the 20 min slot flew by. The other acts on the bill were a rich and eclectic mix as usual. With my highlights being the trio of Soma Labs Lyras being played in unison, and my second time seeing Groundforms from Bristol, whose approach I really admire and find hugely inspiring.

Return visit to Bruton’s best kept secret. The room at Octopus is really special, and it might explain why, when things went horribly wrong about eight minutes in, I felt comfortable enough to just roll with it :)

The purist in me had been keen to see whether this case could run entirely off its own power. OP-XY has a long-lasting internal battery, and the little controller keyboard connected to it can run from that too. Torso S4 and NTS-3 both run off power banks, leaving just the TE Sidekick mixer, which takes AAA batteries if you decide you want to.

I decided I did.

I will not be deciding that again.

They’d been absolutely fine in practice, lasting for hours, but I must have knocked the switch on while the case was packed, or at some point during the day, because they died spectacularly shortly into the set.

Thankfully I’d packed another pair, so I swapped them out while having a nice chat with the audience about the thrill of live performance.

The strange thing is that the calm I felt in that moment ended up being the real highlight of the night for me. A hangover from Sebastian Mullaert’s retreat, or from reading Kenny Werner the week before? Who knows. But being able to stay there, rather than panic or fight what was happening, felt significant.

The long Italo-ish track at the end is something I put together the day before, and features a sample from an interview I found with a regular attendee at Mancuso’s Loft.

First EMOM, centred around a chuggy 110ish BPM, using dub effects with varying degrees of success. Levels clip hard in the second part of the set. The quiet parts seemed to work best. But felt really good to have full tactile control of pretty much everything on knob-per-function. This was the first ever Bruton EMOM, the venue and vibe were top notch.

So after the Circle of Live retreat last year, I spent a long time puzzling out how to put together a live case that felt genuinely playable.

This was the first attempt at using it.

It’s loosely based on the Ableton project Sebastian walked us through on the final day at Chilham Castle. Except without Ableton...

OP-XY handles the MIDI, and Torso S-4 handles the audio. Any of the MIDI-controlled audio coming from the OP-XY can be sent to an aux channel, then routed into the S-4 to be recorded, looped and manipulated. The idea is that I can move through tracks and projects more or less seamlessly, rather than stopping and starting between them.

It’s all mixed through an old Pioneer mixer I had left over from my DJing days, with the new Novation Launch Control taking care of hands-on control, plus a Kaoss Pad for a few extra effects.

And the whole thing lives in an old flight case we used to use for Vintage Mobile Disco.

All nice and neat and tidy.

The initial drone is sampled from my late uncle Stan’s old concertina. I recorded it straight into the S-4 using its built-in mic, then looped it, slowed it down, doubled it and reversed it. That slightly rough recording process is also where the pops and artefacts you can hear come from.

I used the Spiral effect on the Pioneer mixer a lot here too. It’s something I’d almost never touch while DJing, but it turns out to be surprisingly good for adding swells, movement and texture to organic drones.

I was asked to play on short notice, and didn't really prepare enough for the show - either in quantity or quality(!) - its just one extended piece really, with sample from a cornish chant, an old record from the Helston Furry dance, and a serge gainsbourg record i picked up in Redruth. I felt like it needed more texture, and less structure. I'd hoped to make more use of the crossfader, the idea of this rig, is that it can capture loops via the OPXY's aux out, mangle and disintegrate those loops, and then re-combine them with the dry signal. Worked well in practice, but on the night, didn't quite land as I'd hoped.

Short improvised piece on rhodes and modular, recorded to tape, had a few days off after a very busy time at work - tried to craft a space i could just drift off in..

First ever Breezeblock Beats, incredibly warm and friendly room in a little used back room at our local pub. The deckard's voice really shone here. The morphagene was a real joy to use, and incorporated some clips from a recent trip to Agadir towards the end.