In no particular order: Annea Lockwood, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, Laurie Anderson, Murray Schafer, Humphrey Jennings, John Gray (of the GPO), Luc Ferrari, Ludwig Koch, Luigi Nono, Morton Feldman, John Cage, Philip Corner, Max Neuhaus, George Brecht, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jacques Tati, Janet Cardiff, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Dallas Simpson, Jim Fassett, The Kitchen Sisters, Basil Kirchen, Claude Debussy, Francisco López, Henri Chopin, Kurt Schwitters, Gérard Grisey, Bob Cobbing, Lawrence Upton, Paul Panhuysen, James Tenney, Sandra Blow, Christina Kubisch, Tim Robinson/ Timothy Drever, Tony Conrad, Matthew Locke, Walter Murch, Josquin des Prez, Björk, Guillaume Dufay, Kaija Saariaho, Luciano Berio, Philip Gröning, Nicolas Philibert, Bertolt Brecht, Bernard Parmegiani, Hildegard Westerkamp, Tony Schwartz, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Carl Weisman, LaMonte Young, Michel Tournier, Pauline Oliveros, Olivier Messiaen, Alberto Cavalcanti, Alice Oswald, Bill Fontana, Charlemagne Palestine, Walter Murch, Bertolt Brecht, Michel Chion, Francis Dhomont, Raymond Queneau, Christian Zanési, György Ligeti, Tod Dockstader, Jean-Claude Risset, David Tudor, Georges Perec, Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Ashley, Dziga Vertov, Bill Viola, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Maurice Ravel, Antonin Artaud, Jean Cocteau, Iannis Xenakis, Thomas Heatherwick, Patrick Keiller, Chris Marker, Salvatore Sciarrino, Guy Debord, Kaffe Matthews, Iain Sinclair, Andrew Kötting, Johan Van der Keuken, Cathy Berberian, Abbas Kiarostami, Elias Canetti, Alfred Jarry, Giacinto Scelsi, Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Salvatore Sciarrino, Ben Burtt ...
Bio John Levack Drever unfolding practice represents a cathexis into experimental music, devised theatre, movement and dance, everyday environmental sound, the genealogy of SFX, human utterance, natural history, the built environment, background noise, notions of silence and the art of listening – such engagement naturally leads into creating work for specific sites such as the Tower of Winds (an eighteen century octagonal tower in Staffordshire), Goodwin Sands (a tidal sand bank off the Kent coast) and Orford Ness (a decommissioned bomb testing site on the Suffolk coast). Projects are often derived from extensive fieldwork with the aid of field recording and most importantly through the practice of non-technologically mediated soundwalking, exemplified in the triptych, Ochlophonic Studies: Hong Kong (1998-2009). Fundamentally, much of his work is collaborative including projects with Rachel Gomme, Alice Oswald, Alaric Sumner, Tony Thatcher, Lawrence Upton, David Behrman and Louise K. Wilson. He is a member of Blind Ditch.
Drever is an active composer, sound artist and soundscape researcher. He lecturers in Composition and is the head of the Unit for Sound Practice Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. During the autumn semester 2007, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Critical Intermedia Laboratory , School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.
Drever was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, (1973) and raised between Dalkeith and Edinburgh. After a year-out (mis)spent working in an independant record store in Edinburgh that today no longer exists, and hanging-out in Paris and Luxembourg, he studied Music at the University of Wales, Bangor, followed by a Master study in Electroacoustic Music Composition at the University of East Anglia. In 2001 he was awarded a PhD from Dartington College of Arts, titled 'Phonographies: Practical and Theoretical Explorations into Composing with Disembodied Sound'. During 2001-2 he was a Research Assistant for the Digital Crowd (University of Plymouth) co-ordinating Sounding Dartmoor, a soundscape study of Dartmoor. From 2003-04 he was an ACE/AHRB Arts and Science Research Fellow with Centre for Computational Creativity, City University exploring electronic music performance interfaces that learn from their users.
Drever was an elected director of Sonic Arts Network (2004-8) and a co-founder and chair of the UK and Ireland Soundscape Community (a regional affiliate of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology) for whom in 2001 he chaired Sound Practice: the 1st UKISC Conference on sound, culture and environments and edited the latest edition of their journal Earshot, Issues 5, Noise: Debates, Strategies and Methodologies (2007). He is currently developing a revisit of the World Soundscape Project's London Soundwalk (1975) as documented in the European Sound Diary (1977), with members of the UKISC and the Noise Future Network.
Drever has a particular interest in the pioneering use of location recording and sound design in the films of the GPO Film Unit in the 1930s (Jennings, Cavalcanti, Gray, et al.), sounds effects of the ‘30s, everyday use of portable audio-media, surround sound composition from concert hall to cinema, field recording (natural history, documentary, the everyday, phonography and soundscape composition), sound poetry (ongoing collaborations with Lawrence Upton), sound installation and cross-art form collaboration (with an increasing focus on composing for dance with choreographer Tony Thatcher from Laban) and the art and method of soundwalking.
Commissions range from the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (1999), Arts Council England (2002 & 2007), to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (2002). His work has twice been awarded a prize in the annual Musica Nova competition, Prague (1997 & 1998).
*‘Sounding Dartmoor: A case study on the soundscapes of rural England at the opening of the 21st Century’, in Cartografías de la Escucha, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea. [forthcoming]
____________________________________________________________________ Selected Soundwalks
2002: Soundwalk of Exeter, Field Work, SpaceX Fine Art Gallery, Exeter.
2005: Soundwalk of Holbeck Urban Village, at Ways of Hearing, Leeds, to coincide with Fontana's sound installation Sound Lines, in the Dark Arches, Lumen and MAAP.
2005: Soundwalk of Leeds, Something of the Night, Leeds City Art Gallery.
2005: Soundwalk of Eastside, at Creative Lab in Birmingham, to coincide with Bill Fontana's performance and installation of St Martin's Bells Sonic Mapping, MADE and MAAP.
2006: Early morning Soundwalk of New Cross, Deptford and Greenwich, Sound Practice 2006, UKISC and Electronic Music Studio, Goldsmiths.
2007: Soundwalk of Lewisham, Lewisham Walking Festival.
2007: Soundwalk of Manchester City Centre, SenseScape: Sensorial studies of place, an ESRC Research Seminar Series.
2007: Soundwalk of Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong, with students from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.
2009: London Soundwalk Revisit (Easter 1975/2009). Revisit of the London Soundwalk as published in the European Sound Diary (1977) by members of the World Soundscape Project: Howard Broomfield, Bruce Davis, Peter Huse, Jean Reed and R. M. Schafer. The 2009 London Soundwalk was devisid by Tsai Wei Chen, Isobel Clouter, Max Dixon, John Levack Drever and Hildegard Westerkamp. Cosponsored by the Noise Futures Network and the Unit for Sound Practice Research, Goldsmiths, University of London. Organised by the UK and Ireland Soundscape Community.
2009: Edinburgh Soundwalk for Euronoise2009,7.30am on Tuesday 27th October. Meeting at the main entrance to the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.
In conjunction with Salford University and the National Physical Laboratory demonstrating two different state-of-the art ways to assess the acoustical climate in Festival Square: MEMS based noise meters (recently developed in the Dreamsys project) and Positive Soundscapes questionnaires.
____________________________________________________________________ Recent Performances and Installations (selected) Cattle Grids of Dartmoor(2005), Atrium Sound Space, College of Santa Fe campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico, 18/01/08–28/02/08.
Ochlophonic Study 3: Hong Kong in Kettle’s Yard, as part of ‘Music, Sound, and the Music, Sound, and the Re-configuration of Public and Private Space’, University of Cambridge, 18/04/08.
NAMING for Ricki Redhead [That the tongue is a whip] (first stereo version); 10 minutes approx.; text, pre-recorded voice, projections and live voice Lawrence Upton; treatment of recorded voice, additional sound sampling John Drever; The Shunt Lounge, London Bridge; 5/06/08.
-stance (2008), at Turteatern, Stockholm, with Ina Dokmo (dancer) and Tony
Thatcher (choreographer), 17/7/08.
Ochlophonic Study 3: Hong Kong (2008), Musée de Grenoble, France, at the
international colloquium, Faire une ambiance / Creating an Atmosphere, organised
by the "Ambiances Architecturales et Urbaines" laboratory, a mixed research unit
(UMR) affiliated to CNRS/Ministére de la Culture (Architecture)/Ecoles Nationales
Supérieures d'Architecture of Grenoble and Nantes, 11/09/08.
That the tongue is a whip (8-channel version); 10 minutes approx.; text, pre-recorded voice, projections and live voice Lawrence Upton; studio treatment of and composition with recorded voice, additional sound sampling, and live treatment of voice and sound John Drever; presented at Great Hall, Goldsmiths - Sound Practice Research Concert, 21/11/08.
Ochlophonic Study 3: Hong Kong (2008), gallery exhibition, HK Sound Station, curated by Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya, Parasite Gallery, Hong Kong, 7/02/09–3/04/09.
–stance (2008), with Ina Dokmo, Tony Thatcher and David Behrman,
In the MOMENT, Festival of improvised dance and music TrinityLaban, Laban, Bonnie Bird Theatre, 17/02/09.
Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A (1965), with Martin Hargreaves and Robert Coleridge. In the MOMENT, Festival of improvised dance and music TrinityLaban. Trinity College of Music, 19/02/09.
In Between and Around Liminal Places, Van – L Dance Company, Chisenhale Dance Space, 27/02/09.
for SpaceX & Liquid Press, i-dat
*Editor of Sounding Dartmoor (2002)
for Sonic Arts Network:
* Editor of Sounding Soundscape Composition(2001)
*Pastoral Pause, 'A Call For Silence', CD curated by Nicolas Collins (2004)
*3 Pataphonic Studies, 'Pataphysics' CD curated by Andrew Hugil (2005)
for the UK and Ireland Soundscape Community:
*Editor of Architectural Soundmarks accompanying CD for Earshot 4: 'Time and Visibility II' (2004)
*Editor of Disappearing Soundmarks accompanying CD for Earshot 5: 'NOISE: Debates, Strategies and Methodologies' (2007)
ArtistSon Clair Title From the Bridge Duration 15'00 Date of Release 18th August 2009 Format zip · 35.4 MB
From the Bridge is an audio-montage of sounds recorded from the same location over an 18 hour period. The audio material was recorded on 4 separate mono channels and mixed in surround sound for optimum spatial representation.
Hi John, Great session with Barry Truax this afternoon. Sorry i couldn't stay for the reception as I has to dash off. I'll try to catch up at the next session in April. By the way, take a look at my alter-ego at http://www. myspace. com/phonlumen. There are some brief snipets of some of my work.
;
