LIFE and the
weather
. . . but to be more specific;
Allegri, Aphex Twin, J.S. Bach, Beethoven, The Beetles, Emma Black, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Eliza Carthy, Mark Caudrey, Chemical Brothers, The Clash, Bill Connor, George Crumb, Miles Davis, Brian Eno, giNgko_C, Gorillaz, Gotan Project, Stephane Grappelli, Jonty Harrison, Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill, Jimi Hendrix, Irlos, Nigel Kennedy, Kroke, Ladysmith Black Mambaso, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Levellers, Andrew Lewis, Ligetti, Yo-Yo Ma, Rob Mackay, Andy McCluskey, Ray LaMontagne, Morlo Bach, New Model Army, Nirvana, Old Crow Medicine Show, Mike Oldfield, Palestrina, Bernard Parmegiani,Arvo Part, Astor Piazzolla,Placebo, Jean Luc Ponty, REM, Liz Ryder, Steve Reich, Erik Satie, Pierre Schaeffer, Sex Pistols, Sigur Ros, Ravi Shankar, Shooglenifty, Dmitri Shostakovich, Karlheniz Stockhausen, Stravinsky, The Strokes, Squarepusher, Tallis, The Silk Road Ensemble, Talvin Singh, Dr. L. Subramaniam, Amon Tobin, Varase, Wagner, The Velvet Underground, Vaughan Williams, Vinny (man!), Vivaldi, Will Williams, Frank Zappa, Led Zeppelin, Hans Zimmer and all the people I've come across in this carzy life so far to name a few in no particular order!
Sounds Like
Sounds like a constant medium in which to travel, such as air, water, steel etc , they also to like people to listen to them. Sounds do not like vacums or party political broadcasts.
You tell me...post a comment or email to;
I currently live in Wales, which is a fantastic place, between the mountains and the sea, which falls from the sky on a regular basis. I play the violin and viola amoungst other intsruments such as the computer, digeridoo and mandolin (badly!), and you know what it's all good! Eventually my aim is to take over the world and enforce at least one hour of silliness a day in all public areas. I'm currently - staring at the sky to see if anything interesting is going to fall out.
**Due to the size restrictions on myspace tracks some pieces of music are only partialy available i.e. the first half in some cases, I will endevour to ensure that each track is available in its entirety at some point. Sorry for any frustration this may cause...let's all petition myspace for more, well, space!**
Harp Set for Sampled Harp, 8 channel audio and image Composition and programing: Edward Wright 2007
Imagine you've got a bit of music (ok a phrase).What if you tried doing what this fractal does with the central square and reduce it in size and move it about.... ok. As the square gets smaller so the phrase gets quicker, and as it gets transfered up or down the visual field so the pitch gets higher or lower, kind of like modern day Sierpinsky fuge (the bloke who invented the fractal pattern). Ok then translate all that physical movement into a 8 channel speaker set-up so that the top of the screen is the front of the sound space and as the image moves left right up or down so does the audio in the hall. Add in video display of how these sound are being effected and generated in a geometric sort of way and sync it to what is going on. Lie back in a darkened room and enjoy! (this is just a stereo version of an 8 channel surround sound affair but it gives you the idea!)
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Postcards from Home for 8 channel fixed media Edward Wright 2007
So much electroacoustic music can sound dark and sad... here's to writing happy music! ??Having moved house relatively recently it seemed a nice idea to try and capture something of the place in a piece of music. The idea of the sonic postcard has been around for quite a while and my new home village seemed perfectly suited to it nestled on the side of a mountain between the sea, the quarry the forest the express way and ironically the farm that some distant relative of mine owned nearly a century ago.??Technically the music bridges a number of different worlds as the slightly contradictory title would suggest. The opening section is based within a soundscape aesthetic using a number of natural sounds, often with no attempt to conceal their origin. This gives way to a more acousmatic style which none the less attempts to maintain a pitched and rhythmically based drive harking away from the concrete style and aiming at something far older. The final section joins these two main ideas up.... hopefully! Turn it up loud.?
Polarities (Final movement - Tarantella) LIVE. Concerto Grosso for Orchestra and Live Electronics Bangor University Symphony Orchestra cond. Chris Collins Composition and live electonics: Edward Wright 2009
Live Stereo recording of 8 channel and orchestra work, then mangled a bit more into MP3!
Polarities is a piece of experimental music, attempting to combine the forces of the orchestra with multichannel electroacoustic composition.
Within this piece there are three main elements. Firstly there is the orchestral part about which I shall say little here, but suffice it to say say it is central to music, and my sincerest thanks go to the members of the university orchestra for their forbearance and skill in coming on this journey. From this we bridge the gap into the world of the electronic with a number of orchestral soloists, functioning in musically in a similar manner to those in a more conventional concerto grosso. The sound from these players is audibly transformed in real time, providing a link between the worlds of acoustic composition and speaker based sonic art, which leads to the third element, that of purely electronic music. Here a wide number of sounds have been collected, transformed, sculpted, and in a very literal sense composed into one or possibly several parts. This has then been broken down into musical phrases or events and program mapped onto a keyboard so as to enable live triggering in performance.
The concept of bridging these worlds works on a number of levels. The first and most obvious in the use of live processing of performers, and for that matter live performance of the electronic part in that the sound files are triggered with (hopefully!) the orchestra rather than relying on a constant click track or metronome. Beyond this we get into matters physical and musical, in that volume balance and spacialisation need to work just as they would in any purely instrumental ensemble. Growing from ‘classical’ orchestral practice, the movement and exploration of parameters such as pitch, timbre and rhythm between the electronic and the acoustic becomes both a catalyst for musical tension and unifying framework on which to build. Whilst on the surface this piece may appear to be something of a rebellion against the norms of orchestral composition, it is not, rather it is an evolution, broadening the potential spectra and gestural posibilities. This wider potential frees the various elements to work as they do best, rather than limiting a speaker to the tempered scale or for that matter trying to force strange noises out of instruments of relatively fixed timbre and tesetura as so often becomes the case in much modern composition.
I mentioned earlier of a journey, for this is what this is. Polarities is a hard piece to pin down, through the process of writing (in as much as one can be said to fully write a piece such as this) I have often been surprised how the material unfolds. True, one starts with a basic structure, be that motivic, emotional, conceptual, any combination of these, or perhaps none of them; but what comes through is not just how shockingly wide a repertoire of sounds these combined worlds afford, but also how intertwined and similar they can become.
To say this is a completely abstract piece of music would be a lie in that I do not truly believe such a thing is possible, there is always some part of you within a work, and for that matter, the preconceptions and ideas that listeners and performers bring to the piece. Suffice it to say that it begins at the beginning has a slow bit in the middle and gets quicker at the end, or at least that is the plan...
First performed P. J. Hall Bangor University 28.02.09
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En masse Edward Wright 2006
We live in a world dominated by information technology and a culture of mass multimedia communication. Some would argue that this is a bad thing, citing the effects of violent images on impressionable minds, and the intrusion of the media into the lives of not just those that it views as subject material, but all of us by way of mass broadcast. Alternatively such ease of access to information and ideas can be a massive power for good, helping to avert (or at the least alleviate the symptoms of) war, famine and act as a massive catalyst for social change.
En masse is an exploration of these extremes drawing in part from a variety of audio based media and is an attempt to throw a spot light on one of the key social issues of our time. Although intrinsically electroacoustic the use of these resources and the need for them to remain perceivable at times presents something of a departure from the acousmatic style of composition most often associated with the genre. Many other traits from this remain however such as the gestural use of sound and the use of transformation combined with the juxtaposition of sonorities to name but a few.
Most of us like to grumble about the media, some are positively hostile, others see potential for good, whilst some of a more thoughtful inclination would put forward ideas of alienation and social decline. We are all party to this phenomena, we watch it, we fund it and we are ultimately responsible for it. Ultimately in a free society what we hear, see and retell is of our own choosing.
Quotations sourced from terrestrial television and radio broadcasts Oct 2005 - Feb 2006
Botany Edward Wright 2006.
Music: Edward Wright, Text: Robert MinhinnickThe Looters (Seren Books, 1989).
Performed By Amici Del Canto and the Llandudno Festival Strings cond. Bill Connor
Live Recording
This piece was commisined by the Llandudno Festival, and uses the poem of the same name as its basis. The poem its self proved an interesting object to work with, leaving a lot to the imagination of the reader, at times it is joyful, at others it is romantic (in the best sense of the word) and at others it could be read as a lament. It is this shifting balance of emotions that have been reflected in the music. The piece was recorded unknown to me live in the opening concert of the festival on minidisk by a friend who sat behind me half way bach in the audience, so please forgive the (in the circumstances suprisingly good!) sound quality.
Botany
All I know is, we were together,
Perhaps for the last time.
The chase ended, and you in red sandals,
Ankles cut by the pipes of the stubble,
And the dog flung down in the restharrow,
A lace of spittle on his tongue.
Below us lay the hot limestone
Of the fields's incline, and above,
A magpie's flight blurred like a dice
That rolls unreachably away.
You are still there, with your sunburn
Darker than a ladybird,
And on a pillar of coconut-smelling gorse
A stonechat, pierecing with
Its song the cushions of the air.
Years later I come back
With a camera and crouch down
Under the thorn, pushing the blue
Bead of the lens towards
The orchid that grows in the place where you lay.
"...The first half closed with Amici Del Canto and the Festival Strings giving the first performance of a setting by Ed Wright of Botany, a poem by Robert Minhinnik. The poem mixes present and past, memories of love and vivid images of nature, all reflected in the shifting patterns of strings and voices, resolving itself into an a capella rendering of the whole poem at the climax. A lovely piece beautifully performed."
Victor Hallett
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The Way I Saw It Edward Wright 2005 (live violin E.W.)
This piece explores the age old idea of the duet, in this case it is between live violin and a pre-recorded tape part . The source sounds for it were recorded as a journey from home in Bangor, along the coast and up through the woods to Aber falls, and it is this motion between the man made synthetic and the natural organic that underpins the musical exploration here. To state it more exactly , it is the tension between our perceptions of order and chaos, and the natural and the man made, that is being explored.
Any sound, or collection of sounds could be given a position in such a space, equally many other opposites could be applied; notated and improvised, acoustic instruments and electronic sounds, the tempered scale and a continuum of pitches, and so on, the list is probably endless. From the first note or impulse, the state of centred equilibrium is blurred slightly, and any general movement away from this zero point implies an increase of musical tension until such time as the sound comes back to the centre or is thrown past it into another area of the space, coming to an eventual rest with the end of the piece.
The music draws from a number of genre which is unsurprising given the instrumentation and the time and place of writing, as a result a certain amount of interplay between these languages occurs. For example not only does the violin improvise and mimic heavily synthesised sounds at times, but the tape part has been edited to incorporate elements of rubato and other primarily acoustic traits. Above all it is intended to be interesting and rewarding, if challenging in places to listen to. Enjoy.
Con-chords (Shortened stereo reduction) Edward Wright 2008
As part of my PhD I have become interested in the interaction between 'real' and recorded sounds. I am currently working on a piece for orchestral and electroacoustic forces entitled 'Polarity'. Con-chords is a step along that road being created entirely from orchestral sounds:??
ELGAR: The Dream Of Gerontius, Op. 38 21. Softly & Gently?
MESSIAEN: Des canyons aux étoiles - Movt 1. Le Désert??
It is partly a technical study in (hopefully) avoiding the pitfalls pitfalls of using such strong source material; impersonating a Dalek who has just who has just accidently beamed down on top of the radio 3 transmitter, or using lots of new technology to create something that could have been played by an orchestra in the first instance are a couple that spring to mind. It is also meant to be fun, stand as a piece of music rather than simply as an exercise, and maybe, make you ask questions such as what you regard as real sounds, what you think of as electronically or synthetically created, and the ways in which we rationalize sounds born of the electrical sleight of hand that brings voltage to speakers and impulses to our brains.
First performed Bangor New Music Festival 2008.Bangor New Music Festival 2008.See below for gig review courtesy of Emma Louis snogonline.co.uk
"...Bangor based composer Ed Wright (www.myspace.com/virtual440) premiered his new piece Con – Chords. And his programme notes did not lie, it really did sound like a dalek on top of a radio 3 transmitter. An intelligent fusion of identifiable pieces of classical music with the zooms, pings, bongs, and zips of electronica with a narrative, soundtracks feel.
Usually I listen to Electroacoustic music with my eyes closed as you can hear where the sound comes from. However, the image of Ed, side lit, fingers deftly tiptoeing the dancing faders as he controlled the sound direction, he even looked as though he could be The Doctor Himself, all was missing was a long coat flapping behind.
In keeping with a classical composition element Ed brought Con-Chords to a spectacular climactic crescendo, making what he called, with bright gleaming eyes “ Silly Big Noises “ with some heavy white noise thrown in for good measure.
As well as an academic exercise Wright intended to make the piece fun and he succeeded, it certainly brought a smile to my face."
The “Encuentro de Arte Sonoro Tsonami” calls for sound artists, composers, performers, instrumentists and ensembles, to submit Works to be performed at the Encuentro de Arte Sonoro Tsonami 2009 that will take place October 20th-25th 2009, in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The “Encuentro de Arte Sonoro TSONAMI” its a showcase and exchange platform for the work of national and international artists that gather around sound in its many manifestations; Music, Performance, Multimedia, Sound Installations, and other manifestations that don..t have a place in mainstream or traditional communications media, and that does not pursue commercial or lucrative ends.
If you had a chance to listen to my music I'd like to thank you. If you haven't yet,let me know later if you liked it.
I have a new collaboration!
Nick Hopkin is an artist from UK who just released his new album: project X
The album is a single song, divided in 4 parts, that leads into different moods and atmospheres, tru different sensations, creating interesting and deep textures.
A multinational work, where artists from Greece, Russia, Ireland, USA and me from México.
Hi ! Just popping by to have a browse at your page! Lovin' it! Hope everythings good with you. My myspace has been re-vamped, please check out my new recording and new pictures..there's more to come! Any feedback would be appreiciated =)
This years festival is headlined by Billy Bragg (Friday), Seth Lakeman (Sunday) and Peatbog Faeries (Saturday) with many more top artists also performing incl the award winning The Demon Barbers.
Straight from the underground, wisely turning dubstep into breakstep, Mobthrow bridles upbeat breaks and twisted bass frequencies, in a unique combination of raw power and dark atmospheres. Even though tags are useless when such ceaseless beauty flows throughout this ultra-heavy explosion, new-jazz, techno, ambient, IDM, amen breaks and tons of bass are only some of the directions, in which Mobthrow unfolds his stunning technique.
Check it out! I wrote a free book on music production! It's for total beginners, but if you aren't new to music production, maybe you'll still learn something... at least you can send it to your friends who always want to ask you a billion questions about music production! It's totally free too; my goal with this is to accumulate as many BFF's as possible.
With this debut release from his new project, Dave Dando-Moore (Detritus) offers us an intensely composed symphony of unending sorrow. This is as raw, open and confessional as music can get. Drawing comparisons with Max Richter, Deaf Centre, Johann Johannsson and The Protagonist, A Wake A Week will evoke cathartic exorcisms of woe in even the most glacial of hearts.
Hi there,
Just wanted to let you know that there's a new song up from my upcoming album called 'I'ts Getting Harder', and i was just hoping that you could find the time to come and have a listen and maybe let me know what you think. Thank you. Math Bolton.
