Initially I developed my playing set-up — a tailored, multi-sensor environment mounted on a Paetzold contrabass recorder interfacing with DSP software — to enable immediate and intimate control over the playing of the electronics. I was interested in the combined semantics of visual and musical gestures and trying to work out if, within a politics of western art music performance — (from classical to ‘experimental’) this could be used to frame various sounds in such a way that their abjection or abstraction or violence or digitalisation or, even, as I perceived it, genderedness — even to the point of amplitude and frequency at the time — could be worked into interesting own compositions. I liked the immediate, performer-controlled  juxtaposition of the acoustic and the digital and the possibilities offered therein of creating uncanny timbral relationships between the live instrumental part and its manipulated self.



Lately I’ve experimented with including extra-musical material such as found text and processed images. During the QO2 residency I will explore more down this path — starting work on a new piece that, while retreating further into abstract musical thought — exploring psychoacoustic spatialisation effects — also experiments with juxtaposing this with extra-musical material.