Issue 58 / August 2015

8
Bido Lito! August 2015
When the desire to innovate sits
alongside the desire to create, sparks
can fly. When these curious desires
coexist in the mind and body of a
musician, those sparks can be even
brighter. Think of the electronic
experimenting of Joe Meek and Delia
Derbyshire, the human-mechanoid
hybrid of Kraftwerk, and My Bloody
Valentine’s deep exploration of
noise; all examples of when great
art meets obsessive sonic craft.
As an investigation of the
connections between craft,
technology and community, FACT’s
current BUILD YOUR OWN exhibition
lets us see fleeting glimpses of these
kernels of inspiration, breaking down the whole argument to
its simplest elements and allowing us to appraise them in
detail. The wide range of projects that fit under the Build Your
Own umbrella show that the nature of craft and DIY has changed
drastically, and how traditional craft skills can connect with new
digital tools.
To test this out, we sent our own intrepid audio explorer –
Adam Rowley, the electronic sound artist we know as Afternaut
– along to FACTLab to get hands-on with some experimental
‘instruments’ at one of the exhibition’s Make Your Own Noise
series of workshops. With the prospect of creating some unique
sounds using an Arduino light sensor, and improvising a range
Words: Christopher Torpey / @CATorp
Photography: Keith Ainsworth / arkimages.co.uk
of inventive ways of keeping rhythm, Adam jumped at the
chance to explore some tools that could make him view his
own methods of music making in a different light. The last time
we spoke to him (in August 2014), he had just released an album
that was written and performed on his own self-made modular
synth, so we thought it might be up his street. “This sounds
absolutely fantastic, I'd love to be involved!” came his reply
when we invited him. “You know me very well!”
“It was a bit of a cacophony, with six people playing random
sounds at once,” Adam remembers of the workshop, where
he was joined by retired music teacher Reinhard Fuchs, who
specialises in the unconventional art of music composition
with joystick interfaces. “We started off the day by just staying
silent for a few minutes, listening to the environment. We were
then asked to slowly blend in [to that background] using some
sounds: playing with a glasses case, the odd cough, scratching
on the chair. Then we started to incorporate these random
devices.”
The Make Your Own Noise workshops were devised by the
collaborative group of artists from Owl Project, alongside input
from Manchester-based improv music institution The Noise
Upstairs. Drawing on influences such as 70s synthesiser culture,
DIY woodworking and current digital crafts, Owl Project work
with wood and electronics to fuse sculpture and sound art,
creating music-making machines, interfaces and objects which
intermix pre-steam and digital technologies. Their signature
product is the rather natty iLog, a musical device whittled from
a piece of wood to echo sleek contemporary products such as
BUILD
YOUR
OWN
iPods and advanced mobile phones, and which also highlights
the disposability of these modern gizmos and their lack of
traditional craft.
“That way of exploring things in a childlike way is kind of like
what I do with my electronic productions,” Adam explains, when
asked about approaching the workshop as a music maker rather
than just an inquisitive soul. “Like, I won’t think about what key
I’m in, or specific melodies. I’ll just make sounds until I think
‘Ooh that’s good’, and I’ll use it later on for something. So using
that idea, but [doing it] with other people and using specifically
non-musical objects was a bit of an eye-opener.”
For our post-workshop de-brief with Adam, we thought it
would be interesting to invite another musician along and throw
another perspective in to the process. As Faded Gold, Stefanie
Chew paints lush canvases of swelling synths that tug at the
heartstrings, and we were keen to hear her opinions on this
tinkering.
“No I don’t really do much experimentation, I like to stick with
my instrument really,” Stefanie states. “I’m not one of these
techy people who can twist sounds a lot – I don’t really like
things to sound… a bit odd. I like it all to fit in: a bit like a pattern,
in the way that a piece of art will all merge together nicely. I’ve
always got a good idea of where I want certain notes to be, but
I guess what I experiment with a little bit is how I get those
sounds. So what sort of instruments I use, and how I can amend
the sounds on my laptop.”
“As an artist you’re used to approaching something in an
inquisitive way,” continues Adam, “experimenting and trying
something different. I think if you get too comfortable doing one
thing you just end up re-making the same tracks. If you start
challenging yourself and doing something you’re not normally
used to, you learn something fresh.”
Responding to the question of what avenues of musical
advancements there are still left to explore, Stefanie says she
thinks “it’s hard now to break the mould and do something very,
very different because so much has been done already. I think
that, because quite a lot of things are done on a computer now,
it might be that people who are not necessarily ‘musicians’
will find it easier to write stuff and put music together – so
[music] might not always sound the way a musician would put
something together. It’ll put another spin on it. “
With these ideas ringing in our ears, we challenged Adam
and Stefanie to head along to the final Make Your Own Noise
workshop at FACT, with the aim of creating a selection of blips,
beats and noises to use as stems for the basis of a Build Your
Own track. “It would be different to anything I’ve ever done
before,” says Stefanie, “but it would be quite interesting to
have some sort of soundscape to work on top of, and see what
comes out of it.
Being given a set
of… things, and
told ‘right, you
have to produce
some sounds
with these’, that’s
an interesting
challenge – you’d
experiment more
and see what you
could achieve
with the tools at
your disposal.”
There are no
right or wrong
ways to make
music, which
makes a DIY
process like this all the more fascinating. It
just shows that there are even more ways to
achieve the results you want, even if half of
them aren’t what you expect. “It’s good to
do things by accident, and do it in a naïve
way,” Adam muses, as we prepare to take
on the second part of the Build Your Own
challenge. “I think you just have to be
curious to try it. That’s the only little leap
that you need really: a little interest, and
it just spirals from there.”
Keep your eyes and ears trained on
bidolito.co.uk in August for the Build Your
Own tracks created by Afternaut
and Faded Gold.
Build Your Own runs at FACT until
31st August.
fact.co.uk