Environmental Art Music and other stories!

I was speaking with a friend recently and she asked me about my use of environmental noise as a component of my composition work. During the conversation she said to me 'Of course lots of composers use industrial sound on their recordings. That isn't particularly unusual'. It then struck me that she was probably not alone in thinking that is what I do! It isn't! At least not in the context she was implying. I use environmental noise that I can derive pitch from, alter the pitches and properties using Audacity, and create melodies, harmonies and textures in which these sounds take on the role of musical instruments. They are usually then juxtaposed against actual instrumental parts. The point of this process, which evolved out of my PhD between 2011 and 2014, is for the environment I live and work in to play a central part in directing and influencing what I compose and doing so as objectively as possible without resorting to the level of complex pre-compositional planning I once indulged in to the detriment of the music itself. It is an entirely different concept from simply adding sound effects to a musical soundscape.

With my new EP Alternatives To Despair picking up such encouraging radio support from BBC Radio 6 Music, Resonance FM, Exile FM and other favourites of mine, it has reminded me that I am not always very forthcoming at explaining not just how I utilise environmental sound but why. The 'why' almost certainly dates back to childhood and two striking examples of the noises of my environment subliminally getting into my head and helping to shape my relationship with music and sound.

The first of these results from growing up on a housing estate in Hemel Hempstead that was adjacent to the town's large, sprawling industrial centre - around two square miles of noisy factories and workshops whose sounds, some obvious but others enigmatic, regularly drifted across the estate and became comfortingly familiar and, at times, intriguing.

I have a vivid memory from what I have concluded must have been the school summer holidays in 1971. A somewhat disarming sound was filling the morning air on the estate and before long, a rumour had spread that a swarm of giant wasps was heading towards our area. Of course, no-one thought to check whether there was any reference to this on the news. But we were mostly aged about eight! Driven by a mixture of horror and excitement about this tale, it seemed to us that the sound was increasing in volume; evidence that the swarm was getting closer! Then one of my neighbours casually skipped by and informed us that what we could hear was someone operating an electric metal saw on the roof of the Sunley Factory. Naturally we had to see this for ourselves so we gathered at the highest point on the estate with a direct view of the factory in question. Indeed there was a man on the roof cutting metal panels with an electric saw!

We would never hear trains during the daytime because where we lived, in Leverstock Green, we were too far from the rail line that ran along the West side of the town. But we would hear the trains at night when the air was less thick with other sounds. We also lived in a house from which we could see the M1 motorway and Junction 8 which ran alongside the park at the bottom of the estate. So the sounds of traffic were also a constant throughout the day and night.

The other striking example takes me back to long periods of the school holidays spent at my grandparents' home in Abercynon, a mining town in the Welsh Valleys. My grandfather was a miner and, in my early childhood, the pit in Abercynon was still operative. If I was awake early I would hear the loud blast of the hooter that signalled the end of one shift for the miners and called up the next one. Abercynon could also be a noisy place but it enjoyed the beauty and tranquility of being sandwiched between two great mountains and divided almost symmetrically between East and West by the River Cynon running through the centre of the town. My brother and I would go walking up the mountain which sat some thirty yards from the house with our cousins; sometimes picking blackberries or wimberries which my Nan would use to make pies. The sounds of the local industry became familiar elements of the soundscape but so too did the echoing noises from the quarry, the call of the jackdaws that flew around it and the comforting sounds of the river and the nearby rail line.

I think I had always known that these echoes from my younger years were going to impact my creativity. Even as early as age 13, I recall discovering the Kenwood Food Mixer in our kitchen could play the first four notes of the E major scale on the different speed settings and duly incorporating it into a rough recording of a track by my band at the time! For all my classical training and love of organic instrumental sounds, I was always on the side of those who recognised the legitimacy of utilising technology to create new sounds, new timbres and textures and not being pointlessly conservative about clinging just to instruments built to reflect a time when electricity was not an option. It also part-explains my reverence for bands like Kraftwerk, 23 Skidoo and Cabaret Voltaire; all very different from one another in character but united by their utilisation of found sounds.

It took until I was in my late forties to fully realise how I would address this desire. I had begun my PhD in 2011, determined to build on the composing techniques I had started to develop when studying for my Mmus (masters) a few years earlier as a means of representing events, behaviours and concepts that resonated with the society I lived and worked in. It had, however, proved to be a frustrating process and, while I could write extensive programme notes explaining what was happening, I was painfully aware of two problems. Firstly, if the audience needed to read programme notes in order to have a clue what they were hearing, that constituted a failure of communication on my part. Secondly, I did not much like the music I was composing using this approach! In fact, against the advice of one of the music department's independent monitors of my work, I included two works in my final PhD portfolio in order to demonstrate both that they were important steps on the journey to establishing my Urban Art Music (subsequently renamed Environmental Art Music as there is nothing specifically 'urban' about it) and that they were, ultimately, failures!

It was by chance that, on a Saturday afternoon in 2013, I heard the striking sound of an electric metal cutter being used on a construction site and recorded enough of it to subsequently identify and manipulate pitch and use as the basis of a new composition. It was a short step from there to using pitched environmental noise harmonically and combining it with notated instrumental parts. Thankfully it also brought much-needed direction to my PhD research and transformed the ensuing portfolio and accompanying thesis into one I could feel confident in.

In the time since I was awarded my Doctorate, I have been very fortunate to enjoy strong support from great people in national radio like Stuart Maconie (Freak Zone) and Tom Robinson (BBC Radio 6 Music), whose Fresh on the Net team I was privileged to join nearly three years ago; Max Reinhardt who, as a then-presenter of Late Junction (BBC Radio 3), not only played my music but successfully nominated me to perform on the BBC Introducing Stage at Latitude in 2017. It was not just Max though but Nick Luscombe, who also took my music onto his Flomotion show on Resonance FM, Fiona Talkington and Anna Hilde Neset on Late Junction, Dexter Bentley on Resonance's Hello Goodbye Show, my friends Ming Nagel and Jon Read at Exile FM who I now present a show for; Marc Ainscough at Radio Dacorum, Ben Vince on NTS and many more. I have bucked conventional wisdom and, despite being little known before, I have enjoyed my most successful period as a composer and recording artist in my fifties!

I have been called a lot of things over the past few years. On occasions I have even been called 'ground-breaking' for my use of environmental sound to drive the composition process. I am not ground-breaking! I just have my unique way of working and it has allowed me to carve out a small niche from which to knock out periodic EPs and very occasional albums of my work. If and when lockdown ever truly comes to an end I long to get back on stage and enjoy connecting with live audiences again. In the meantime my new EP Alternatives To Despair has hit the proverbial streets, albeit mostly digital ones! You can find it on the usual platforms!