In many ways, the compact cassette tape is not an ideal music storage format: It has a number of drawbacks including: its fragility, a lack of bass and treble, and its gradual self-destruction each time it’s played. However, the creative misuse of tape’s drawbacks opens up a world of possibilities for those willing to push the cassette tape to its limit.
For my studio project, I explored using the physical imperfections of cassette tape for filter processing and adding artefacts to sounds. I carried out a series of experiments on tape, including: the application of bleach and acrylic paint, burying tape outdoors, freezing tape, and finally destroying the tape with a candle. Within my clip, we hear a tapethat has been frozen, and soaked in bleach in order to change the tape’s tonal qualities, following this, I interacted with the tape by using a candle to warp and damage the tape over a 6 minute period before the tape eventually snaps.
James Burns is a BA student on the Music Technology course. He releases music under the name Robinson’s Village, where he creates dense soundscapes, blending elements of shoegaze, sampling, and ambient music, created using the Roland SP404 and my Eurorack setup . Follow him on instagram for experiments with tape, eurorack, synths, samplers etc.
Peregrino - Subsis (Kira Ramchaitar-Husbands)
This project ‘Peregrino’ (Spanish for Pilgrim), is a meditative, immersive environment that links Ambient aesthetics and adaptive music to game-play.
The concept was inspired by traditional antecedents in 20th-century musical Modernism including the works of the Aleatoric and Generative artists such as Pierre Boulez and Karl Stockhausen, coupled with the audio-visual synaesthesia experiments of Oskar Fischinger’s ‘An Optical Poem’.
Subsis is a 23-year-old Producer/Creative Programmer hailing from London whose work fuses experimental processing techniques, found sounds and generative compositional methods.
Triangulations - Alberto Rizzo
More than one year has passed since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is not a surprise thinking about how catastrophic have been the consequences, not only in terms of human lives but also on mental well-being. The isolation in all its form has been a private sphere that everyone had tried to mitigate or not consider like it was something normal. The research for this piece headed to create a performance representing that intimate sensation.Triangulations is an intimate multi-media performance that turns around ties that have dissolved over the past year and the struggle to restore some equilibrium. It aims to reveal and balance the audi-ence’s level of immersion in the media content and finally balancing the dynamics between performer, the outside soundscapes, and the inaudible made audible.
Alberto Rizzo is a master’s student on the Music and Sonic Media course. As an aspiring music researcher, he got in touch with an alternative practice over the last two years that lead to finding a tight bond between body, motion, and sound into the ether. As opposed to several digital instruments based on motion capture systems, his system uses ultrasounds to create thecomposition matter and physically feel the interaction with the body and the environment taking advantage of some physical properties of sound into the air. He’s currently researching a suitable compositional aesthetic for his system in the field of feedback musicianship.
