Can you tell us about your two other pieces and why you decided they would work with Soundscape?

The two pieces I’m going to be playing today are Electric Counterpoint by Steve Reich which is for a guitar ensemble or a pre-recorded array of guitars, usually electric guitars, and a soloist also playing electric guitar, which I’m following with Bhudda by Julius Eastman, which is more or less a graphic score. It has twenty lines of music but no indication of which order they’re to be played in, whether or not they’re played simultaneously, the instrumentation, the volume; basically, all the usual details that you have. So, I’ve sort of arranged that and made, sometimes quite extreme interpretive choices to make it work.

But each of these pieces has a large number of parts that when separated can emphasise certain musical ideas. So, depending on the choices that you make – which parts to place in which part of the room – you can reinterpret that music, and emphasise aspects of the composition that would perhaps be slightly lost when performed live in a normal stereo environment.

Can you describe the effect for the audience?

These are both pieces that audiences can often find overwhelming; pieces that provide a sea of sound and to an extent, like a kind of wash. It means that sometimes things can be slightly lost. The advantage of being able to spatialise them or place them as different objects in different parts of the room, and also being able to move those objects around is that you’re able to have the wash, or the movement of the sound come from various different directions, different combinations of directions, instead of just coming from the front which by comparison is a slightly basic interpretation.

I think that’s what I’ve found quite hard to adjust to, that I would never have considered that before, because it’s not a parameter you can control when you’re performing acoustically. It’s like having to immediately think in 4D.

And how has the collaboration been between you and the d&b team?

It’s been very easy to collaborate with the d&b team, I mean they’re pros and I think it’s exactly what I needed because I don’t really understand this technology yet, some of the terminology that’s used, and the finer aspects of the tech itself. They’re very able to take my comparatively crude instructions and turn it into something that sounds very natural yet sophisticated.

What ideas has Soundscape given you for future performances, future works? 

I was chatting with a young composer, Sasha Scott, who I commissioned with the help of IGF and King’s Place a couple of months ago to write a piece called Rush; she deals a lot with, like Shiva does, spatialising sound and having it go beyond a simple stereo idea. We were talking about how she will help myself and a singer, Ema Nikolovska arrange O Superman by Laurie Anderson and how we would visualise different lyrics that are set out like ‘here come the planes’ and how Laurie Anderson has this kind of synth wave panning slightly through the recording. 

We were listening to it together on Spotify and it wasn’t really coming across. But we were then thinking, because of what Sasha does, and because of my recent experience in the d&b studios, how would that sound if it was turned into something more than stereo, how could the idea of planes or jet engines, or something actually above the audience, sort of move over them, in a slightly ominous way. So, it has affected the collaborations I’ll have in the future.

What part do you play in the collaboration with Shiva we’ll be hearing tonight?

Tonight, we’re performing Seismic Wave Orchestra and Shiva’s on turntables; she’s spatialising pre-recorded sounds she’s creating. And I’m playing the electric guitar but I’m bowing it with a violin bow and using a very large amplifier to create a lot of gain, a lot of feedback using only one pitch - the guitar is tuned entirely to G. So, we’re sort of speaking against each other and taking turns to dominate the room with our sound in quite different ways. Actually, I’m not spatialised in this set up tonight, I’m just coming from one direction, it’s the amp only, and Shiva’s moving around. It’s an interplay of different systems.