Sonic Arts

Events

Peter Batchelor

  • Date: 12 July 2018
  • Time: 21:00
  • Location: Corfu, Greece
  • Venue: Ionian Academy
Portrait: Peter Batchelor

Kaleidoscope: Cycle

(Fissure, Nebula, Pulse, Fuse)

Kaleidoscope: Arcade


Kaleidoscope: Cycle

Fissure (2006 | 9’47)

…is about the breaking of things. It is about destruction and fragmentation, division and fission. While redolent of disruption, this kind of activity also represents catalyst and commencement, and as such Fissure introduces the idea of the fragment from which the following works in the series emerge. The piece explores the sounds of breaking environmental materials (e.g. cracking ice and thunder (celestial fracture)) and those of frictional play (grinding/sliding) with these broken materials.

Nebula (2012 | 13’17)

…is loosely inspired by the legend of Ys, a city swallowed by the sea off the Brittany coast whose ghostly cathedral bells reportedly remain audible when the sea is calm. As such, this piece celebrates the ephemeral, fleeting and transient through swirling textures and particulate sonic clouds. Periodically these particles coalesce or give way to coherent, solid soundscapes before exploding again into sonic nebulae.

Pulse (2013 | 8’04)

…explores impulse along with rhythm and periodicity. It plays with real-world sounds which exhibit such behaviour, both mechanical (engines and machinery, bicycle chains, a record player, thudding helicopter blades) and natural (crickets), allying these with looped sound fragments and repeated rhythmic patterns. Musical relationships are sought between these various materials, and the polyrhythmic complexities that result from their combination.

Fuse (2013 | 9’40)

…represents a coming-together of sonic particles into effluvial, noisy clusters, and into notionally ‘whole’ real-world soundscapes, albeit soundscapes which themselves involve sonic effluvia (rain on a tin roof, fire crackling, accumulated shouts/vuvuzelas at a football match). These in turn dissolve into and meld (fuse) with each other, yielding sound evolu- tions and marriages impossible in the real world and facilitated entirely by spectromorphological similarities.

Kaleidoscope: Arcade (2004 | 8’40)

Come behind the neon façades of the one-armed bandits and pinball machines and into the hearts of the machines themselves. Among the gears and levers, the whistling, darting, ratcheting and rolling is frantic and all-encompassing. A rage within the machine. Respites are fleeting, for no sooner has a game ended than more coins are pressed into the slot to start another…

Peter Batchelor – Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre. De Montfort University.

https://www.peterbatchelor.com/

Peter Batchelor is a Senior Lecturer in Music, Technology and Innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester. He studied with Jonty Harrison and Andrew Lewis and, having completed a PhD in composition at the University of Birmingham, joined the team at De Montfort in 2003.

His music draws strongly on the compositional concerns of the acousmatic tradition, which provides an aesthetic foundation for investigating a variety of other genres and presentation formats for electroacoustic media including radiophonic documentary, live-electronics and improvisation, multimedia and large-scale multi-channel installation work. More recently his interest has shifted towards site-specific public (sound) art, including the fabrication of aural landscapes and sonic illusion (trompe l’oreille).