Sarah Angliss | Words, sounds and robots from Sarah Angliss

Performance with theremin, automata and laptop. Salon talks. Theatre music. Sound installations.

The Ealing Feeder
28-note polyphonic robotic carillon, first exhibited at Kinetica 2010, now used for stage performance

About the robots

Events coming soon

News

Horlicks and Armageddon (Brighton Fringe 7-15 May)

Posted in Gigs / Robots / Sounds on 26 Apr 2013

In a sub-basement deep below Brighton Town Hall, I’ll be using theremin, stories from the archives and my own automata to recall the lives of Britain’s self-styled nuclear survivalists. In the 1980s, while most of us lived in fear of Armageddon, this small band of enthusiasts prepared for nuclear war with relish, as though it was an extended, underground caravanning holiday.

This surprising, strangely moving and sometimes darkly funny show is based on rarely seen discoveries from the British archives. I’ll be accompanied on the night by actor Colin Uttley and by Hugo, our dilapidated, robotic ventriloquial sidekick who will be reading government announcements.

This show started as a 25 minute talk at the Catalyst Club, Brighton, and the Port Eliot Festival. It provoked a flood of memories and high emotion from audience members who grew up in the shadow of the bomb. That’s why I decided to create a full-length show for the Brighton Fringe, with music and automata. Nuclear missiles marked our lives, even though they remained in the silos – I’m hoping this show will get under the skin.

8pm Tues 7, Wed 8, Mon 13, Tues 14 and Wed 15 May
Sub-basement
Old Police Cells Museum
Brighton Town Hall
Brighton BN1 1JA

Tickets £8.50 (£6.50)
Booking and venue details

New writing on music, technology and culture

Posted in Writing on 10 Apr 2013

Three publications arrived through the post this month. Each includes some of my writing on music, technology and culture:

Material Culture and Electronic Sound is a new book from the Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, edited by Frode Weium and Tim Boon, with a forward by Brian Eno. This is a beautiful book, with many photographs, and articles on the Auxetophone, technology and apparent effort in performance, the use of rediscovered objects in music making, the Oramics machine, the early reception of the Hammond organ and more. I’ve written a chapter on musicians’ early attitudes to drum machines and samplers, comparing the introduction of these machines to the early days of talking pictures. The book includes contributions from Katy Price, David Toop, Mick Grierson, Aleks Kolkowski, Tim Boon, Frode Weium and several other researchers with a particular interest in sound.

Working with performer and theatre historian Caroline Radcliffe, I’ve also contributed a paper to the journal Performance Research. Our paper concerns a Lancashire heel-and-toe clog dance from the nineteenth century in which female dancers directly mimicked the loom, mule, shuttle, governor and other mill machines around them. It was written for a special edition of the journal on labour. The full title of the paper is:

Challenging the automaton: Repetitive labour and dance in the industrial workspace, Caroline Radcliffe and Sarah Angliss. Performance Research, Volume 17 Issue 6, 2013.

Finally, I’ve written a few words on The Bird Fancyer’s Delight and the practice of using trained birds to bring music into the home before the invention of the phonograph. This article appears in Dutch translation in Blockfluitist.

If you’d like to know a little more about these topics, do check out the above publications. There are also some audience friendly versions of this material, presented with non-specialists in mind, in my TEDx talk Loving the Machine and my BBC Radio 4 documentary The Bird Fancyer’s Delight (which includes an appearance from fellow Material Culture and Electronic Sound author Aleks Kolkowski).

Seeking a friendly nuclear physicist

Posted in Gigs on 9 Apr 2013

The Brighton Festival Fringe is fast approaching and I’m hard at work, devising a new solo show Horlicks and Armageddon which will be taking place in a city sub-basement from 7-15 May. Here, I’ll be mixing music, film, robotics and readings from the archives to tell the little known story of Britain’s nuclear ‘survivalists’. In the 1980s, while most of us lived in fear of nuclear war, this secretive band of enthusiasts prepared for it with relish, as though it was an extended underground caravanning holiday.

This show includes a musical performance in which sounds are triggered and modulated live by a Geiger counter sensing radioactive materials. I’m looking for someone with expertise in nuclear physics to cast an eye over this performance, in rehearsal, and offer some informal advice. I can offer a small fee for your time. If you’re from a progressive science communication institute who might be interested in sponsoring such a venture – I’d love to talk. Do get in touch!

Flatpack Festival 30 March 2013

Posted in Gigs / Robots on 27 Feb 2013

On 30 March, I’ll be performing live at Flatpack Festival, Birmingham, as one of a series of events celebrating the heyday of Birmingham Arts Lab. Here’s Alan Moore talking to Flatpack curators about arts labs in the 60s and 70s. With its lack of hierarchy, its collaborative working and an atmosphere which encouraged wild creativity, the arts lab scene has strong affinities with hacking and making culture today.

Wolfgang, Sarah Angliss' robot drummer (photo Agata Urbaniak)

Wolfgang, robot drummer (photo Agata Urbaniak)

My performance is one of a series curated by Vivid Projects. I’ll be playing live on theremin, laptop and other electronics, accompanied by my robots - details coming soon. In the meantime, here’s a photo of one of my latest works: Wolfgang, a Kling Klang-inspired robot drummer. Wolfgang had his debut performance earlier this month at Spirit of Gravity, Brighton, and is one of the machines joining me on stage at Flatpack.

7pm
Minerva Works, Digbeth
Saturday 30 March
Tickets £5 (plus £0.95 booking fee)

Brighton Fringe 2013

Posted in Gigs / Talks on 27 Feb 2013

The Brighton Fringe is fast approaching and here’s a round-up of the shows I’m bringing this year. There’s a solo show of archival oddities and music, exploring Britain’s 1980s nuclear survivalists; a Spacedog set at Jane Bom-Bane’s music café and a theremin jam with Leila Dear, curated by Strange Attractor and Disinformation.

Horlicks and Armageddon

This new, solo venture takes place in a sub-basement refuge, deep under the streets of Brighton. I’ll be using electronic music, automata and spoken word to recall the secret lives of Britain’s self-styled nuclear survivalists. In the 1980s, while most of us lived in fear of Armageddon, this small band of enthusiasts prepared for nuclear war with relish, as though it was an extended, underground caravanning holiday. This event includes rarely seen documents from the National Archives.

20:00: 7, 8, 13, 14 and 15 May 2013
Sub-basement, The Old Police Cell Museum, Bartholomew Square, Brighton BN1
Tickets £8.50/£6.50 Book on the Brighton Fringe website.

The Effect – composition for the National Theatre

Posted in Sounds on 18 Jan 2013

How do you write music for a love affair that blossoms in the arid setting of a clinical drugs trial? And how do you portray the head rush you experience when you fall in love or swallow a stimulant drug – that sense of heightened awareness and those rushes of excitement and panic that flood the mind and body? What sounds conjure the anxiety and visceral pain of depression or a dark, shared memory? These were problems I had to fathom last autumn, when I was invited by playwright Lucy Prebble and director Rupert Goold to write music for The Effect, Lucy’s new play.

The Bird Fancyer’s Delight (BBC Radio 4 doc) – notes

Posted in Sounds / Talks on 6 Jul 2011 •1 Comment

This Radio 4 documentary aired at 1:30pm on 5 July 2011. It’s repeated at 3:30pm on Saturday 9 July.
Now available on the BBC iPlayer.

For those of you who would like to know more about The Bird Fancyer’s Delight, here’s a bumper crop of references I’ve found over the last few months, including transcripts from the British Library, music excerpts, photographs of a serinette and details of contributors to the show. I hope you find them interesting.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day 2011

Posted in Miscellaneous / Sounds / Writing on 7 Oct 2011 •3 Comments

This must be how it feels to see a unicorn.

Six months ago, I came face to face with a machine I’d read about often but never expected to see. A one-off invention, this oddity had been a dreamlike presence in my life, hovering into my consciousness at unexpected moments, something I imagined but couldn’t fully sketch in my mind. I’d dreamed of it since I was ten, a time when I was obsessing over a cassette tape my dad had given me. On it were some electronic sounds he’d recorded from the radio – sound pieces composed by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Find Us – music from the Voyager golden record

Posted in Sounds on 6 Mar 2012

Find Us is a miniature I’ve composed using sounds from the Voyager golden record. You can download it free as part of Soulless Party’s album Electronic Encounters – Special Edition.

This year we’ll be celebrating two thirty-fifth birthdays. In November 1977, Columbia Studios released their blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind, arguably the film with the most gratuitous use of the Arp 2500 modular synthesizer. And just a few weeks earlier, NASA launched Voyager 1 and 2, probes which took stunning images of the outer planets before taking a slingshot around Saturn and Neptune to journey out of the solar system. Voyager 2 is now around 11 billion miles from Earth, in the outer reaches of the heliosheath, the bubble of solar wind which envelopes the solar system. It will soon be out of the heliosheath and travelling into deep space.

The Odditorium

Posted in Talks on 25 Aug 2012

Seen at this year’s Port Eliot Festival, the Odditorium is a collaboration with a handful of other salon speakers who share an interest in the arcane.

The Odditorium is curated by David Bramwell, host of Brighton’s long-running Catalyst Club. David and I have performed together at The Last Tuesday Society, The Horse Hospital and TEDx – here’s how David describes our latest venture:

“The Odditorium is a portal to the fringes of culture, its mavericks, pranksters, adventurers and occultists.

Our team comprise Sony Award-winning broadcasters, musicians, best-selling authors, roboticists and comic-book heroes, here to share their passions through slide show lectures, musical performance, live experiments, audience participation and mischief.”

A trip to Belbury

Posted in Gigs / Miscellaneous / Sounds on 28 Oct 2012

Apart from a few brief theremin performances, I’m stepping back from live shows over the next few weeks as I’m working intensively in the studio.

This month, I’m composing music for The Effect, a sharp and witty new play by Lucy Prebble (writer of Enron). The Effect is a ‘clinical romance’, exploring the nature of love and sanity and the boundaries of neuroscience. The composition is somewhere between music and sound design – I’ve been engaged in a lot of last-minute Max/Msp wrangling to make the bleeps, clicks and drones of the laboratory and transform them into musical riffs. I’m working alongside the brilliant sound designer Chris Shutt – I’m hoping you can’t tell where his sounds end and mine begin. The Effect opens at the Cottesloe, National Theatre, on 13 November and runs until the end of February. It’s a joint production with Headlong and is directed by Rupert Goold.

As soon as The Effect is open, I’m taking an excursion to Belbury. Spacedog are delighted to be working on a 7″ single with Belbury Poly, due for release in early Spring 2013 as part of the Ghostbox Study Series. I’m also contributing to a code-based album and am featuring on an release by another fine electronic artist (details coming soon).

That effect in The Effect

Posted in Sounds on 14 Nov 2012

Anyone who has seen Lucy Prebble’s gripping new play The Effect may be curious to know more about the peculiar sonic undercurrent which is present at certain points in the drama. As this has been mentioned in a few reviews, I thought I should say a little more about it. Without going into too many details (and spoiling the, erm, effect), the strange sensation you’re experiencing is infrasound – an extreme bass sound which plays through the air and vibrates the seats, walls and other structures in the Cottesloe Theatre.

Infrasonic notes are pitched so deep, they’re on the cusp of your perception. Descending in pitch from the bottom end of the piano into the infrasonic range is like stepping into the sonic abyss. Audible sound slips away as you drop further into the bass range and you’re left with a purely tactile sensation - a sound you feel rather than hear. I’ve been experimenting with infrasound since around 2003, when I laced a concert in the Purcell Room with infrasonic pedal notes. I became curious about the musical effects of infrasound when I realised that some of the biggest pipes in cathedral organs were creating sounds so deep, they were in the infrasonic range. Although they’re inaudible – in theory at least – these sounds seem to have some peculiar physical and psychological effects. Some organ players throw these infrasonic bass notes into the mix to create a feeling of awe. Stranger still, in the 1990s, a physicist named Vic Tandy presented some tentative evidence that infrasound may be present at some ostensibly haunted sites. This, rather than anything supernatural, may make you feel spooked as it creates a sense of unease and the sensation of an invisible presence in the room – an impression that’s heightened if it gently shakes sheets of paper, upholstery, doors and other loose objects around you. The infrasound may come from a mundane source – Tandy had some odd experiences when his workroom was swamped with infrasound from a faulty ceiling fan. But it still has an unfamiliar and unsettling effect.

Listen to the birds

Posted in Sounds on 27 Nov 2012

Anyone who shares my obsession with talking and singing birds might enjoy this juicy worm from Moon Wiring Club.

Today Bread, Tomorrow Secrets is a new album from electronic artist Moon Wiring Club, exploring an uncanny world where humans and birds dine together at a bewitching, Edwardian post-theatre banquet.

The album is available on CD and vinyl and curiously, different tunes are served up on each format. The CD is packed with exquisite electronic tracks, in compound time signatures that lilt like a high Baroque dance suite. I appear on recorder, here and there, extemporising fragments of the kind of minuets and gigues that were taught to birds in the eighteenth century. The LP is largely cut from the same source material but is a more laid back affair, sans beats – an electronic lullaby of sorts.

Popcorn – edge video

Posted in Exhibits / Sounds on 17 Dec 2012

Some festive, unplugged 70s strangeness: my cover of Popcorn, played on the sampled carillon, with its own pair of binary videos. I fell for the charms of 1-bit video when I was updating an installation that makes music by tracking butterflies in flight. I’d been experimenting with vision algorithms that reduce video to a simplified binary image (i.e. pure black and white, with no grayscale).

This version reduces a moving image to pure black and white blocks (with no grayscale).
READ MORE

Older

MAILING LIST - sign up here

Music, performance and robotics

Salon talks

Theremin – classical and augmented techniques

Robotic art – from concept to design and engineering

Exploring the sonic properties of unusual spaces

Uncanny valley – live performance with automata

Composition and sound programming

Spacedog – human and robot ensemble

Researching and demonstrating early sound technology

Saw playing – unplugged ethereal music