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Sedbergh Music Festival 2010

Saturday 12th June

Event 15, Jonathan ColecloughSonic Saturday event marker

Over the last 15 years Jonathan Coleclough has made a dozen albums and performed on four continents. He is an alchemist, transmuting the sounds around us into brooding, cinematic epics. For this performance he responds to the “Book Town” idea using electronics, video, heat and water to turn lead type into sonic gold.
Venue: Westwoods Books 1:00pm
Tickets: £5.00, Children free
Jonathan Coleclough

Jonathan Coleclough

Words into water.

This performance will create abstract music from live manipulation of prosaic sound sources: a couple of glasses of water, a child’s bath toy and some printer’s metal type. A video projection will give listeners a close up view of where the sounds originate. These everyday sounds will enter a computer and form the seeds of a flowering and flowing piece of music, transformed in a variety of ways that take the sounds far from their origins.

The sound transformations that occur within the computer include adding long and slowly fading tails to what started out as short sounds, isolating and emphasising particular frequencies of the original sounds, making sounds resemble bells ringing, shifting the pitch of high sounds into deep rumbles, and elongating sounds to expose the complexities hidden them. Jonathan hopes to give a glimpse into the music hidden within the sounds that we encounter in our everyday lives.

In previous performances Jonathan has started with sounds of cracking glass or boiling water, but for this event he will work with material more appropriate to a bookshop – the physical embodiment of words as moveable metal type, the technology pioneered 500 years ago by Gutenberg that transformed the worldwide flow of information.

Jonathan Coleclough is a composer who transforms the delicate sounds of everyday objects into mysterious and sensuous music. Starting from raw sounds as diverse as water boiling on a stove, sheep bells ringing on a remote hillside or pins dropping onto the floor, he creates music of richly textured drones and fragile details. Sometimes the music is far removed from the original sources, at other times it exposes and explores fine details of the sounds.

In solo performance this process of transformation of the everyday is made explicit by live video projections that show close-up details of him using the objects that serve as his instruments: a sheet of glass, a burning sparkler, a metal bowl, a melting ice cube.

He also makes sound installations which offer listeners an opportunity to explore a created sound world at their own pace. These installations incorporate sound material from the environment where they are located.

He has performed in the UK, Europe, Australia, USA and Japan.

Selected releases

Since 1996 he has had over thirty releases on CD, LP and 7" vinyl including:

Website: http://www.coleclough.plus.com/