As has now become something of an autumn tradition, I went back to India with the Bollywood Brass Band in autumn 2011 to play a couple of fun Bollywood gigs. The trip was much shorter than our trip earlier in the year but was still lots of fun, and I managed to tack on a few days at the end to have a little explore along the west coast, where I've not really spent much time.  

Look, here I am not blending in. 

In September 2010 I composed and designed the sound for First Impressions at the Theatre Royal, Margate, a play about cultural snobbery, class and William Turner by Tim Stimpson.

It was a challenging piece to design as the play's action switched between the nineteenth and twenty-first centrury (sometimes every other line) and the director, Mel Cook wanted each of these switches to be triggered by a sound cue. I also wanted to capture the sense of faded glory that Margate seems to have - a fashionable seaside resort in Turner's day, it now has some of the highest rates of unemployment in the south of England, and it seems like every second shop is boarded up.

With that in mind, I set about designing a fairground organ sound using various modelling synths in Ableton Live, and wrote a suitably fairgroundy-sounding ditty for the main theme, which I then ran through lots of reverb and spliced with some found sounds that I'd recorded in the town. Here it is:

First Impressions - Main theme by stevepretty

To make the switch to contemporary Margate, I created a percussion part using some of the found sounds that I recorded in the arcade, added some sub bass and some glitchy electronic effects. Here's the result:

Firt Impressions - Modern Theme by stevepretty

Here are a couple of the short transition sounds:

First Impressions - Scene Change by stevepretty

First Impressions - Scene Change 2 by stevepretty

And here's a silly arrangement of I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside that I did for the bows:

I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside by stevepretty

Being MD for Robin Ince's Book Club at Latitude Festival was pretty much a highlight of the early part of the summer. As well as doing a few short comedy sets where I tried out some bits of my Origin of the Pieces show, I also ran a couple of epic cockney knees-ups, one in partnership with Kevin Eldon and featuring performances from Gavin Osborne, James Dowdeswell and Josie Long on the swannee whistle. It was, in the words of Chas and Dave, a Lovely Ol' Job, if I do say so myself. Getting 500 people doing the Hokey Cokey on the last night was, to put it mildly, fun.

Other Book Club stuff included various incarnations of an improvised musical about crabs taking over the world with Robi/yns Ince and Hitchcock, accompanying Robin reading a bedtime book for kids alongside Josie Long (swannee whistle) and Helen Zaltzman (toy glockenspiel) and an impromptu duet with Ben Goldacre playing my MIDI trumpet.

Speaking of which, was also good to perform with a laptop and live electronics hooked up to my trumpet/voice/melodica for the first time properly, even if it was in order to make lots of extremely silly and/or spooky sounds.

Latitude was especially busy for me in 2010 because I was also performing on trumpet and electronics with Ron Jetson, and doing the music/dance game Segue that I co-devised earlier in the year. Both went extremely well, thankyou very much, and here are some photos and a video to prove it.

This is a piece of composition/sound design that I originally designed for the interactive theatre game Echo (dir. Mel Cook) in March 2009.

Echo was inspired by the Echo and Narcissus myth, and was commissioned by SPID theatre as a piece of interactive community theatre. It featured live musicians, actors, video projection and an interactive set as well as the sound collages and compositions that I designed for the show.

 

After interviewing members of the community living in and around the Trellick Tower in west London, I produced a series of narrative audio clues to guide players around the Meanwhile Gardens, a community space underneath the tower. The 'goal' of the game was to get to the final location, where we had produced an audio-visual installation which was triggered by a touch pad, which in turn triggered a camera and projector, projecting people's faces onto the side of the Trellick Tower, whilst a sound collage made from fragments of the interviews played through hidden speakers.

The piece was such a success that we re-ran it in September 2009 (which also featured me 'duetting' on trumpet with a fire juggler!), and again in modified form for the Latitude Festival in July 2010.

Here are some of the bits of sound design that I did for the show.

This one used a Tibetan singing bowl and shakuhachi flute along with some organ that I played.

Echo - Lionel by stevepretty

This one used lots of found sounds, and was played through a big PA in the skateboard park within Meanwhile Gardens:

Echo - Mace by stevepretty

I co-devised Segue with Laura Kriefman of the Guerilla Dance Project, which we performed at the V&A. Segue is, for want of a better description, an interactive music-dance-theatre game. I co-devised it with Laura Kriefman with assistance from Mel Cook, and it was originally designed for Hide & Seek’s ‘V&A Late’ session in March 2010. For more information about Segue itself, see my composition and sound design page.

 

The V&A debut was brilliantly manic fun. There’s nothing quite like getting some serious musicians, dressing them up in silly hats and getting them to play fragments of music whilst surrounded by an exhibition of clothing from 1890s India. The game was a great success and went down even better than we’d hoped. Hide & Seek are also lovely to work with – I’d recommend going to anything that they run as it will, at the very least, be massive fun, and probably interesting and informative too.

 

Did a schools tour (booked by the Edinburgh Fringe office) and then Edinburgh Fringe run with my show The Big Filling: This Time it's Pie-sonal (see Writing for more info), playing a number of parts and providing a live soundtrack on lots of instruments. I'm somewhat biased about this show, since I wrote and composed it, but... well, it was awesome. Great reviews, great people, great time. Though did need to sleep for about seven weeks after August was over.