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.

(download)

Click here to download:

latitude-festival-dbxCmJfEjbJnHdstvkcf.zip (37.65 MB)

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