SOUND ART/CHRIS

PETER: Do you specialise in any instruments?
CHRIS: Anything, laptops, I play conventional instruments, guitar, bass guitar anything I can make a noise out of really.

PETER: Is your work studio based, club based or performance based, anything ina white cube context.
CHRIS: Yeah we generally do a mixture of things, we do stuff that’s in clubs, a typical gig situation to performances in here (RED). One thing we did here, was an exhibition by Alex Pearson where by he changed the shape of the gallery and we reacted to the pieces. There was a dark room, we got inside it, the materials in the installation were wood and string and basically we were making a racket inside this installation. But Hull’s really interesting as regards to Sound Artist’s, there’s a really big mix of different things going on from high end stuff to low fi stuff, even rustling pieces of newspaper. One of my friends had a performance in the library. He told us to come in, basically unannounced, he told us to come into the library then take some books off the shelves and sit next to him and he would start playing the books, flicking the pages, slamming them, we were quite nervous, obviously the whole point of doing it in the library was you weren’t supposed to make noise. The piece started to build up. There were about six of us, flicking through and slamming books and use them like musical instruments.

I am working with SCAM RECORDS I’m in a band called Team Doby with Alex Pevron and we’re working on a new album, this is our third album now. I’m doing a lot of work with a Kurdish drummer, he uses instruments that are ancient drums and flutes and things and using a laptop with contemporary software, we are trying to blend the traditional and the contemporary, just a new way in making music, sort ethno and adding house tracks, drum beats. Sort of one instrument informing the other… a new sound.
The way he plays his instrument is very expressive, but a computer isn’t expressive, a piece of plastic, but there ways to try and play it that gives you that expression. Theres a folky vibe to it if that makes any sense, using the computer to make folk music.