I was invited to perform at Simon Whetham‘s Active Crossover event at the Arnolfini, Bristol on December 8th 2011. Active Crossover is an installation Simon create a few years ago which he has been touring extensively around the UK. Alongside the installation, Simon curates a series of live events with artists local to the area of the exhibition. The concept behind the live performance is that the performers are grouped into pairs, and within each pairing, one artist starts, then the second artist joins in and they both improvise together (effectively ‘Crossover’), which leads into the second artist performing a solo set.
I really nice idea, and I was up with the superb Bristol line up of SJ Esau, Tom Bugs, Ekoplekz, Skjølbrot and Simon Whetham. It was an absolute pleasure to be be paired with SJ Esau to ‘cross over’.

I decided to perform with the Piano Migrations installation, which was the first time I had performed with it solo, which meant I developed quite a few new ways of working, including live sampling and more techniques to work with my dismantled toy piano. I really enjoyed the crossover with SJ Esau, we moved from the more textural ‘soundscape’ flavours of Piano Migrations towards a song, and it worked really well. At a first glance, it might appear that our work is really different but as soon as we started experimenting together, we found an amazing amount of soundworlds that combined extremely well. There were points when I thought we sounded like the look of scratchy super8 film….

Here is a video of my solo section – and there are possibilities that the ‘crossover’ might be released as a download – watch this space!!