Martyn's blog

Martyn at XML Bath 16th March 2012

2012-01-12T04:38:00.000-08:00

From Brendan Harkin at XMediaLab...It's a rock-star line-up for X Media Lab Bath this March! Jeff Gomez, Ralph Simon, Dale Herigstad, Rubedo, Martyn Ware, David Maher Roberts, Martha Ladley, Leah Hoyer, the Allosphere.... an embarrassment of riches! You can check it out on LinkedIn: http://linkd.in/zV4DV6 Please do circulate it amongst your impeccable international networks for those you think would be interested or could benefit from the X Media Lab process. Register for the one-day Conference on Friday 16 March 2012 Nominate your project for consideration for The Lab (17 - 18 March) and receive one-on-one mentoring from the International Mentors. Very much hope we'll see you there! best wishes Brendan

West St Story

2011-12-12T05:13:00.001-08:00

West Street Story:Come Together was a co-commission for the White Night festival with the Noise Abatement Society, Brighton and Hove City Council and Brighton & Hove Arts Commission. It comprised an original 3D soundscape composed by Martyn Ware of the Illustrious Company, founder member of bands Human League and Heaven 17; and live commentary and analysis in Brighton University's Sallis Benney Theatre by psychobiologist and body language expert Dr Harry Witchel from Brighton and Sussex Medical School. The event was filmed and broadcast live by Driftwood Productions. Situated in part of West Street, in the heart of Brighton’s night life, the installation and experiment, hailed a success by local stakeholders including the police and local council, presented a contrast to the raucous disharmony so frequently heard in lively areas at night, and connected with visitors to the area and residents, as well as those exiting the clubs. For more information contact press@noise-abatement.org

2011-11-04T02:45:00.001-07:00

http://hw.libsyn.com/p/3/d/0/3d0770dbe9447695/Martyn_Ware_Life_in_Scents.mp3?sid=779c7ef99902eaae7a82097a4c88d898&l_sid=32962&l_eid=&l_mid=2774828my life in scents podcast linkmx

Kim Wilde Joins Boy George’s Charge Back to 1980s Pop in London - Bloomberg

2011-10-19T07:31:00.000-07:00

Not since Michael J. Fox stepped out of a DeLorean has time travel been so exciting.London’s Roundhouse has taken its latest step back to the future with a festival of 1980s music. The only question is when the venue does it again.Boy George, Sandie Shaw, Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside and Kim Wilde are celebrating the historic future-pop perfection of the British Electric Foundation album “Music of Quality and Distinction.” Fans can only live in hope that the one-off show will be followed by more.The British Electric Foundation, often abbreviated to B.E.F., created the template for modern pop 25 years too early. Its production of Tina Turner’s covers of “Ball of Confusion” and “Let’s Stay Together” kick-started her revival.Not bad for two synthesizer-obsessed punks based in the industrial English city of Sheffield.Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh were members of the Human League before forming Heaven 17. Their side-project B.E.F. took classic soul songs and, working with a range of singers, recreated them using technology that was just starting to become available.The spectacular results have been re-released in a set “1981-2011: B.E.F.” A new album will follow in 2012 with many of the songs in the show. Big soul vocals and sparse synthetic backing is the sound of contemporary pop. Despite the obvious advances in recording technology, these originals still sound vital.On stage, they are sublime.Glacial SynthMarsh has left B.E.F. and Ware is happy to augment his keyboards with guitars. Even so, the 1980s future dazzle remains. Glenn Gregory, the lead singer of Heaven 17, mixes rich blue-eyed soul into the glacial synth. His trademark blonde quiff is gone, not his onstage exuberance. He strums through an acoustic version of Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me.”Ultravox’s Midge Ure takes on David Bowie’s “Secret Life of Arabia,” which he dedicates to the late Billy Mackenzie who originally sang it for B.E.F. The audience calls for “Vienna.”“No, we are singing music of quality and distinction tonight,” laughs Ure.Wilde glitters like a Blondie from a northern English town and astounds with her version of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” by the Supremes. Gartside, bearded and wearing a louche black velvet suit, applies his rich reedy tenor to a version of The Delfonics song “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” tickled with electronic drums.Goose BumpsBillie Godfrey turns Bronski Beat’s “Small Town Boy” into a poignant epic. Kate Jackson of the Long Blondes raises a mountain range of goose bumps with Blondie’s “Picture This.” Shaw brings effortless glamour to Dionne Warwick’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart”.Boy George looks like a rhinestone cowboy at Tiffany’s with his pink hat and black, bejeweled suit. His mellifluous voice, spiked with an ever-present glint of wickedness, is ideal for his beautifully oozing cover of Lou Reed’s “Make Up.”Ware’s arrangements, innovative and still, after 30 years, strikingly modern, give the concert a coherence and consistency, preventing it from becoming mere cabaret.An impromptu encore of Heaven 17’s “Temptation” (some of the guest singers have to be dragged back onstage from the bar) is one of the greatest moments of house music euphoria to be written before house music was invented.It seems criminal that this two-day weekend event, as presently planned, should only be a one-off. Exceptional.Rating: ****.What the Stars Mean:**** Excellent*** Good** Average* Poor(No stars) Worthless(Robert Heller is a music critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Croatian Newspaper review of the Heaven 17/BEF weekend

2011-10-19T05:07:00.000-07:00

REPORT FROM LONDON Reason, feelings and lessons 'original' post-modernLondon is these days to restore all of the immediate past, despite the credit crunch, global protests and pessimism in the financial district. Cultural Production in a liberal economy, traditionally strong industry, and however much some sectors were in trouble, judging by the endless sea, theatrical productions, exhibitions, new books, concerts and even supplement the contributions of culture, the crisis seems to lack in the creative sector.Indeed, as if all this more than ever, and now - just in London - still puts emphasis on self-awareness of the sector, deliberate or spontaneous review and evaluation of the culture of the seventies and eighties, the famous and infamous for some time, the cultural theory has highlighted as "Thacherism." Economist Cover Story Supplement for Culture Intelligent Life says, "Warhol's Law" and it seems rightly so: all these days in the British capital as in a former factory: wacky, fun, collaborative, with many humorous references to the past, But the irony is present. In the midst of this cultural hatches took place last week, two concerts, two nights in a row. The first occupies Heaven 17, creations duo Martyn Ware Ian Craig-Marsh after release from The Human League, and the other British Electric Foundation, the platform of the same duo, formed initially as an experimental arena to merge two of their greatest love - soul and electronic music. BEF has over time evolved into a production house which is far Heaven 17 smash product. But some of their works, like the album "Music of Quality and Distinction ', there are still among the most important musical works of Cyril of experimental new wave. The first night at The Roundhouse was devoted thirty megauspješnog anniversary release of their album 'The Luxury Gap'. But that has since perfected the technology Martyn Ware 3D sound reproduction, it was a concert performed largely supported this fascinating technical infrastructure.Brains and dancingThe day before the concert I met up with Ware in the Groucho Club in Soho. Club in the seventies - the time that describes the current exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, received - of course - named after the most famous of the brothers Marx and his statement "I would not want to be a member of the club that wants me as a member." And the irony is part of the culture time in a space where socializing, eating and drinking people in the creative industries. Ware, now in the middle fifties, smiles while talking to him the idol of my youth, as an author who has managed to pack smart, even politically engaged texts superatraktivan dance funk and it is visualized at a time when music videos were just moving. "For the record two TV commercials then we had a budget of 300,000 pounds! It's like a million today, and therefore that it is no longer possible. The music industry has changed significantly since the period of the new wave and in every respect. It changed the way music consumption has changed the author's method, and most access to music companies. Today is dominated by marketing. Marketing is, of course, was before, but now completely overrides all other layers. So it's not good any more so I have an exciting product that marketira. And if so, the industry is in crisis. "Ware tells no nostalgia for the past, when the almost avant-garde experiment created a world megauspješni band. "We've never embarked on a U.S. tour, we were more interested in recording the screencast." And so, he said, Heaven 17 did not become a global commercial phenomenon, although "The Luxury Gap" was sold in four and a half million copies, and "Temptation" is another and now the most wanted song at their concerts. but are remembered today as certainly the strongest in the vortex of the then electro pop bands like ABC, Duran Duran and Ultravox, and it is no wonder, because the music and life attitudes were closer to the progressive experimentalists like King Crimson or radical-type rockers Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire. The cult status of the H17 are held more or less regular occurrence, although Ian Craig Marsh for four years is not an active member. But by the end filled with Roundhouse and happy faces testify to the old charm of clever lyrics and dance music still fell 30 plus audience that has dominated the audience.British pedantryThe concert is conducted through all the songs from the album "The Luxury Gap," a young team of musicians plus two girls (vocals and keyboards) is superbly done the background work, and the first culmination of the evening was electro pop rendition of "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" Righteous Brothers. Perfect Wareov arrangement and powerful vocal Glenn Gregory still perfectly sound. Another highlight was a performance of "Being Boiled," the first single, The Human League, the progressive phase, while Marsh and Ware were members. When I asked him how he sees "The Luxury Gap" today, Ware said it was a smash album, but he prefers the later "How Men Are," "our Sgt. Pepper "so called because it is najeksperimentalniji album, closer to the method of BEF" Ian and I were big fans of progressive rock, which is seemingly incompatible with the post punk and philosophy novovalnm short form that will overcome the "boring old prdce", as it was then ironically called these bands. Van der Graaf Generator, and now I listen to regularly, "he says with a laugh and added:" I guess I will not be seen as an old nostalgic. " The second night at the Ware Roundohseu did BEF through the platform with the same basic setup, but respectable list of guest vocalists, who the evening turned into a fabulous fashion show arranged by famous and less known songs. On the stage izredalo twenty guests, so the atmosphere is reminiscent of a strange pastiche of entertainment festival, but the electro-soul release. There were Midge Ure, Kim Wilde, Green Gartside, Sandy Shaw (Remember the barefoot singer with the Sixties Contest!) and many others. but undoubtedly the highlights of the evening, which froze the audience were the performances of the "Ball of Confusion" Polly Scattergood (no less impressive than Tina Turner once), and psychedelic down tempo version of Blondie's hit "Picture This" which was sung by a young Kate Jackson , then Shingai Shoniwa with "Change is Gonna Come" that lifted the entire audience on their feet and eventually totally fired version "This Boots are Made for Walking" performed by Boy George ! morning before the second concert, Ware and the band looked at the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition, "Postmodernism, style and subversion 1970th to 1990th," by author, with Glenn Adamson, signed by Jane Pavitt, whose latest exhibition project in the same museum, "Cold War Modern" suffered a controversial critique of a few years ago. Everything in the exhibition provides an additional context for two concerts at the Roundhouse, but also because the exhibition and accompanying book-catalog is full of references to popular music and mass culture in general. Even the final chapter of this catalog signed by David Byrne , and one of his verse cited authors as the motto of the introductory text! This is a new development in the understanding of what is before twenty to thirty years called postmodernism, because then this phenomenon is rarely associated with popular culture. On the other hand, the authors and colleagues are not too much to take into account the philosophical context of the phenomenon, but the British meticulously processed each methodological approach, the reinterpretation of history, through irony and mixed collage until relation to Dadaism, Pop Art and the aesthetic interpretation of postmodernism in the context of "Thatcherism "and" Reaganism. " Is it because of all this, and thanks to this intellectual and museological interpretation of the time has come, given the present, but also speaks of the "classic" or "original" postmodernism?Enjoyment and consumptionThe answer may be found in the context of a trade exhibition which certainly offers the choice of subjects additional feedback - it is also possible to buy Jameson's "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Foster's "The Anti-Aesthetic" and double vinyl eighties music compiled specifically for this exhibition. When the jacket open in the famous Jencks genealogy of modernism, from his book "Modern movement in architecture!" After all, Ware method of processing the existing tracks is perhaps the best metaphor for what is postmodernism "wanted to say" - each including existing content can be creative basis for a new one. And social criticism can be fun. Especially in pop culture and the culture industry. Such a hybrid, intellectual and entertainment product itself is a work of late capitalism, which in the meantime, since the time when they created this whole artistic and architectural works, Vini and music books, really become - old and subversive in itself, it seems. And while the mystic calm area Victoria and Albert Museum Cultural Facilities provide for the enjoyment and consumption, a few subway stations still may be changing the world ...FEDA VUKIC

Heaven 17 Concert Setlist at Roundhouse, London on October 14, 2011 | setlist.fm

2011-10-17T02:20:00.000-07:00

Heaven 17 Concert Setlist at Roundhouse, London on October 14, 2011 | setlist.fm

Huffington Post on H17 Luxury Gap

2011-10-14T02:09:00.000-07:00

The Luxury Rap - Heaven 17 on the Record
Posted: 11/10/11 09:51 GMT

The early eighties were the high watermark for electronic music. A new wave of electronic synthesisers appeared in the late seventies, opening up the floodgates for a generation of bored kids, just as guitar-driven punk rock had a few years earlier. Suddenly it was possible to produce pop music with no technical virtuosity - all you needed was a vivid imagination and an instruction manual.

This was Martyn Ware's winning formula; first in the Human League and then in Heaven 17 with Glenn Gregory and Ian Craig Marsh, he co-wrote and co-produced some of the most memorable hits of the decade.

The Luxury Gap, Heaven 17's seminal, second studio album, which spawned tracks 'Temptation', 'Let Me Go', 'Come Live With Me' and 'Crushed by the Wheels of Industry', is now being 'toured' live, performed entirely in three dimensional surround sound at the Roundhouse, in Camden, London this Friday October 14th. The next day, his side project, British Electric Foundation's 'Music of Quality and Distinction' is also performed live, with a range of guest vocalists including La Roux's Elly Jackson, Sandie Shaw, Glenn Gregory, Scritti Politti's Green Gartside, Boy George, Midge Ure, Polly Scattergood, the Noisettes' Shingai Shoniwa, plus Kate Jackson (former lead singer of The Long Blondes).

I recently got the chance to speak to Martyn Ware and Glenn Gregory in London's Primrose Hill. Both from Sheffield, the boys haven't lost their northern friendliness and remain resolutely down to earth. Charming, chatty and approachable, at times they still sounded like wide-eyed sixteen year olds in awe of the wonder of great music, seminal recording artists (many of whom they've now worked with) and the technology of music production in general...

DJP: It was one heck of a project, the original BEF 'Music of Quality and Distinction', an inclusive thing bringing together so many different artists but with a new sound...

MW: Yeah - we were so in love with technology at the time, there was a lot of things we used. We ordered so much kit in... It was about that time that Ian Craig Marsh bought the Fairlight. Forty grand he paid. Forty thousand quid!

DJP: I was going to say, it must have cost a bob or two!

MW: He just turned up and said, 'I've bought a Fairlight'! It wasn't very user friendly and the sound quality was appalling, but it looked great. Being the world's first sampler was amazing, being able to see the 3D waveform was really cool...

GG: But it didn't really work!

MW: I must admit when the Emulator E-mu ii synthesiser came out it, was a hundred times more useable, and 'only' cost £3,000. Ian was sick as a dog!

GG: Ian ended up using his Fairlight as a keyboard stand. Then he sold it; I think someone in New Order bought it.

DJP: But it was part of the birth of sampling. And the analogue synths of the day sounded so nice back then.

MW: Still do. Sadly I sold 'em all throughout the course of the eighties. We got rid of all sorts, Jupiter 4s, Jupiter 8s, and bought horrible clanking digital synths in an effort to keep up with times. Then it got to 1992 and I met Vince Clarke for the first time. He was always a fan of the early Human League, and claims that 'Being Boiled' got him into electronics, because before that he was a sort of 'happy clapper' Christian folk singer. And then one Christmas this stuff arrived, it was a bunch of boxes. And he'd found me an original boxed Roland System 100, and he'd bought it for me in an effort to get me to go back to make records like, back in the day.

GG: And, coming full circle, you have started using them again - and there's a lot of that on the new BEF album.

MW: The oscillators just sound incredible; there are outcomes which you get from using it which you'll never get from virtual synths. It was all in the drive for miniaturisation...

DJP: When the synth generation came, it was two fingers up to The Eagles, wasn't it?

GG: That's exactly what we were doing, wasn't it? Even before the Human League, when punk had smashed open the door for us, we realised we don't have to play guitar, we can do it with these synths...

MW: It wasn't as important to have a traditional musical skill, as it was to have a good ear and a sense of what sounds were appropriate for different sources.

DJP: It was almost like the year zero for this type of music.

GG: Well we were writing demos, and I remember it was a lovely day, and Ian was sat on the window sill of his flat. And he said, 'I've had an idea - I'm going to write a song about the Lord's Prayer. He was going on about a chord structure that never seemed to stop building, like sexual tension. And both me and him went, "Are you all right?"

MW: But the man had got it right! We were writing a lot using this Akai keyboard, that had a stepping chord facility. There was something about the appeal of this sort of random way of writing, it was really about multiple choice. And actually the funny thing is we wrote the entire 'Luxury Gap' album using this technique, and our publishers brought out the sheet music. And when you look at it, it was incredibly complex - some of those tracks are in the most bizarre keys, these weird inversions, seven flats, you know.

DJP: Really?

MW: Funnily enough making the first BEF album, 'Music of Quality and Distinction Vol. 1' was like a crash university study course in brilliant song structures; they were great songs but we didn't quite understand why we liked them so much. When you start deconstructing songs like 'It's Over', 'Anyone Who Had a Heart'... you know Jimmy Webb, Bacharach and David, it was like a crash course in how to keep people interested in a song. And often what appeared to be incredibly complex were very simple chord sequences, because some of the greatest songwriters were not very good keyboard players, like Bacharach for example. So this dichotomy between what appeared to be very elegant, like a swan floating on the lake but underneath it was something different going on entirely, that really appealed to us...

DJP: What are your favourite Heaven 17 tracks - 'Temptation'?

GG: Well, it's one of those things that just works...

MW: We've played that song for what must be a couple of hundred of times, and everybody gets it, always. But for us, the song that we're most proud of is 'Let Me Go'. Indeed we still loved the original so we reused the string part and made 'Best Kept Secret'.

DJP: 'Come Live with Me' has a certain Bacharach quality...

MW: Part of the excitement of doing Luxury Gap live for the first time ever, is it has to sound right, it has to sound epic, it has to sound like the best thing we ever did. And that's the reason we're doing in three dimensional sound... it's going to sound great.

GG: I tell you, The Luxury Gap, when it was at Air Studios which was in Oxford Circus, we had to order in extra air conditioning to keep the machines cool, because we'd got so many tape machines in the room. We were running three 24 track tape machines in sync, which took about 15 seconds to sync up, plus a couple of half inch machines, plus quarter inch machines with multiple loops going round the outside of the studio, choral loops which we mixed down to 128 tracks!

DJP: So if you dropped your fag on the floor, the whole of London would have gone up!

MW: It was technological insanity; we had towers of outboard gear, going up to the ceiling. We had every Dolby SR unit in London!

GG: We went mad on that album

MW: I think it cost £300,000 - like way over a million quid in today's terms. We really were highly motivated. We had that work ethic, maybe it's the Sheffield thing, but we weren't lounging around with a bunch of prostitutes...

GG: Tragically.

DJP: Did you get the sense that it was a special time in music?

GG: Oh yeah. Greg Walsh, the co-producer/engineer on that album was pushing the envelope constantly...

MW: He was trained by Geoff Emerick, a famous engineer who worked with the Beatles at Abbey Road, and with Rod Temperton, who wrote some of Michael Jackson's hits - all of those vocal harmonies he brought to us.

GG: We were doing 128 track backing vocals for 'Let Me Go'. We really went for it on that album.

MW: When it was finally mastered, we we so proud of that album. 'Penthouse and Pavement' was more like an experimental album, energy-fed, but with 'Luxury Gap', we were attempting to make a timeless album.

DJP: Arty eighties music journalists would have called it your 'magnus opus'!

MW: Oh yeah, and a lot of credit has to go to Virgin Records, because there was literally no agreed budget for that album. When we started working on 'Temptation' in the studio, and we thought it would be great to have a big orchestra, and we rang up the record company, the answer was 'When do you want it?', not 'how much does it cost?' It's a different world to now...

DJP: It was just at the time when you could do that...

MW: Yeah, it was a particular window of opportunity that you could exploit - and we did!

GG: To be honest, there was an awful lot of 'we're gonna f***ing show everybody out there that we're better than you - and can write better songs that are more melodic and more beautiful'. It's not like that anymore, but at the time, yes.

I sense that for Glenn and Martyn, feelings run deep. They're immensely proud of the Luxury Gap, and justifiably so, but the album itself wasn't the beginning and the end of the Heaven 17 project. They were really trying to do something new, at the time, which was to bring soul music to electronics (or vice versa). Whereas the likes of Kraftwerk and Phil Oakey's Human League (one of the biggest bands in the world, momentarily) were following a cleaner, colder and more clinical groove, Heaven 17 were working hard to fuse the warmth of soul with the clinical precision of electronics. That's what defined their sound, I put it to them...

GG: Oh yeah - we were listening to a lot of black dance music and northern soul.

MW: It was a burgeoning time, I mean come on, the Michael Jackson albums, Quincy Jones, Earth Wind and Fire, I mean, it was an incredible time! Even a lot of Norman Whitfield productions, it all had an influence on us, as well as disco. Gorgio Moroder...

GG: And the important thing about the Heaven 17 take on that, we also were equally in love with Bowie and Roxy (Music), and lyrically I guess we were more on the Bowie side, and musically on the funk side, so it was a lovely hybrid.

DJP: Disco was this amazing hybrid as well, wasn't it?

MW: I loved it... even to this day I recently heard some Hamilton Bohannon tracks, and Terry Callier, and that had an amazing influence on what we were trying to achieve. Some amazing players! The new generation of synthesisers and drum machines let you recreate that - but there were no rules! The micro coding in the bad of my mind was about timbre, it's like simple melody and timbre, rather than the technical skill of playing anything.

DJP: That's something I love about your albums, the timbre...

MW: Yeah - on 'Luxury Gap' we were doing a lot of composing on the Roland MC4 and MC8, and it's very mathematical - it was pure maths and it was beautiful. And you know the nature of Linn Drums is that they were super-accurate timing wise, much better than any modern computer-based system. I actually tested it on an oscilloscope at Vince Clarke's studio once... the Micro Composer was bang on and the Logic on the Mac was up to 12 milliseconds late. If they'd have made those early Kraftwerk albums on Logic, it wouldn't have the same solidity, sharpness, snappiness. That's what you get from a Linn drum, why 'Penthouse and Pavement' sounds pin-sharp.

DJP: It's very difficult to hear that album sounding right - you've got have good hi-fi equipment, and then it suddenly snaps into focus, otherwise it just sounds mushy...

GG: A good CD player can really make a difference to that album.

DJP: That's why I can't wait to hear 'The Luxury Gap' live - and BEF night. I see you've got Green Gartside [Scritti Politti] coming on the 15th...

MW: Yeah - he's a super-talented lad. He thinks about music in a different way. You're talking about timbre-based stuff, and he's the don. He actually thinks about things in multi-stave format. He creates these amazing contrapuntal constructions, and it's all in head - and that's Mozartian! With us it's like, chuck it to the wall and see if it sticks.

GG: When you work with him in the studio, you find he thinks about music in a completely different way - I really do think he's a genius.

MW: I think he's a great songwriter, really underestimated - I think when he goes he'll be appreciated after his death - on the level of Jimmy Web or somebody like that. Nobody sounded like Scritti at his peak... and oh what a voice! That's why I've always thought of him as a soul singer. When we did 'I Don't Know Why I Love You but I Love You' by Stevie Wonder with him for the second BEF album, I mixed his voice right up... a beautiful thing...

DJP: How's the planning going for BEF night?

MW: We've got so many guests, so from a logistical point of view, the BEF show is a problem because it takes so much time; you're relying on the good will of the artists, and you're dealing with a certain number of egos. Hopefully none of them are going to be divas, although Boy George is on! He's a mate, and we've always got on really well with him, though. Sandy Shaw can be edgy, but she's a fantastic woman and a great singer. There are no people who we don't get on with - I'm thinking it's going to be quite an emotional night, it's the joining of generations, hoping to expose the provenance of great pop music. The whole BEF concept is historically about trying to prove that electronic music can be emotional and affecting, without being a cliché.

For more details on the Heaven 17 and BEF live shows, see www.heaven17.com. For tickets, contact the box office on 0844 482 8008 or call the 24 hour ticket hotline on 0844 844 0444, or click on www.ticketmaster.co.uk. Day Tickets are £23.50, Weekend Tickets are £42.50.

Follow David Julian Price on Twitter: www.twitter.com/David_J_Price

2011-10-10T01:30:00.000-07:00

Wow, the BEF documentary on BBC 6 Music is now available - we're really proud of it It’s available to listen to online via BBC iPlayer here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b015yh3f/Music_of_Quality_and_Distinction_The_British_Electric_Foundation/

Busy, busy, busy...

2011-10-07T07:19:00.000-07:00

What a day!H17 appearance on Loose Women doing Temptation...The BEF boxed set samples arrive - beautifulhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015yh3f - BEF documentary on Saturday night on Radio 6and now rehearsal for the BEF and H17 gigs at the Roundhouse for 4 days!

New Radio Ditto iPhone app featuring Heaven 17's Music For...radio show

2011-09-28T09:58:00.000-07:00

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of the Radio ditto app, available now free at the iTunes store for iPhone and iPad. Use this link [ http://bit.ly/radiodittoAPP ] to download yours for free. Which means the show is now fully mobile. It also means that anyone who hears about the app through one of the other artist’s networks, automatically has access to our show too, offering you a whole new audience! To be honest we’re bouncing off the walls with excitement.

2manydjs support BEF at Roundhouse Oct 15th

2011-09-28T09:53:00.001-07:00

For immediate release, London, England B.E.F. have confirmed "2manydjs (DJ Set) - a special and unique 80s set" to their Music of Quality and Distinction night at the London Roundhouse on Saturday October 15th. Other guest vocalists performing at the B.E.F. Roundhouse concert include La Rouxs Elly Jackson, Kim Wilde, Boy George, Sandie Shaw, Glenn Gregory, Scritti Polittis Green Gartside, Midge Ure, Polly Scattergood, the Noisettes Shingai Shoniwa, and former Long Blondes singer Kate Jackson. B.E.F. will perform songs from their first two Music of Quality & Distinction albums, as well as songs from their upcoming third MQD album, Dark. On the previous night, Friday October 14th, the Roundhouse will see Heaven 17 perform the world premiere of their seminal 1983 album The Luxury Gap, for the first time, and in 3D sound. H17 will perform their iconic hit single Temptation plus other songs from the Luxury Gap, including Come Live With Me, Crushed By The Wheels of Industry and Let Me Go. Click here for additional info about the B.E.F. and Heaven 17 London Roundhouse concerts: http://www.noblepr.co.uk/Press_Releases/meanfiddler/heaven17-bef.htm Day tickets for The Luxury Gap concert in 3D sound on October 14th and B.E.F. presents Music of Quality & Distinction concert on October 15th are each priced £23.50. Weekend tickets for both nights are £42.50. 24 hour ticket hotline: 0844 844 0444. Book Online: www.ticketmaster.co.uk (direct link for tickets: http://bit.ly/npTMBH). For interview opportunities with Heaven 17 and B.E.F., review tickets and photo passes, please contact:Peter Noble and Will Taylor at Noble PR Consultancy0207 272 7772, peter@noblepr.co.uk, will@noblepr.co.uk.

Music For BEF radio show

2011-09-20T06:15:00.000-07:00

our latest 2 hour radio special Music for BEF is now available to listen to on www.ditto.tv/... it's funny, and it has some world-premiere work-in-progress mixes from the forthcoming BEF MQD album Dark!

Illustrious 3D soundscape at Brighton's White Night Festival

2011-09-16T03:04:00.000-07:00

SOUNDING BRIGHTONINNOVATIVE SONIC EXPERIMENTS AT BRIGHTON & HOVE’S WHITE NIGHTSOUNDING BRIGHTON, supported by the European funded COST Action, is a co-commission with the Noise Abatement Society for Brighton & Hove White Night. A series of sonic artworks, produced especially for the occasion, will challenge notions of sound in public spaces. The works will extend the Noise Abatement Society’s pioneering initiative, Sounding Brighton: they will provoke debate and initiate innovative explorations to help solve noise disturbance in urban environments. This project is part of White Night’s commitment to ‘new work’ and ‘new approaches’.The artists and experts who have been chosen for the White Night project all have a gift for public engagement and an accessible message/medium through which to communicate it. The work created for White Night will be of particular interest to sound artists, designers and acoustic ecologists – as well as the participating public.WEST STREET STORYa 3D outdoor soundscape installation, transforming the atmosphere and ambience in the heart of Brighton’s cacophonous clubbing areaThe installation is being created by Martyn Ware of The Illustrious Company. Martyn, a founder member of The Human League and Heaven 17, is a musician committed to helping the public understand positive soundscaping. Situated in part of West Street, in the heart of Brighton’s night life, his installation will consist of two rows of speakers creating a 3D soundscape, through which people can walk. Martyn will present a combination of both recorded and live sounds from a kiosk at the side of the street. His soundscapes will present a contrast to the raucous disharmony so frequently heard in lively areas at night, and will be designed to connect with visitors to the area and residents, as well as those exiting the clubs.

H17 and BEF news press release

2011-09-11T09:14:00.001-07:00

To dovetail Heaven 17s world premiere of The Luxury Gap album performed in its entirety in 3D sound at the London Roundhouse on Friday October 14th, and songs from B.E.F.s Music of Quality & Distinction albums the following night on Saturday October 15th, Heaven 17 have launched their own weekly radio series on Absolute 80s entitled Electronic 80s with Heaven 17. Click here for more info about the series - http://www.absoluteradio.co.uk/artists/Heaven-17/article/3975-Electronic+80s+with+Heaven+17 The hour long radio show will see Heaven 17 play the best of electronic 80s music from Kraftwerk, Human League to Scritti Politti and Blancmange. Each week the show will include a special guest. This weeks guest on the Sunday September 11th show is Kim Wilde, who, along with a number of other guest vocalists, will also participate in the B.E.F. presents Music of Quality & Distinction concerts at the London Roundhouse on October 15th. Other guest vocalists who will perform at the B.E.F. concert at the London Roundhouse concert on Saturday October 15th will include La Rouxs Elly Jackson, Sandie Shaw, Glenn Gregory, Scritti Polittis Green Gartside, Boy George, Midge Ure, Polly Scattergood, the Noisettes Shingai Shoniwa, plus Kate Jackson (former lead singer of The Long Blondes). B.E.F. will perform songs from their first two Music of Quality & Distinction albums, plus new songs their forthcoming third MQD album, Dark. Click here for more info about the London Roundhouse concerts http://www.noblepr.co.uk/Press_Releases/meanfiddler/heaven17-bef.htm Day tickets for The Luxury Gap concert in 3D sound on October 14th and B.E.F. presents Music of Quality & Distinction concert on October 15th are each priced £23.50. Weekend tickets for both nights is £42.50. 24 hour ticket hotline: 0844 844 0444. Book Online: www.ticketmaster.co.uk (direct link for tickets: http://bit.ly/npTMBH). For interview opportunities with Heaven 17 and B.E.F., review tickets and photo passes, please contact:Peter Noble and Will Taylor at Noble PR ConsultancyTel: 0207 272 7772, Email: peter@noblepr.co.uk, will@noblepr.co.uk.

2011-09-07T01:31:00.000-07:00

Absolute 80s have run this ticket promotion on their website today - http://www.absoluteradio.co.uk/artists/Heaven-17/article/3976-Win+tickets+to+see+Heaven+17+live! H17’s radio series is on the home page of Absolute Radio’s website - http://www.absoluteradio.co.uk/artists/Heaven-17/ Absolute Radio ticket page for H17 Roundhouse gigs - http://www.absoluteradio.co.uk/artists/Heaven-17/tickets/ Absolute 80s page on H17’s new radio series - http://www.absoluteradio.co.uk/artists/Heaven-17/article/3975-Electronic+80s+with+Heaven+17

my interview on Remember The Eighties

2011-09-01T11:26:00.001-07:00

http://www.remembertheeighties.com/index2.html

New scientist review of ReAnimate!

2011-08-12T02:45:00.000-07:00

Using technology to dance a life story

It wasn't your usual museum soundtrack of measured murmurs, heedful shuffling and controlled whispers. As dancer Hollie Miller grappled with the belt, tubes, collar and other gadgetry that together comprise the latest work from artist Di Mainstone, clanging, chiming, ringing reverberations erupted in a hallowed hall of London's National Portrait Gallery.

Inspired by a portrait of Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, last week's performance of Atmospheric Railway, was part of a show curated by musician and music producer Martyn Ware. To promote the gallery in the lead-up to the 2012 Olympics, artists had been invited in to find inspiration in the paintings, busts and other portraits on display. As a DJ played a steady thrum of head-bobbing beats and guests clinked cocktails in the atrium, the halls of the gallery - where British faces from Lord Randolph Churchill to a sleepy, sighing David Beckham looked on - were transformed into performance spaces.

Upstairs, in a high-ceilinged hallway, the works alternated between the sound installation It Is No Spirit Who From Heaven Hath Flown by Brian Duffy of Modified Toy Orchestra and Atmospheric Railway, a collaboration between Mainstone and digital musician Adam Stark. Stark runs a lab at the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London, where Mainstone is currently artist in residence. In previous works, Mainstone has collaborated to create instruments that rely on dancer's body movements and the surrounding space - playfully named the Serendiptichord and the Whimsichord.

Duffy's work - which filled the hall with ethereal whooshing sounds - was created using an Optophonic Lunaphone, an instrument of his own design. He used it to translate starlight captured by telescopes into sounds after finding inspiration in a portrait of the English astronomer Sir William Huggins, who helped expand our understanding of stars.

Mainstone and Stark's work charts the life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who has a somewhat more muddled legacy. "We wanted someone quirky, with a sort of dark, strange side," Mainstone says.

Brunel is credited with contributing to some of the great British engineering feats of his generation, but he is also known for a passionate folly - the Atmospheric Railway. A rail system powered by forced air, its reliability depended on an air-tight seal. In the mid-1800s, with ready access to rubber still in the distant future, Brunel and those who'd tried the technology before him were forced to rely on treated leather flaps to create this seal. "It did work," Mainstone says, but not consistently. The trouble: the leather was prone to dry out and crack, and the treatment they used to prevent this attracted nibbling rats.

In the performance, the dancer enters the stage and examines an old, beaten-up travelling trunk. Within, she discovers a box of silver balls, which in the course of the performance she ushers through tubes and sometimes spills out onto the floor. These, Mainstone says, represent the lifeblood of Brunel. Microphones at the edge of the space pick up each ping and chime. "We analyse the frequency spectrum of sound for sharp changes," Stark explains, and when the microphone picks them up, they are played back in 10-second loops. The repetitive sounds mimic the chugging, whirring workings of a locomotive. "It was built around the idea of the click and clack of the train, the whooshing as it goes by," Stark says.

In addition to tubes that sprout off of a belt she's wearing, Miller grapples with a large, green, almost heart-shaped instrument that amplifies the sound of pinging silver balls. The device, which she alternately wears as a collar and balances over her knee, has a clear tube marked with lines. As the performance proceeds, more and more of the silver balls clink into this chamber, representing the passing years of Brunel's life.

The performance swings from quietly curious, as Miller inspects the silver orbs, to wildly frenetic, as she seems to be propelled about the space outside her own control. When she attaches a new piece to the belt she's wearing - a blue-tooth enabled addition the looks like a flat mushroom - the sounds in the space begin to warble and warp, as her movement indicates which of Stark's filters they are processed through. "In a way there's a dialogue between her generating sounds and being a prisoner of them as well," Stark explains.

As it draws to a close, the performance takes on a nearly manic character and the dancer staggers about in seeming disbelief. Toward the end of his career Brunel successfully transformed the South Devon Railway into a forced-air system, but after so much trouble with the faulty seals, the venture was short-lived. Only two years after service began, he was forced to admit failure. "He'd gone through so much success, but then he had these failures before the end of his life," Mainstone says.

Before curling up to conclude the performance, Miller finally upends the heart-shaped instrument over the trunk. While the buzz of a party carries on downstairs, the normally quiet hallway is filled with the clamour of the collected silver balls spilling away.

2011-08-05T04:56:00.000-07:00

Tonight’s Late Shift Extra offers an evening of sensory stimulation exploring the body, movement and the senses: inspired
by the Road to 2012 exhibition. For more information about the Road to 2012 project visit www.npg.org.uk/roadto2012
ReAnimate is curated by Martyn Ware, Illustrious and Karen Pearson, Folded Wing.
Please note, Floors 1 and 2 close at 20.50, Floor 0 is open until 21.50
To find out more about Late Shift visit www.npg.org.uk/lateshift join our enewsletter or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
Next Late Shift Extra: Friday 7 October 2011
ReAnimate Friday 5 AUGUST 2011
18.00 – 21.50
Soundscapes Listen to a series of specially commissioned
sonic soundscapes inspired by the Collection.
18.00 – 20.50
MIRA CALIX: I DESIRE NO COMMENDATION
Room 2
Taking inspiration from the portrait of Catherine Parr, Calix’s piece, sung by
Sarah Lucas, features lyrics inspired by letters written by Parr to Henry VIII .
18.00 – 20.50
MARVIN AYRES: ANTHROPOMORPHIC
Room 2
Ayres draws on the history of the feuding relationships n the portraits and
re-animates these connections with the sound of a distant, echoing piano.
18.00 – 20.50
BRIAN DUFFY: IT IS NO SPIRIT WHO
FROM HEAVEN HATH FLOWN
Room 22
Duffy’s installation was recorded using the Optophonic Lunaphone, an
instrument of his own invention, and is inspired by the portrait of astronomer
Sir William Huggins.
18.00 – 21.50
MARTYN WARE: I DRAW WHAT I FEEL IN MY BODY
Room 33
Inspired by Only Connect, an experimental display, Ware has taken quotes
from the sitters to create a conversation played alongside his own musical
interpretations of selected composers’ most famous works.
18.00 – 21.50
TRACEY MOBERLY: TEXT-ME-UP-SCAPE
Room 38
Artist Moberly has saved every single text she has ever received since 1999.
Taking inspiration from the portraits in Room 38, she identifies texts from her
archive to create an aural narrative representing the Gallery’s Collection.
18.00 – 21.50
DJs
Main Hall
Inspired by art, invention and thought, listen to an eclectic range of
music from both up-and-coming and established DJs, with a special set
from Illum Sphere at 20.30.
Performances Enjoy live performances from some of the
country’s most cutting-edge artists.
18.30 – 18.50 19.15 – 19.45 20.00 – 20.30
Marvin Ayres An dreya Triana Ben Westb eech
All Room 20
18.20, 18.50, 19.20, 19.50
DI MAINSTONE: THE ATMOSPHERIC RAILWAY
Room 22
Inspired by Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Atmospheric Railway, Di Mainstone
and Adam Stark present their unique wearable instrument in a series of
special 10 minute performances by dancer Holly Miller.
Film
18.00 – 21.50
COUNTO12
Main Hall
Goldsmiths students Yujin Yun, Christina Katsantoni and Ewa Balazinska
photographed over 500 people in the five Olympic host boroughs.
Using these portraits of East London they have created a digital clock
projected in the Main Hall.
18.15 – 19.30 & 21.00 – 21.45
UNDER YOUR SKIN
Ondaatje Wing Theatre
Goldsmiths students Yuval Gerstein and Cristina Picchi filmed London-based
athletes during three different moments of training – preparation, participation
and rest, watch them here, played with unique binaural recordings
Ta ke Par t
18.30 – 19.15 & 19.45 – 20.30
DROP-IN DRAWING SESSION
Room 12
Practice your drawing skills in one of our drop-in sessions, led by a professional
artist. All materials provided. Tickets released at 18.00*
19.00
PHILOSOPHY SALON: SOUND THINKING AND BODIES
Studio Gallery
Artist, filmmaker and academic Julian Henriques (Goldsmiths, University of
London) leads a discussion on thinkers, scientists and sports personalities in
the Collection. Ticket required, please ask at the Information Desk
19.30
BOOK READING: TEXT ME UP!
Bookshop
Hear Tracey Moberly read extracts from her new book, Text Me Up! and buy
your very own signed copy.
20.00
PANEL DISCUSSION: THE SENSES
Ondaatje Wing Theatre
Brian Duffy, Sissel Tolaas and Mira Calix discuss the inspiration behind their
work in this panel discussion, hosted by Martyn Ware. Ticket required,
please ask at the Information Desk.
20.00
EXHIBITION TOUR: ROAD TO 2012
Meet in the Main Hall
Anne Braybon, Photographic Commissions Manager, gives a personal tour of
Road to 2012. Tickets released at 18.00*
Look out for perfume staff in the Main Hall to smell the bespoke ReAnimate
perfume, created especially for tonight by Scent Artist Sissel Tolaas – what
does Late Shift smell like?.
Relax at the Late Shift Bar with our special ReAnimate Cocktail, plus don’t
miss 2 for 1 drinks with your Glamour of the Gods ticket.
* All events are free but a ticket is required and is available from the Information
Desk in the Main Hall from 18.00 on a first come, first served basis.
With thanks to Bowers & Wilkins, Goldsmiths, University of London and BFI
All events are free

Today's The Day for ReAnimate! and it's free

2011-08-05T02:44:00.001-07:00

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY TO BE FIRST MUSEUM TO CREATE A FIVE-SENSE VISITOR EXPERIENCE …FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY

ReAnimate

Curated by Martyn Ware, Illustrious and Karen Pearson, Folded Wing
Late Shift Extra: National Portrait Gallery Friday 5 August 2011, 6-10pm

Late Shift, in partnership with FTI Consulting

For one night only the National Portrait Gallery will become the first museum to offer a total sensory visitor experience where people can listen to sonic landscapes and DJ sets, see exhibitions and films, taste cocktails and even be intoxicated by a specially created perfume. The event is set to be one of the most far-reaching explorations of the power of the senses.

On Friday 5 August, as part of the Gallery’s programme of late openings, Late Shift, in partnership with FTI Consulting, ReAnimate will be a night to indulge the senses. Exploring body and movement, the evening is inspired by the Gallery’s recently-opened Road to 2012: Changing Pace exhibition of portraits of Olympic and Paralympic participants.

Curated in partnership with Martyn Ware, Illustrious and Karen Pearson, Folded Wing, ReAnimate will offer sonic soundscapes, an artist’s panel discussion, an exclusive DJ set from Illum Sphere and a Philosophy Salon on the subject of Sound Thinking and Bodies led by film-maker Julian Henriques.

There will be live performances by Andreya Triana, a self-taught, experimental singer/songwriter, Ben Westbeech, a DJ, singer and producer and Marvin Ayres, a British composer/cellist/pianist/producer who, has released minimalist and modern classical orchestral music for both himself and other recording artists. A founding member of The Government, Marvin also made solo contributions to many bands and artist’s albums, notably, Culture Club, Simply Red, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Prefab Sprout.

Responding to the themes of ‘Art, Invention and Thought’, Illum Sphere’s soundscape for the evening attempts to reflect the work of such sitters in Gallery portraits as Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Brunel and Stephenson. Inspired by the Gallery’s portrait of Catherine Parr, Mira Calix’s piece features lyrics inspired by letters written by Parr to Henry VIII whilst he was in France. Marvin Ayres’s Anthromorphic draws on the history of the feuding relationships represented within Gallery portraits and re-animates these connections with the sound of a distant, echoing piano.

As a counterpoint to Only Connect, an experimental new Gallery display, Martyn Ware has taken quotes from the sitters to create a conversation played alongside his own musical interpretations of selected composers’ most famous works.

Brian Duffy’s installation It is no spirit who from Heaven has flown was recorded using the Optophonic Lunaphone, an instrument of his own invention, and is inspired by the portrait of astronomer Sir William Huggins.

Artist Tracey Moberly has saved every single text she has ever received since 1999. Taking inspiration from Gallery portraits, she identifies texts from her archive to create an aural narrative representing the Gallery’s Collection.

An experimental performance from Di Mainstone and Adam Stark will create The Atmospheric Railway. Inspired by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, it is a unique wearable instrument in a series of special 10-minute performances by dancer Holly Miller.

Goldsmiths students have photographed over 500 people in the five Olympic host boroughs to create a digital clock projected in the Main Hall which will be available to download as a screensaver, www.npg.org.uk/roadto2012 Visitors can also experience the students’ filmed portraits of London-based athletes during three very different moments of training – preparation, participation and rest – and which also include the internal sounds of the body during training.

The sensory experience extends beyond films, talks and performances as a reanimate perfume created especially for Late Shift by scent artist Sissel Tolaas will fill the Gallery’s spaces with extraordinary fragrances. Visitors will be able to taste specially-created ReAnimate cocktails in a two-for-one drinks offer at Late Shift bar with tickets bought for the Gallery’s current exhibition Glamour of the Gods. And there are drop-in drawing sessions led by a professional artist. All events are free but tickets are required for some activities. Please visit the website for more information at www.npg.org.uk/lateshift

Folded Wing are also producing a podcast which will go live after the event and will feature interviews with performing artists and will include the soundscapes also at www.npg.org.uk/lateshift

ReAnimate is the sixth Late Shift Extra since the launch of the National Portrait Gallery’s Late Shift programme of late night openings at the Gallery last year. The Late Shift runs every week from 6pm-9pm on Thursday and Friday nights. Thanks to the support of FTI Consulting, this is the first time the Gallery has been able to present such an ambitious late-opening events programme.

Erin O’Connor, who launched Late Shift says: ‘Late Shift is a brilliant way to encourage people to explore the arts in the evening. Every Thursday and Friday visitors can enjoy free talks and music and a great atmosphere over a glass of wine - as well as brilliant exhibitions and regularly changing displays. The Gallery’s central location makes it perfect for evening and after-work audiences who might not normally be able to enjoy everything the Gallery has to offer.’

Jack Dunn, president and chief executive officer, FTI Consulting, says: ‘Since we launched the Late Shift in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery in May 2010 we have been proud to play our part in unlocking art and culture for new and increasingly diverse audiences. The success enjoyed by the Late Shift has provided the platform from which we are able to host exciting new projects such as ReAnimate’.

For further press information, please contact: Neil Evans, Press Office, National Portrait Gallery: Tel. 020 7312 2452 (not for publication) / Email nevans@npg.org.uk

For further information on FTI Consulting, please contact: Sebastian Mathews, Vice President FD Corporate: Tel. 020 7979 7453 or 020 7269 7158

• National Portrait Gallery St Martin’s Place WC2H 0HE opening hours: Saturday-Wednesday 10am – 6pm Late Opening: Thursdays and Fridays until 9pm Recorded information: 020 7312 2463 General information: 020 7306 0055 Admission is free.
• Website: www.npg.org.uk

NOTES TO EDITORS

The National Portrait Gallery in London was founded in 1856 and houses the finest collection of portraits in the world. The Gallery aims to promote the appreciation and understanding of portraiture in all media, offering a unique and enthralling insight into the men and women who have shaped British history and culture from the Middle Ages to the present day.

FTI Consulting, Inc. is a global business advisory firm dedicated to helping organizations protect and enhance enterprise value in an increasingly complex legal, regulatory and economic environment. With more than 3,700 employees located in 22 countries, FTI Consulting professionals work closely with clients to anticipate, illuminate and overcome complex business challenges in areas such as investigations, litigation, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory issues, reputation management and restructuring. The company generated $1.4 billion in revenues during fiscal year 2010. More information can be found at www.fticonsulting.com

Late Shift, sponsored by FTI Consulting
Thursday’s weekly Late Shift includes a rich programme of talks, panel discussions, exhibition tours and in-conversation events.
Friday’s weekly Late Shift includes free concerts in the Gallery of contemporary, world, jazz and classical music. Visitors can participate in free drop-in drawing workshops amongst the art works in the Gallery. On Thursdays and Fridays visitors are able to enjoy a cash bar, cocktails and dinner in the Gallery’s skyline restaurant with panoramic views over Trafalgar Square.

Martyn Ware and Illustrious
A founder member of both The Human League and Heaven 17, Martyn is one of the leading figures in electronic music. As record producer and artist has featured on recordings totaling over 50 million sales worldwide during a 27 year career to date, working with Tina Turner, Terence Trent D’Arby, Chaka Khan, Erasure, Marc Almond and Mavis Staples.

Martyn founded Illustrious Company with Vince Clarke in 2001 to exploit the creative and commercial possibilities of their unique ‘Heightened Reality’ three-dimensional sound technology and bespoke musical composition in collaboration with fine artists, the performing arts and corporate clients around the world who include The Science Museum, London, The Royal Ballet, and collaborations with the artists Cathy De Monchaux, Tim Head, Gary Stevens, David Bickerstaff and Philip Tsiaras (at the 2003 Venice Biennale).

Recently Martyn was part of the collective representing Britain at the Venice Architectural Biennale in 2006. Echo City, developed under the leadership of Jeremy Till, Director of Architecture at the University of Sheffield, is an "urban register" describing Sheffield at a variety of scales from 1:1 to 1:10 million and Martyn’s soundscape, with visuals by Malcolm Garrett, projected Sheffield's relationship with the world at large.

He also lectures extensively on music production, technology, creativity and soundscape composition at universities and colleges across the UK and Europe.

Karen Pearson and Folded Wing
Karen Pearson is passionate about music and radio, and finding new ways to combine the two. Thats why she founded Folded Wing, and why its now recognized as one of the most innovative and forward-thinking production companies in the world.
Her radio career began 16 years ago at the BBC where she produced Gilles Petersons legendary Worldwide show, helping it to become a globally respected and commercially successful brand.

In 2005, she left to set up the company which became Folded Wing quickly establishing herself as an authority on podcasts and alternative audio broadcasting. Her clients included Red Bull Music Academy Radio and Roundhouse Radio, and audio projects for international clients such as Nike and Fabric. Along the way, Folded Wing picked up a Gold Sony Award for the Book Slam podcast, a remarkable achievement for such a young company.

In 2010, Folded Wing launched the Jamie Cullum show on Radio 2. The networks flagship jazz show, it showcases Jamies passion for old and new jazz, and for introducing new fans to the music he loves.

In June 2011, Folded Wing won 5 awards in one week, most notably 'Indie Of The Year' in the Radio Production Awards.

In addition to running the company and generating new business, Karen remains hands-on as senior producer of the Jamie Cullum show, and oversees the high production values and innovative soundscaping for which Folded Wing has become known.
A respected DJ in her own right, Karen continues to perform at venues around the UK and internationally, and promote the successful Broad Casting club nights, featuring unique performances and collaborations with artists from around the world.
http://www.foldedwing.co.uk

Summation if my speech at the European Parliament last week re artist copyright issues

2011-07-01T04:59:00.001-07:00

Martyn Ware, an internationally successful British musician and producer, followed up on Konrad’s presentation with a pragmatic analysis of the current state of copyright. He reinforced Konrad’s point about the innovation process and noted that copyright has not been able to keep up with the technology which has made digital sampling and remixing an essential part of the creative process. Martyn reminded the participants that the fundamental purpose of copyright was to enable creativity. However, he noted, we have gotten ourselves into a situation whereby copyright is perceived by many as a barrier to creation. According to Martyn, what we need is a global clearing house and rights management database, in addition to international copyright reform and harmonization. Martyn reinforced the importance of access to music for educational institutions on preferential terms - ideally, that accredited institutions should not have to pay for non-commercial uses of works as part of the education process.
In a follow-up on Martyn’s point about online file sharing, one of the participants noted that in the Netherlands, artists recently formed a coalition with consumers to speak out against the criminalization of their audience.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Transcription of an interview from 2008

2011-06-19T10:16:00.000-07:00

Interview with Martyn Ware – 2/5/08

IW: Great, well, as you know, I’m interested in multimedia and live performance and what people are doing with it - and part of my project is trying to see if there is any sort of generic functionality which people from widely different disciplines, and different sorts of work within those disciplines, if there’s any thing we can identify that we can put together in a system that actually means you don’t have to start right from ground zero all the time, but just to promote people by giving them an available, open-source that everyone can experiment with and then do the ‘special bits’ that they want to do on top of that.

MW: Great.

IW: And I’m particularly interested in talking to you because you’ve worked in music for quite a long time and I know that you’ve become very interested in working with multimedia as well in various ways.

MW: Well I actually work with multimedia all the time now, it’s so integrated it’s not even like a [bolt-on?].

IW: That’s right.
(coffee is served)

MW: Sound effects of coffee!

IW: Yes, this is the coffee by the way.

MW: Thank you so much.

IW: Thanks very much. Ah, so that’s why I’d like to interview you, because of your knowledge of the field and I suppose the first thing I’d just like to do is maybe if you could just briefly describe your practice for me?

MW: OK. Well I’ve got a company called ‘Illustrious Company’ which I formed with Vince Clark 8 years ago now, to exploit a 3 dimensional surround sound system that we helped to develop called 3d Audioscape which now runs on a Mac Intel, any Mac Intel machine. There are 2 key elements to the company; one is content creation and one is the technical aspects of it. So, for instance, we do a lot of stuff that’s not necessarily concerned with 3D sound, for instance we might do some stuff that’s just pure stereo content for various things or 5.1, 7.1, also we might just do 3 dimensional production that doesn’t rely on our providing the content or, what is more normal, is that we do both. In addition to that, we do a lot of work combined with other media and other practitioners. It’s a big passion of mine, kind of a big stealth agenda, sounds quite grand but…, to promote convergent practice. It’s funny because coming from a band, right from the start of my creative career I’ve always worked in a collaborative framework. I don’t know if that’s insecurity or what, but for me it works very well and when I first made a conscious decision to move into this new world round about 8 years ago, I was…

One of the things that impressed me about this world is that there is an awful lot of people doing fantastic work, but an awful lot of them are doing it on their own and a lot of the time they’re reinventing the wheel. [4’02”] And these new emergent technologies, a lot of them, are becoming ubiquitous faster than we can cope, in fact a lot of the time now, I feel the technology is in advance of peoples’ comprehension of how to integrate it into their lives or (a) use for it anyway. So it seemed an obvious thing to use my love of collaboration to try and bring together different, and my production skills as a record producer and 25 years’ experience there, to help to bring together people in this field. And thereby creating new, interesting and otherwise unobtainable forms of practice.

To that end, about 5 years ago I was a member of the BAFTA interactive committee, dealing with all things interactive; at that time games was included, mobile technology, interactive art forms, anything concerned with the moving image that was digital fundamentally. I was asked, as a member of the committee, to create an event; everybody was invited to create an event that kind of related to their specialist area. And I thought what would be great would be to get a bunch of practitioners together and see what they would make out of our 3 dimensional sound system in a kind of theatrical environment. So, part lecture, part entertainment, part futurology. This was called ‘Future of Sound’ which is now a well-established thread that I continue to develop. We’re on our 16th show now, tomorrow in Manchester at Futursonic and we’re going to be doing a lot more later this year. And that was really a kind of, if you like, a real-world effort to show people the sort of astonishing technologies generally, not just in sound. Interactive and immersive technologies. To show the general public, this is very important as far as I’m concerned, another key element of my mission, if you like, is to make it as populist as possible, to demystify it.

IW: You’re not interested in technology as magic?

MW: Well I’m not, because I’ve just worked in that field for ever. I’m only really interested in what it can do, I’m not interested in coding; I’m not particularly interested in how it works, I’m interested in the end result. Purely because I’m not really of that mind. Thank god there are people that are like yourself!

IW: Or like Nick.

MW: Or like Nick Rothwell, yes, and where would we be without them? But I think people like myself and presumably yourself as well and many many other people I know find it very difficult to keep on top of what’s out there and what’s being developed at any given time. So if we can create a kind of, if you like, a focal point for all this stuff I think it’s an extremely valuable thing. And it’s entertaining! Because I come from show biz. And also it saves me from sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours a day, every day of my life, which is what music composition has turned into!

IW: Yes, well I remember as a, inverted commas, ‘classical music’ composer, it’s sitting in front of a piece of paper for 8 hours a day.

MW: Yes, my personal preference and strength is for human contact and I love sitting in a room and vibing with people and coming up with something that you otherwise would not have come up with.

IW: Yes, absolutely. No, that sort of surprising and being pushed by other people creating.

MW: And there is a sort of larger philosophical issue as far as I’m concerned which is the way the art world and the art market has developed in the 20th century, particularly the late 20th century, is very much about the aggrandisement of the individual artist because it’s a commodity, it’s a brand. And I am anti-brand fundamentally hence it’s not like Martyn Ware Incorporated, it’s an abstraction; I believe that the future of artistic enterprise is collaborative. [8’44”]

IW: No, I think you’re right. There’s people like Pierre Levy and people like that who’ve said that the nature of digital technology means that collaboration is foregrounded and [pushing that?] is the collaborative intelligence stuff he talks about.

MW: Well I’ve done this by default for years so…

IW: Well I think his point is that actually we’re all doing it and part of the reason we’re doing it is the nature of the tools we’re using now which actually are silently in the background pushing us all to collaborate.

MW: There’s also a very important development over the last 15 or 20 years which is the open source movement. So this is as much a philosophical concept as it is a practical way of distributing work and I’m very keen on the open source concept.

IW: Do you use very much open source material or resources yourself?

MW: I don’t but the people I collaborate with do, primarily because I’ve always worked on the top-end professional platforms for musical composition so I’m not going to go back to something that’s like half the functionality.

IW: but you know there’s an open source alternative to Pro-Tools now?

MW: Yes, I don’t use Pro-Tools, I use Logic, although it pains me because Apple are becoming more prescriptive as they get older, it is a very good piece of software. So in terms of collaboration and integration with other technologies, we do use some open source software and also the end results that we create, apart from where we’re doing commercial work, obviously we have to charge for bespoke compositions and we’ve got to make a living, but I’m very keen to expose the workings and expose the guts of the creative process because I think it will lead to further interesting work and lead to further collaboration. And this has proved to be the case, I mean although Future of Sound, the series, doesn’t even break even, it costs me a little bit of money for every show, it’s worth it in terms of the interest it generates, the amount of PR, but also the amount of your life work it generates. And also it acts as a conduit for all the other contributors. I think there are about 6 or 7 15 minute slots per event and it acts as a kind of gathering point for like-minded people.

And many many projects have emerged from Future of Sound which have nothing to do with me which is great. And there are people, you’ve been to a Future of Sound event.

IW: Yes I have.

MW: We probably wouldn’t be sitting here if it wasn’t for the Future of Sound show. The thing is, in a nascent kind of world like immersive sound in particular, doing this as a kind of, ‘oh this is magic, I'm not going to show you how it’s working’, you know, ‘it’s quite difficult to contact us and you’ll be very privileged if we work with you’ is just simply not going to work.

IW: No, no I think that’s right. I think there’s an interesting sort of movement isn’t there in the distance and the communication distance between performers and creators and audiences or consumers, that’s all changing.

MW: I find all that very interesting because whilst it can all be dismissed under the heading of ‘geek’, I think it’s very poor shorthand for a world that’s very valuable to a lot of different areas because, as you quite rightly identify, it’s changing the philosophical nature of how people communicate. I mean, even the non geekiest people who own a computer, they’ve got a Facebook site.

IW: Absolutely, I was thinking of (how) the artist in the Ivory Tower now has a Facebook site!

MW: That’s right! [12’46”] and this kind of playfulness I think is very useful, also it takes a lot of, if you like, the kind of scariness out of inter communication. A very funny story I must just tell you briefly.

IW: Yes, go on.

MW: A friend of mine who I met, I did a talk at the Harvard School for Design, or whatever it’s called, any at the Harvard Architectural School for Design, about immersive architecture. There were a bunch of people there, didn’t know most of them well, but I suspected some of them were quite high ranking, anyway, this guy who’s done loads of eco-sustainable projects, really nice American guy sent me an email the other day saying, ‘would you be my Facebook friend?’ I said, ‘yes, of course, I like what you’re doing, it’s great’. I’m not one of those people who just Facebook for a laugh, I mean I’ve actually got several interesting things out of it, and so as soon as I signed up he said, ‘I think you’ll find my, the people on my facebook, there’s some very interesting names’. And another one of my collaborators, Alex McDowell, who’s a production designer in Hollywood thought there could be some famous people, could be quite interesting. So I looked down his list, it’s like, Johnny Depp and tom Cruise, and I’m going, ‘this is wild’ and then actually I fell for it didn’t I, because they’re not actually real, but they’ve got the real photo there. And it looks real and I thought because my friend Alex actually knows them, therefore there’s a good chance that it might be real. In fact, it might be real, I don’t know, but it seems unlikely. So [?] this is a very strange concept, so there’s a whole kind of cloning of famous people going on. Anyway, not really [relative?], but I thought it was funny.

IW: No, it is funny

MW: But the interesting thing is that when people look at my friends they go, ‘hmm, Johnny Depp, hmmm’ – doesn’t matter if it’s real or not! Anyway, moving on…

IW: [laughs] Yes, my daughter, who was 6 at the time or something, I think it was a sort of Japanese little site where you could have pets and things and I was just watching what she was doing, and she said she was 10, and I said ‘you’re not 10, you’re 6’ and she said to me, ‘yes but on the Internet, it doesn’t matter, nobody knows’.

MW: That’s the worrying thing.

IW: Well no, because she was quite aware of it and she wasn’t fazed by it, she just said you don’t need to get so hung up about that, it doesn’t matter.

MW: The blurring of reality and fantasy is getting more extreme.

IW: Yes, that’s right, but also the nature of, what we may think of as very important about identifying a particular personality becomes… there’s a different set of things..

MW: Identity and alterity is the phrase. It’s actually the theme for an event in Venice, the art Biennale a few years ago. Yes, I find it all a bit freaky, I mean the first time I went on Second Life, freaked me out completely. I’ve never been back since.

IW: Have you not? Well, I’ve got an avatar…

MW: I've got an avatar

IW: just can’t get rid of my beard!

MW: [laughs]

IW: but it is interesting isn’t it? It’s not quite realised yet, technology isn’t quite delivering it, but I must say I was surprised when I went into Second Life at how immersive I felt it was. I expected to be very under-whelmed, I must say.

MW: Well, interestingly enough, we’re doing some research with the serious games institute in the University of Coventry at the moment. They bought 4 of our 3 dimensional sound systems, so they’re going to be doing a lot of experimental work with other practitioners and we did a demonstration of linking 3 dimensional sound to an avatar in Second Life. So if he’s walking across a gravel path, you can hear the same movement in the room. And so we’re going to develop this process for multiple avatars. We’re working on that at the moment. I think it’s a bit clunky at the moment, and actually Linden labs have been working on that for 15 years, so it’s not a surprise it’s not developed as much. There are new virtual worlds that have been developed that are much better quality and it’s now being used for training purposes. Not just conferences, but actual training. I sat in on a session recently where there was a simulated terrorist attack, in Stamford, in America. The weird thing was there was one location which was a simulation of the real conference which was going on in Seattle, then there were mental practitioners from all around the world who had their avatars dealing with these casualties which were coming in on a virtual helicopter, which we were invited to watch and rush into the operating theatre to watch these people being operated on. All, I’m going this is just too wild for me. And then afterwards you get invited to another location to discuss it. My first question was, ‘is it useful?’ Cos it looked like a fantastic game, and the overwhelming response from all the, and these are doctors, they said it’s at least as useful as doing the simulations in the real world with actors. And it has other benefits as well, of course, because they don’t have to travel to the same place to do it. [18’03”]

IW: Right, well, let’s move on. So what I’ve got, I’ve tried tor think about the sorts of things you can do with multimedia and I’ve sort of come up with, at the moment, nine starting points for discussion. And they’re not fixed and they’re not necessarily exclusive so the same sort of thing could definitely appear in lots of different places and you may well think of things that I haven’t thought of, in which case just raise them.

MW: OK

IW: What we’ll do is that I’ll take you through them and some you’ll say, ‘yes I’ve done that’ and others you’ll say, ‘no, no’ – and we’ll just move straight on. The idea is that we can sort of focus on the things that you use which are important to you.

So the first one we have here [they look at diagram] is Gathering input from performers and users, and the sorts of things you might want to do with this, you know; audience participation, speech control, interactive narrative choices. And the sorts of technologies you might use, you know; mobile phone input – as you can see. So I’ve divided things up into this sort of ‘what sort of things you might want to be doing’ and the sorts of technologies you might want to use [to do?] it, but obviously it’s not exhaustive and in a couple you’ll see biro notes where people have suggested other things. So have you used any digital technology to collect information or input from users?

MW: Yes, we have, [reads suggestions] audience participation, speech control, interactive narrative choices, gestural control. Actually we have within The Future of Sound used, Jason Bruges, one of our collaborators, was using an infra-red camera to analyse movement, audience movement, and then play back various elements, in this case a nursery rhyme and encouraging them to do a Mexican Wave to play the lines in order. And so, yes, um, gestural control…

IW: I remember seeing a mind control…

MW: Oh the mind control, yes, I mean Luciana Haill is another Future of Sound artist and we’ve created a palette of sounds, she’s started using her own palette of sounds now which isn’t as good, but originally we created a palette of sounds that would be triggered according to alpha, beta and theta waves.

IW: Yes, I remember…

MW: That she generated live on the fly. And originally, it was in 3D. She’s gone off on her own course now but it’s still very entertaining. So yes, um, speech control, not so much; interactive narrative choices, we did a project called ‘The Dark’ which was a 15 minute narrative in 3 dimensional sound in total darkness for 12 people at a time, walking around a space about 12 metres square by about 4 metres high. And the original intention of that, this was about 5 years ago, it was with a company of a friend of mine, Terry Braun, Braunarts. The original intention was that there were going to be 4 different narratives going off in the corner of the room with an overarching piece of sound design linking it all together. In this case, it was about a slave ship and about an epiphanal moment for one of the lieutenants who saw the ‘bad stock’ in inverted comments being thrown over the side because they’d got glaucoma in fear they’d infect the rest of the stock. And he went on to become one of the leading campaigners, anti-slavery campaigners, 1760 or something. And the original intention was that as you went towards the individual stories at the corners of the room, there was the Cabin Boy’s story, the Captain’s story, the Lieutenant’s story, the main character and the Slave’s story and the original intention was that as you, there was going to be proximity sensors at the corner of the room so as a person approached it, that particular story would get louder. So it’s like putting a magnifying glass, right?

IW: Nice.

MW: Very simple idea, unfortunately, they couldn’t get the programming together in time, but that is entirely feasible.

IW: Yes absolutely.

MW: Position or movement sensors; we’ve been working for a while, a project that was part-funded by the Arts Council with a blind dancer called June Bretherton, we’d been doing research into trying to find an appropriate sensor that could be attached to a ballet dancer for instance, I’ve done three projects with the Royal Ballet, you’d be amazed how difficult this is, or probably not.

IW: No I wouldn’t be amazed. I have to say that everybody that I’ve ever talked to, that’s dealt with movement has said, you know, ‘God, if only you could find out where a particular performer is on the stage and what they’re doing, it would be fantastic’.

MW: Yes, well we’re still working on this and, as you probably know, problems are line-of-sight with triangulation and you have to… It is possible to do, but it’s a bit clunky at the moment.

IW: So what sensors were you using?

MW: Well, the things we experimented on, we were actually getting one purpose built and the guys just gave up on it in the end. The problem is, you can use radio transmission, you can use RFID, you can use Bluetooth, you can use sonic beam, ultrasound, but delineating between different performers on the stage is the problem because one performer interrupts the beam of another one, plus certain of the technologies cost an absolute arm and a leg like the Ultrasound technology. It’s just not, we’re not there yet. Of course you can do things like Mo-Cap which is very, very expensive, but again not ideal, you want something that is transparent, simple. So we’re still working on all this.

Interaction, in terms of what we’re doing at the moment, we are working on an integrated system which I was telling you about the other day for the Threeways Special needs school in Bath, where we are looking to use as many different types of input as possible, sensor input as possible, to create potentially large effects from tiny inputs. Some of the unfortunate children couldn’t barely move, a lot of them can of course but can’t control their movements for instance, so you have different aspects of sensors (so) that some need an enormous amount of pressure on a pressure-pad or giant movements to make the them work, some just need retinal scanning for instance where you just look into them and look at something.

Mobile phone input; sorry, getting back to the Threeways school, we’re using a lot of these different technologies, that’s being mediated by a central server and then we’ve got a kind of digital matrix which allows us to patch, you know, inputs to outputs fundamentally, so we can control lighting, speed of effects, er digital animation on the screen in front of them, lighting effects, we’re going to be installing RFID technology so each of the pupils has their own identity on the central server and their own favourite colours etc. photos, whatever can be triggered automatically once they enter the room.

Midi keyboard we use all the time, of course! So this is a very broad question…

IW: Well it is…

MW: So we would use a lot of different kinds of sensors to achieve… I mean, for instance, we did a piece recently which actually I wasn’t there for, but I helped develop, in Dublin, with SMART lab at the University of East London. It was a performance piece for 3 performers in wheelchairs called ‘Body Weaving’ or I don’t know, they’ve got some fancy name for it. Basically, they had Wii controllers attached to their wheelchairs and their position in the room created various events to be triggered, musically. Their location in the room according to where the Wii controllers were in relation to the detectors. So we were moving into like again ubiquitous technology to help us create new forms of interaction. That was quite successful apparently, I wasn’t there. And of course, we’re right at the start of all this stuff. [26’45”]

There is also another Future of Sound artist, well artists/team called Squid Soup, they showed a gestural recognition piece of technology. It was a camera viewing one of the operators making flying motions.

IW: Oh yes…

MW: And it would enable you to fly through a virtual world. This is no more complex than a Wii controller or a Mario Cart which I bought the other day in America where you’ve got a steering wheel which is attached, you know, to nothing, driving the coach. It’s just brilliant I think, absolutely works perfectly.

IW: a lot of it, just that iToy thing…

MW: yes, iToy

IW: Amazingly well developed when you think about it.

MW: I’m in awe of their, of the ruggedness of those sort of things.

IW: Yes, me too.

MW: Umm, follow-up questions…

IW: Yes, don’t worry about that, I mean we’re going off track a bit but I’m just more interested in you know…

MW: Well fundamentally we use all and everything we can, I mean we do a lot with, we’ve done quite a lot with analysis of colour for instance or movement via a web cam or camera of any sort. And then using MaxMSP to interpret colours or differential between movement and non movement which will create effects. And combining actually.

The large pixel arrays [28’20”] I mean, a lot of people are using this now, but HMC media labs, friends of ours, they showed us some stuff a couple of years ago, I think a lot of people are using it now; square arrays of 8 by8 pixels on card that you hold up tot the camera and as soon as the camera recognises the pixel array, it places, in the same place in the digital mirror, on the screen, anything you want. So an image, an animation, a sound, even, in 3 dimensions, we did it with 3 dimensional sound - in space! This guy holds a card up and there’s a sound attached to it and it’s moving around – which is really peculiar.

IW: Ye, I've seen people doing that at De Montfort, Masters students doing projects and things.

MW: And so that’s not new now, but when we did it, it was pretty new.

IW: it’s still very nice though.

MW: And also I like the idea of this kind of invisible integration into a normal environment. We’re talking about print on T-shirts or hats. There’s another thing we’re doing in a couple of weeks which is, there’ a conference called B.tween, which is a kind of marriage brokering service between artists and business. I mean it’s a big thing, it’s a huge event, and basically we’re equipping all the delegates with their own RFID tags and the idea is that when they, they have to make a certain gesture to each other, the idea is connections right? So if they agree, if two people meet and they agree to make a connection, a sound will be transmitted on the PA throughout the entire building and this will be recorded and captured on a kind of, on a cumulative basis, on an hour-long loop which is what we’re doing in a central space which has a 3d sound installation in it, which is the main meeting place. So where ever these connections happen within this huge building, they will be represented in 3 dimensionality within this space in a cumulative way. So over the day, you’ll hear all these, I mean it might be something very, very subtle, it has to be or it would drive you mad. But the idea is, at the end of the day or at the end of the conference, the person who has made the most connections gets some kind of prize.

IW: But also I suppose, could you walk into that place and, from where the most of the sounds were coming from, work out where most people were connected?

MW: Yes, that was the idea.

IW: Very nice.

MW: So it’s like part analysis, part art-work, sound-heat[?] map. So all these things are about creating new forms of, sometimes playful and not, sometimes they’re not very deep, but actually just doing stuff that couldn’t be done in other methods – which I particularly like.

IW: it’s a sort of ‘mash-up’ idea isn’t it?

MW: Yes, really, well I think the world’s a mash-up idea really! I mean the creative world is.

IW: OK, well let’s move on. My next sort of category if you like or starting point is ‘gathering information about the environment’. You know often, one of the things we can do now is that as well as having a performance, we can actually make it specific or react to the space it’s in or the situation of the space it’s in.

MW: Yes.

IW: It was difficult before because, well you have a lot more flexibility.

MW: Yes, I suppose this relates pretty much to the previous question.

IW: Absolutely

MW: And um [reads sheet] abstraction, well it’s a bit like gathering information can be for several purposes can’t it? It can be for analysis so you can get more funding for something for instance. Or, it could be instantaneous, interpreting it in an artistic way – the information you are gathering. It is pretty much like the previous, the B.tween installation.

‘Gathering information about the environment’ I mean are you talking about just live gathering or generally?

IW: Live gathering.

MW: Live gathering, right. There’s a series of installations we’ve done concerned with asking people to ring an answering machine and leave a message based on a particular premise – which then becomes part of a big 3 dimensional sound installation. The ones we’ve done so far have been mediated so we’ve created a piece from it, but it would be quite easy, well in fact, like the B.tween thing, that’s pretty much live. So if we were confident that people weren’t going to abuse the system, we could quite happily leave say microphones around the exhibition, around the conference space and say, ‘could you leave your comments about X?’. And then that would be extruded and placed in 3 dimensional sound space in the same space. So we could do stuff like that. But looking at, I’m just looking at your list here, hang on a sec. I like the kind of feedback mechanisms of gathering information so that way that it alters performance as you mention here, I’m trying to think of examples of what we’ve done. I suppose the thing in Dublin that I wasn’t at was an example of that because the way that the sound was being triggered affected the way that they moved around the space – so a constant bio-feedback mechanism. Likewise with the brainwave, that was definitely bio-feedback mechanism so you can kind of put yourself in a trance, you can go, ‘right that peak’s too high, I’m going to try and bring it down’. If you know what you’re doing and you can instantly, like at 6 frames a second, analyse how you’re affecting the outcome. That’s a very pure form of feedback within that space.

Um, ‘Radiation sensors’, that’s interesting, what kind of radiation?

IW: Well it could be anything, you could literally say that the performance changes according to the background radiation.

MW: Yes – talked about temperature sensors in the Jason Bruges example with the infra-red camera, ‘monitoring network conditions’,…

IW: Yes there’s some nice pieces that were done where they sort of sent messages off on loops and depending on how long the latency of the network was, that affected how sort of long musical phrases were.

MW: Oh that’s interesting. There was another piece by a friend of mine called Ross Phillips from Show Studio, who presented this piece as part of Future of Sound. Created a piece, right, they do a lot of, they’re very heavily web orientated, so they have like several web cams on their office when they’re working and they include people in the process. When they are not, he though, ‘well look, there’s nobody in the office over Christmas for a couple of weeks’, why don’t we, why don’t I design something that captures kind of information while we’re away? So instead of the, they had a message instead of like the video webcam which said, ‘look, can you instead leave a message? – and every day, it’ll play back at the same time – for 2 weeks’. Now it’s a simple premise, right? But actually what ended up, and he had a visual map when he came back of where all these messages were in a 24 hour period. So consequently, what he found out (was) that people were ringing back at the same time to create a work - in an iterative way, over a period of time, or maybe someone had left a question. And anybody could ring up and listen to this stuff at any time. So it was not only generative, but it was kind of playful but there was a point to it. You know, in a sense, nobody was leaving like, ’oh God I need this thing printing for me now’, it was all about playfulness. And so, I love the idea of these self-generating artworks. And it’s something that we kind of incorporate into some of our pitches sometimes, to suggest that people kind of do this stuff.

IW: Well it’s quite a big thing in music isn’t it, kind of the idea that what you compose is the structure rather than the piece, the Birtwistle thing; he wants his pieces to survive after him because they’ve got this structure that he’s devised; it doesn’t depend on him.

MW: Yes, that’s a nice idea. I mean I’m all for new forms being determined by new methodologies. I think, again, it’s like you couldn’t say it’s the Martyn Ware Algorithm, I’m quite happy for it to be distributed amongst a million people and I think that’s the interesting thing about it.

IW: No I agree, all that algorithms is very good. Right, let’s move on and so my next starting point; ‘Outputting and presenting information’.

MW: Right, well we use…

IW: Clearly sound projection you use quite a lot with your 3D

MW: Should put 3d Audioscape on here, it’s better than SPAT!

IW : Well I will do that.

MW: You should do

IW: I will do, consider it done.

MW: Isadora we’ve used, Max/MSP we use all the time, in fact, Max/MSP and Jitter is what 3D Audioscape is written in.

IW: Is it, right.

MW: Virtual performers, you mean in like Second Life?

IW: Well could be, or could be generated and then projected into a performance.

MW: OK, So you mean, yes I understand. No we’ve not really done anything like that apart from… no not really. Or sending SMS, do you know what, I feel a bit uneasy about all this mobile [?], over the past, 5 years, there’s been a whole heap of…

People think you know, of course we’ve got this amazing piece of technology in our pocket… there’s something… disturbs me… about… it just feels a bit gimmicky to me that this bridge between you and this experience should be this thing. I don’t know what it is, I can’t really rationalise it, I just don’t relate to it, I’ve never felt attracted to creating kind of, ‘cos there’s so many projects where it’s like, ‘we can use the mobile to do X, Y and Z and you can type in this stuff and it makes this sound and it’s like… I don’t know, it just feels a bit, it’s not playful enough for me, it’s too, it’s too much like, ‘Oh God’, it’s like, ‘what does it do?’, it trans, it makes your mobile into a remote control – big deal! You know.

IW: Well except that it’s a 2 way remote control. I did a piece with, with, at Middlesex University, with some students there. As the audience came in, they all had to turn their mobiles on.

MW: Oh so it was a musical piece?

IW: No, no, it was a performance piece with dancers and text and sound.

MW: Right

IW: They all had to turn their mobiles on and give us their mobile number and we put them into a database – and then whenever the performers were off stage, they just went to the side of the stage and we had that set up, you know, where you can go to a website and send SMSs so there they sent messages about how the performance was going to individual mobile numbers. So you had a really interesting, you had, obviously you had a mass of audience, but every now and then, someone on the audience would find out some little bit of information, a programme note written on the fly, and of course you saw people craning. So it was a way if individuating members of the audience.

MW: I can see the appeal of that. However, you know, my er [40’21”] dramaturge based friends would say that that is completely breaking the illusion of any sort of engagement with the performance.

IW: Well, absolutely, except of course, it is an individual engagement. No, I think it’s very interesting and of course a lot of…

MW: I’m not saying it’s wrong, that’s what they’d say, I’m just playing devil’s advocate.

IW: Yes absolutely, and what I’d say is a lot of what’s happening in multimedia performance is actually about de-focussing, it’s more the sort of ‘happening’ idea; in other words, you present far too much information. There’s no main character you look at, but actually in a sense what you do is you present spectacle and experience and stimulation. And you allow people to construct their own narrative from that.

MW: I’m up for that, but a lot of it depends on how it’s presented, in what format, where the people are in terms of the performance. If you’re mingling with the performers. Is it in the round? If it’s delivered in a proscenium arch format with rows of seats. I don’t think, for me, that doesn’t work. I mean it has to be, it’s got to be one or the other. Anyway, just for me.

IW: No, no I’d agree with that.

MW: We were, I’ve been developing over the last five years a multimedia theatrical extravaganza about Tesla, the scientist. And we’ve gone through a lot of iterations of this and thinking. The original intention, right from the start was to make it an all-singing, all-dancing multimedia experience with some kind of interaction with the audience. 3 dimensional sound, immersive… projections…, with actors. And, to be honest with you, when we came up with the idea and wrote the 28 page treatment, like 5 years ago, it was probably a bit, well it was ahead of its time, very, in terms of the technology available it would have been too expensive, now, it’s entirely feasible. A lot more practice has been done on relative kind of disciplines and also the equipment has become a lot cheaper. So I think it’s a long term project of mine and whether it ever gets realised or not I don’t know, but it’s a great idea.

But the interesting thing was when we were looking into research… at the time about forms of interaction between the audience, we looked, this was in America so mobile phones had hardly taken off, you know, we were looking at PDAs and the big problem, and funnily enough I went, the big problem was this breaking of one’s immersion in this world by looking at this fucking ugly thing, right? Excuse my language – you can take the ‘fucking’ out! But by coincidence at the same, round about the same time I was developing this with a team of people in America, I went to the Whitney Biennale(sic) in New York and they had various, well in fact they had one big piece in there that was about you know, you got given a PDA and you went through several of the gallery spaces and certain things responded to you and I hated it. I thought it was… totally pointless, I just didn’t see how it was meant to improve my experience of anything from an artistic point of view or an informative point of view. And it kind of prejudiced me a little bit against…

IW: no, I must say I don’t think, I mean the problem with mobiles and all that sort of thing is we can see a sort of grand narrative with all the technology which is becoming more immersive and yet here you have this device which is anti immersive.

MW: That’s right

IW: instead of going like this [looks around?], you’re going like this [looks at phone?].

MW: Well I’m very much against. Well, another premise of what, of our practice is that, is communal experience as opposed to individual experience. So for instance, in a gallery environment, I detest those fucking huge bricks that you have to put up against your ear, or like audio guides and this prescriptive way that people are meant to experience… things. I’m all for information, but I think the way one can get information should, could and should be more an opt-in. you know, rather than an opt-out. So therefore, obviously I would say this because we have a 3 dimensional sound system, but we’ve done various exhibitions where we’ve used a kind of abstracted kind of narrative, almost like ‘Under Milk Wood’, or that kind of theory, almost like using reminiscences or snippets of information and dialogue to create a sense of immersion in a subject rather than… you know, some fuddy duddy reading you what they think this painting means. Or this gallery means.

So, this all sounds like nothing to do with the technological aspects, but actually it does impact on how you use the technology because the philosophy is at the heart of all activity. And so I believe, from my experience, that communal, we can create, not really more immersive experiences for people, but more, more relevant communal experiences, and as we become more… as processing becomes more powerful and everybody’s got a computer in the home, just about, people, in my opinion, are going to be wanting more communal experiences, based on this processing that’s generally available. To that end actually, this year I was talking to the London Games festival, like computer games festival…

IW: I know, yes.

MW: …about creating, they’re very interested in, in this developing world of creating communal experiences for gaming and so in collaboration with the mayor’s office, God knows what will happen there, I can’t believe it.

IW: I was so depressed this morning listening to the news.

MW: Actually it’s quite good news for the Labour Party to be honest because he’s got to drop several thousand bricks during his term which is going to…

IW: I think you’re right, but it’s…

MW: I can’t bear…

IW: being a Londoner and having that complete arsehole…

MW: that twat as our representative,

IW: Jesus!

MW: Anyway. Never the less, um, I've forgotten what I was talking about now, what was I talking about?

IW: You were talking about the London Games Festival.

MW: Oh yes, the games festival, yes. So basically, with the Mayor’s office, they were proposing to use various public locations; parks, squares in London, maybe to create communal gaming experiences and see, just test it out in the real world and see if it appealed to people. Which is quite interesting.

IW: It is interesting.

MW: When you look at the way in which, say for instance, the wii is developing.

IW: Yes, that’s right.

MW: The most popular games are communal and this idea of bringing together family members; God almighty we need it don’t we? And certainly in America they need it. Anything that…

IW: Oh, I think we do, yes, that’s right.

MW: you know it’s the 21st century version of sitting down and having a game of card fundamentally. I find all that much more interesting than this kind of, you know solipsistic activity of gazing into this increasingly real virtual world.

IW: Yes, but you see, what I like about mobile phones is that, you know, they’re increasingly having GPS on, they’re increasingly having Nav, you know, non-call technologies like that communicate. It’s a bit like, eventually I hope, everyone is going to be walking around with a computer in their pocket that knows where that person is. In that sense, I think that’s quite interesting really.

MW: Yes

IW: Because one of the big problems with technology is giving people the kit to use it. Well actually, if this sort of multi-function device is becoming so ubiquitous that everyone’s got it… You can say, oh well great, they’ve already got the kit, all we need to do is provide the structure…

MW: No, I understand all that…

IW: No, I’m sure you do…

MW: I don’t know…

IW: I must say that the idea that you’re in a performance looking at a phone...,

MW: that doesn’t work…

IW: that just isn’t going to happen, at least I don’t think so.

MW: Even in a kind of… I think if you’re trying to create an experience… any form of technology that gets in that loop, that’s not invisible, is… everything I do about creating an experience is about hiding the technology.

IW: Right. [48’34”]

MW: I think that’s really at the heart of what I’m saying. So, if you’ve got a constant reminder in your hand that everything is being mediated through technology, that, for me, breaks it, so yes, interesting. But, that’s just my view, I’m not going to, I mean there are some, I know there have been collaborative musical works done with people in the audience using mobile phones.

IW: Dial-tone symphony.

MW: I think that’s very interesting

IW: That’s quite playful in a way isn’t it?

MW: yes, I quite like that. Also, oh yes, in terms of music, there’s another, I mean this is a very simple thing, but we put together a proposal which is probably going to happen for the new Virgin club house, well, it’s not new, it’s been there for a couple of years now, at Heathrow, which is like for first-class passengers. Our collaborators and kind of sponsors, Bowers and Wilkins loudspeakers, had brought out this amazing new iPod dock thing called a Zeppelin, it sounds fantastic. I’m not saying it because they gave me one, it really is amazing, it’s about 400 quid. Anyway, the idea is to have, we came up with this idea, they’ve got this space which really isn’t being used at the moment in the clubhouse and they’re interested in this collaboration with Virgin, so we said, why don’t we create this installation with a load of these docks, a load of these Zeppelins on different height pedestals and we create a 3 dimensional sound experience. We create a… [they’re only just?] playing stuff though them, I mean I know it’ll be 3D and everything, but what you want is a means of creating a new piece, so basically, we welded an iPod into each of these things,

IW: I can imagine!
MW: Right, and create a piece that’s meant for distributed composition, so maybe there’s 12 of them and it’s like non-temporarily referenced. But it’s almost like a kind of Ennio Morricone style piece where everything is in the right key, some of it’s sound effects, some of it’s… But actually people control it by pressing ‘play’ or selecting whatever…

IW: That is nice.

MW: And it’ll play until the end of the sample and then somebody else has to press it again to keep it going, I really like that idea a lot.

IW: Yes, I once did a dance piece where it was 3 or 4 performers and what I did, I got them to record their instrument onto a cassette and they each then had this and they played the work by turning…

MW: Same thing.

IW: Yes, nice, nice idea.

MW: Only the technology changes!

IW: That’s right, cassettes were dodgy, I must say.

MW: So, [reads sheet] ‘Has the use of technology been central to any of your artistic intentions?’, Absolutely! Because it determines and changes the way that one composes music when you’re working in space. It absolutely changes everything.

IW: Good. Let’s move on, ‘Controlling Devices and Systems’. [51’36”]

MWL Yes, right, let’s start here [reads sheet]. We will be controlling lighting changes using the RFID technology and any other sensor technology in the Threeways school. Controlling robots, er, actually Fiddian Warmen, do you know Fiddian?

IW: No, don’t think so…

MW: From Soda?

IW: No

MW: No? He has some, he has collaborated with Sony I think, They’ve got some of these kind of 4 foot high robots and he’s managed to get hold of a few of them and he’s currently, I think I'm right in saying, designing a programme where they respond to audience, sorry, they respond to music. So like they are actually punk robots.

IW: Oh fantastic!

MW: So the louder and faster the music is…

IW: The higher they jump!

MW: the higher they jump, and pogo. Which I think is really cool.

IW: Yes, very good.

MW: I’ve not seen it, but it sounds very cool.

IW: Yes, did you see Nick’s quartet thing that he did?

MW: No.

IW: That was very nice. They had a robot there that sort of…

MW: ‘Playback of sound or video’, we do that all the time. ‘Triggering special effects’, again, that’s going to be another part of our, I mean, when I talk about the Threeways School, this immersive environment is like a template, it’s going to be a template; an aggregation of our knowledge, but also a template for other things that aren’t to do with special needs. It’s like the first step on the way to the holiday as I see it. And in terms of input, or is that output?

IW: No, this is about how you connect to these things.

MW: Oh I see, yes we use obviously Bluetooth, Ethernet, MIDI, some of the things we do live are translations from DMX to MIDI. I don’t know what OSI and XML are.

IW: OSI is a sort of connection protocol developed especially for sound so you can send sort of sample accurate timing over networks and things.

MW: Right. [reads sheet] Did it work as you wanted?, controlling and triggering – do you remember any… Err. One thing that I’ve not mentioned is this piece we did with… professor… anyway Jennifer Sheridan and Nick Bryan-Kinns from the University of Leeds, they’ve now formed a company called Big Dog Interactive. They’re really cool actually. Nick Bryan-Kinns is from the University of London which is where I’m a visiting Professor, and they’re really cool, we did a project which is a very simple premise again they brought, they wanted to design a swing for you to swing on with a simple accelerometer in the base which transmitted information, can’t remember if it was by Bluetooth or, whatever… some format. To a, and then taking this stream of data from the swing, which was attached to the underside of the swing and then triggering musical events on a sampler, EXS24 sampler on a module. So it took quite a lot of thought to think what the best way of doing this; should we just have one sound that went up and down in pitch? For instance, or should it just filter? Or should we actually just go for it and have different stuff that’s thematically related on every key? And how do you thin the data stream? Do you want it to trigger on every, every time it gets a signal or can it cope with that? All these issues came up, anyway it was quite interesting.

What we ended up doing was, we did 3 different, if you like, palettes for the, to interpret the data. One was a kind of virtual synth that made a, based on white noise and filtering so it would go [breathy, whistling sound with varying filter] so we blended all the sounds together. Then there was another one that was, then there was another one that was much more weird and abstract and incorporated a lot of distortion which was kind of scary. Which we liked the idea of something scary emanating, this is all in 3D by the way, 3D sound so it was spatialised as well.

IW: I see, yes.

MW: so for an audience, the sound was attached to the swing, right?

IW: Fantastic.

MW: in a ghostly way. So this was more like a kind of, if you like, an electronic, grungy kind of thing. And then the third one, which was the most successful in my view was an artist friend of ours called Nicola Green, went round the country collecting laughter samples as an art work, for 2 years and created a vinyl record out of it. And she brought to us and said. I said oh this would be fantastic in 3D, so we got all the assets created in 3D so that laughter would be coming out like in a pointillist way although. So we basically took these samples again and reinterpreted them and put one on each key on the keyboard. So in other words, this data stream is being interpreted…

IW: into MIDI?

MW: Right, so if you pressed a particular key it would laugh [slight laugh] or [high pitched laugh] right? But the weird thing is we decided not to thin the data stream for this, it was like basically, every time it got a trigger it would pay a sample. This created something that sounded a bit like laughter, but was much more sinister. It sort of went [jumbled selection of laughs cutting in to each other] and as you swung higher we made it so the pitch of it got higher.

IW: I see.

MW: So it became absolutely maniacal as you swung higher, and the kids absolutely adored it. And so this is a classic example of how a very simple premise and not that complex interaction can create something very complex depending on how you approach it from a creative point of view. [58’03”]

IW: Good, OK, ‘Processing information’! So here I’m talking about obviously doing things with stuff that’s coming in. Now some of this you’re doing anyway, you know we’ve talked about presenting information and obviously you process things to present information. But sometimes you process things to make decisions or to convert one thing into another, so…

MW: I’m looking…

IW: Yes, yes.

MW: Pitch to MIDI we’ve done, MIDI event translation we’ve done.

IW: I mean reacting to events and rules-based systems, that’s more or less what you’ve been talking about.

MW: Randomising we’re very interested in. for instance, we can take live inputs into our 3D sound system and, I’ve mentioned to you before we’ve done, we do several 3D DJ events where we actually fly sounds around the room, but this, live using a 3D joystick.

IW: Yes, I know.

MW: That’s responding directly to the content of course. However, you could just as easily put it through various automatic presets. For instance, one of the things we like to do, particularly with high pitched sounds, sometimes real recordings, for instance rain or in non-real, high-hats for instance, is to randomise location within 3 dimensional space. It works incredibly well, sounds amazing. ‘Cos there’s no real, very few kind of analogues in the real world apart from maybe you’re in the middle of a rainforest, raindrops hitting individual leaves in a random fashion. So we can create this sense of unearthly immersion using randomisation.

Umm, ‘converting one sort of information into another’… the last thing I was talking about was a classic example; movement of a, can’t get much more simple than the pendulum movement of a swing – but controlled by you. So they can actually modulate, on the fly, their own experience. Err ‘combining and mixing information’…

IW: You may well not have done this.

MW: Yes, no, I’d like to think of something, err ‘rules-based systems’… Yes, we kind of use rules-based systems all the time, I mean… What’s Peersynth?

IW: Peersynth is a collaborative improvisation, a web-based collaborative improvisation system.

MW: Right, that sounds interesting. Is that open-source?

IW: Yes, it’s on the net.

MW: Right I’ll look into that. ‘inference Engine’ – give me an example of that…

IW: Well, it’s the software component that does the ‘if this thing happens and that thing happens, we’d better go and do this…’. It’s one way of implementing a rules based system.

MW: Right OK. Let me just look at these questions, ‘have you used live conversion or mixing?’, ‘have you used technology to decide how the performance proceeds?’…

IW: So that’s your rule-based system.

MW: Yes, not, we do obviously with various other things I’ve mentioned already, the brainwave thing…

IW: I suppose also the bath school?

MW: But everything is going to be based around reaction from the audience, if you like, [get process as in central?] Yes, it has been central to my artistic intentions, it always is. ‘Mixing or combining’, I’m trying to think, trying to think…

IW: I mean there’s all that classic stuff, you know when all the, the web just got fast enough and people were really excited about you know, having events in more than one venue at a time and taking in video and sound from, you know things like Absolute Jam.

MW: I’m yet to be convinced. I mean we were, as a musician, I was right at the forefront of this because we used to work at Strongroom Studios and they were, they were always at the forefront of any collaborative technologies in music. So they had the rocket system which was the, an early implementation. And it was really an economically driven thing because it was like, can we get this session player in Los Angeles to play on our track…

IW: Without flying them over!

MW: without flying them over, to be honest with you, it was kind of clunky.

IW: no, I still think the latency thing, people have come up with all sorts of elegant ways to get round it, but in the end, if you’re a musician, you want to be able to just do that [indicates downbeat?].

MW: Well yes, exactly, so anything that artistically creates a restriction I think, well you can always make a benefit out of a restriction, but

IW: I suppose you can, there have been some quite interesting, I suppose…

MW: I mean if it was a raga for instance, it wouldn’t matter because everybody around the globe, it’s non temporarily based, but even then… I suppose you can do ambient music…

IW: Ambient’s about all you could get away with.

MW: That’s it, yes, anything that requires some kind of sequencing. Processing information, um, there are various other kinds of things that we’ve done, I mean like the Sancho Plan. Which we do, you know, their stuff is in 3 dimensional sound as well so we link together our 3D sound system with a series of triggered via their percussion system, triggered events. So we can actually, for instance in that case, we can play back some triggered 3 dimensional pre-convolved sounds, but also there, at the same time, they’re triggering visual avatars, it’s very interesting.

IW: Yes nice, very nice.

MW: And there’s no reason in fact for a performance like that, they could easily have it in a, you know, auditorium where you had 360 degree projections. That would be the ideal and you can move sounds around, triggered etc. [1h04’10”]

IW: Ok, Let’s move on, now one thing I’m very aware of…

MW: This is just like doing an exam!

IW: You’re doing very well – you’re going to A star here. Are you OK for time, sorry?

MW: I’ve got to go in about quarter of an hour.

IW: Ok, let’s rush through. Obviously performances don’t just happen at a particular point in time, there’s a lot of ‘before’ and a lot of ‘after’ so I’m moving on to look at that. So, in terms of planning and preparing?
MW: Right, I don’t use Ableton Live, not for any other reason but…

IW: No, obviously there’s a lot of stuff here…

MW: Yes, I’m just kind of going through it…

IW: Yes, good.

MW: We prepare, we prepare interaction systems in advance, I mean we have to do a lot of testing in a 3d sound studio with various collaborators with Future of Sound, for other projects as well. And the interesting and exciting thing about 3D Audioscape is it’s quite easy to integrate because it just takes MIDI controller value input so you don’t have to really get under the bonnet, unless you really want to. So we do work, in terms of preparation, it’s just a matter of testing with whatever we [?], we’re quite lazy, we say you have to send us the information. You know, we’re not interesting in getting into some kind of 3 month coding experiment. So it all just boils down to testing and we can, anything that can issue MIDI controller values we can integrate with.

‘Learning configurations or settings’; reasonably straight forward for us, we use Apple scripting, various macros to change different settings. For instance, we’ve just sold our first, no, we’ve just opened our first demo facility in Paris that doesn’t require our presence there. So we’ve trained a guy, who’s pretty much a layman in this, how to operate it and this is an entirely Applescript-based system so he can demonstrate a bunch of B format things just by clicking stuff and obviously… We’re talking about 4 different programmes that have to be opened in the right order and latency between the programmes. One has to be finished opening before another can open. From scratch, so it’s not just a matter of pressing a button, this stuff is quite complex. Different set-up sequence, so for instance if we’re playing existing stereo content through this algorithm we’ve got which creates 3D out of it, it has to close everything down, open everything up again and it’s all controlled by Applescript. But of course we use Apple remote desktop as well. So we can control the actual demo performance if you like remotely from anywhere on earth. Which is kind of cool.

Checking hardware and software, oh gawd…

IW: I mean lots of people do this sort of thing manually, it’s just that one or two people have said oh, I’m starting to use multimedia to do that bit as well.

MW: Well, you know, getting back to the special needs school which really is the template for everything performance-wise we’re looking at, we will be… the real challenge we’ve got is not the pupils, it’s the teachers. Because these are laymen – although they will be trained. They’re not part of our world at all. And so the really relevant stuff is finding ways, it’s come down to having a series of buttons on the wall, and then if they want to get further under the hood, they have to go into the control-room and actually… you know again the Applescript thing of opening up different scenarios. But we are developing, since I last talked to you I’ve actually seen the programming for a, which is like 3 quarters of the way through now, for controlling the inputs and outputs for this system and it’s all in MaxMSP. I still want you to meet

IW: No I’d like to meet

MW: Because I suspect it is duplicating a lot of the same stuff, but, it’s been very cogently structured so it’s basically a list of sensor inputs for each scenario, a list of stuff it’s going to be controlling and it’s just a matter of linking them together, saving it as a preset, recalling it, modulating it. So giving the teachers an opportunity to create their plan for the following day’s work. Hopefully - at the moment it looks like a nightmare, but they’ve not built the skin on the top yet. That sort of thing.

Do you, let’s have a look at this… diagrams, that would be a luxury! How did we…? It’s normally very ad hoc, unfortunately for us!

IW: of course, yes.

MW: [reading] How did you do this checking, did it work as you wanted?

I mean, some of our Future of Sound shows normally are under enormous time-pressures so…

IW: Well not just that, I mean one of the themes that’s coming out of talking to people, you know the big thing they say is you get the technology at the dress rehearsal, and that’s a problem.

MW: it’s a real problem. People don’t understand the complexity of what you’re trying to achieve. I mean even, for instance, future sonic, they’re giving us less time to prepare than we need and it’s not good enough. You know, we’re doing, you know we really need a full day’s prep or at least a get-in with everything working at 9 in the morning. Normally everything’s up and running at 2 in the afternoon and we’re on stage at 7. So it’s always a nightmare. So this is the real world as opposed to this kind of theoretical world. But I have to say that most of the technologies are getting more rugged.

IW: yes, I think they are.

MW: There’s less crashing going on.

IW: Ok, let’s move on. So what about the other end of a performance in terms of remembering and documenting? Obviously there are .lots of different ways you can do this, but people are starting to use automatic documentation systems or using MySpace and YouTube to actually put up documentation quickly. [1h11’00”]

MW: All right, well we haven’t quite got this all together yet. We do document all the performances. We do film them all, we do… transcription? We don’t do transcription, we do do audio, we capture the audio as well. We try and archive as much as possible, we employ photographers and such like as much as possible. We post, we have a discussion forum online for most of the live stuff that we do. We definitely reuse material. Wherever possible!

IW:L That’s become quite interesting, the way technology allows you to re-use you know things like film of material, you can reuse a lot more different sorts of assets than perhaps you used to.

MW: I think you’re right. And also what’s really interesting to me is Future of Sound is very much about creating a, it became clear after a few of them that what we were all more interested in, I suppose I’m leading it, is the idea of presenting a work in progress. Rather than a slick, this is what we do for a living and look how clever we are. And people at first were going, oh that didn’t work properly and maybe they had to sit around fidgeting for like 90 seconds while something was working and of course there’s a certain element of that which is… After a while I grew to like it because I thought, actually this is real, you know it’s like, to me, you read about, we did two of our first Future of Sound shows at the Royal Institution where 8 of the elements were discovered and they present you know cadavers and you name it. You’re not telling me that all those shows were slick, you know, historically. These are, we’re talking about the danger of discovery and that’s what turns me on. And so I would much rather somebody turned round to me and said, I’ve been coding all night, I’m not sure if this is going to work’ – fine by me.

And so all that stuff, once you accept that as a kind of honest exposure of the working process it encourages, and this is something I couldn’t really have predicted beforehand, it encourages people to, by definition, to continue with their experimentation. They’re not looking for an end. It’s not like we have to get to the end to get our funding. There’s no funding! You know, it’s all for your own personal reasons, so what we created is a kind of mechanism for people, and also there’s a lot of competitiveness; people want to show that they are even more future-facing than anyone else. So we’ve ended up with this thing where people are doing the most.., if I was paying them to do this stuff, it would never get on. Never in a thousand years, none of these shows. If I went to people and said, ‘there’s a little bit of funding for you to develop this’, they’d go, ‘well actually, I need 30 grand’! Because you see, everyone is mucking in together and nobody’s making any money. In fact, we’re losing money but it’s worth exposing this and they like the theory of it. [1h14’12”] People are continually iterating their work. And so, tomorrow for instance, we’ve got Sancho Plan in Manchester, Sancho Plan and Modified Toy Orchestra, Tal Rosner, oh various other people. No two shows that we do are ever the same and thus their practice develops. It’s become like a work in progress - in public. I love that, I was quite influenced by Battersea Arts centre when they were doing the development for Jerry Springer, The Opera and they’d have work in progress when they’d only done like one act. And they’d invite audience in for a limited amount of money and they’d actually invite comments at the end of it all. And to me that actually had a big influence on the way I thought about all this.

IW: I like all that, the discussion with the audience thing afterwards…

MW: Unfortunately we try to cram so much into what we do that we never have time for questions and answers afterwards. But we do document, we encourage people, at the start of every show, we say, ‘please video, please take photographs, we want as much as possible on the Internet tomorrow, if you can’. And to this end, while it’s not particularly technology mediated, I am employing a part-time archivist to, and I have been for the last year, to try and just identify and archive, to identify the useful aspects of what we’re doing. Not just the Future of Sound but all combined with Illustrious and allow access in the most cogent way to the public to all that we’re learning, because we are like, in a real sense, pioneers in this world, but also an aggregator of knowledge, so it makes no sense not to share all this stuff.

IW: I agree. We’re nearly there look, Generating Material. So here I’m talking about things that are actually created on the fly as it were.

MW: Generative work?

IW: yes, sort of live generative work.

MW: Live generative work. Well, lots of examples of it in the Future of Sound oeuvre. Again the brainwave automatic generation 3D soundscapes. To a certain extent the Sancho Plan is generative as well because no two performances are the same – or semi generative.

IW: No, I think a lot of this stuff; clearly you set up the structures to generate in before the performance.

MW: Yes, exactly, are you talking about totally generative?

IW: Well, I suppose like all these things, I’m interested in, you know, I say this to you and I’m interested in what you come out with really.

MW: I am interested in kind of audience-modulated rather than generative work I think because it needs some kind of narrative, not narrative, it needs some kind of central core idea. Or else you end up with abstraction with no kind of core to it – and I love abstraction! But, I’d rather have something that triggers associations…

IW: some sort of connection?

MW: Yes, rather than the kind of Jackson Pollock thing.

IW: Yes, Ok. Right last one, Connecting Performers or Audiences.

MW: Hmm, interesting.

IW: Yes, so obviously the telematics idea here is one of the things I’m thinking of. That should say ‘distributed collaboration’.

MW: Collaborat - this new word! Linking venues, linking venues…

IW: Quite an old idea now…

MW: Yes. No, linking venues, I’ll just give you an idea of what we can do now and we were asked to do and then it fell through. When Finland got the Eurovision song contest, we were contacted by one of their production people when they knew it was going to be in Finland, when they knew they’d got it for the next year. They said, you know, would it be possible, we’re going to do beam backs of the show to lots of cinemas in Finland because it was like a massive thing for them. Putting them on the map, no matter how ludicrous we think it is. And they were going to you know beam it back to like 50 big cinemas round Finland and they said would you be able to beam back, would you be able to give them a more real experience if we installed 3D sound in all these venues? We said absolutely, we can transmit B format ambisonic material via the Internet now. Live. So we can translocate real 3dimensional environments and put a sound field microphone in the middle of the auditorium, suspended and we can make people, make it sound like they’re in the middle of this giant audience, screaming and hollering. And the potential of that for sporting events for instance is huge. Anyway, that’s that linking venues.

Streaming media, that all comes into that as well, er telemnatics, explain telematics?

IW: Telematics is that thing that lots of dancers talk about but also Ford did a lot of research about this. It’s about recreating a sense of physical location at a distance. So it’s like the sound stuff, but also the visuals and what have you.

MW: Yes, I know what it is. One interesting thing; we’re working with this artist called Anna Hill, have been for 5 years now, we’ve done various projects with her. She’s a sci-artist and she’s been working for all this period of time on this device which astronauts would take up into space, she’s been working with the European Space Agency, which would not only analyse the biometric data of the astronaut, but would also, if you like, capture the feelings and the way and identifying the way that an astronaut or the experience of being an astronaut using various means, some scientific, some less scientific, more artistic. [1h 21’07”] So this device, which at the moment is like a kind of ball with different, it’s got like, it’s got a keyboard on it, it’s got these biometric sensors on it, it’s got some kind of haptic devices. I don’t know, she’s not really exhibited the full range of, because it’s all under NDA. However, this idea of trying to recreate the experience of being in a completely extraordinary and non-accessible environment for somebody else is quite interesting to me.

IW: Yes, I agree.

MW: So this project is called Space-Synapse and one of the things is 3 dimensional sound, it’s part of the reality aspect of transmitting this information. So that’s quite interesting, that kind of relates to telematics.

IW: absolutely it does.

MW: Oracle, what’s oracle?

IW: Oracle is a database system, oh hang on where are we? No, sorry, Auracle, with an ‘A’ is a collaborative music system which is voice input. It’s collaborative, it’s quite interesting, it’s quite quick to set up.

MW: Voice input?

IW: Yes, it works in a web browser with a little java applet that you have to download.

MW: yes, but what’s the…

IW: The point is it’s a collaborative music system, it’s for improvising, you just sing with your voice and it tracks your pitch and then modulates it according to other stuff.

MW: That’s quite nice. One of the things, just getting back to more basic things, with the 3D sound system that we anticipated for live interaction with an audience, we’ve never really sold the system into night clubs or the dance community or even like live rock and stuff like that because we just thought we’d get swallowed up in the general morass and then before you know it, it would be a gimmick that was thrown away, so I was very careful about that.
But, one of the ideas we had which was part of a giant collaborative proposal for a new all singing, all dancing immersive environment entertainment venue, a ridiculous EU grant application for like 10 million Euros or something, because French telecom was involved and all those… never went through anyway, was the 3D sound system, the idea of teaching an audience different gestures, it relates to the Jason Brive [?] thing, different gestures that can actually affect what they’re hearing in three dimensions. So, fort instance, if they put their hands up in the air and go like this, they can make the entire sound field bounce up and down for instance or if they want to rotate the sound field they can point to the left or, the whole audience, then you have analysis of the audience and you can see and detect and this is all entirely feasible. [1h24’19”] Now, even more so now because the technology is better.

Or, or we’re doing a project with, again which is under NDA, but I can tell you a little bit about it, with this company called Lazerium who used to do all the big laser shows in planetaria all around the world. That’s all kind of over now, but they’ve had to re-purpose themselves and they’ve bought or leased, this huge dome which used to hold the Spruce Goose in Long Island.

IW: Oh I know, yes…

MW: Well half of it anyway, they’re turning into a big, huge auditorium that is based on audience interaction. So they’ve designed this thing called Light Dancing which is basically platforms about 2 m in diameter, circular, that you stand on and it’s got beams of light that come down and you interrupt the beams and it triggers certain sounds which is all, because they’re American, it all has to be very musically orientated, not really abstract in a European sense, but… And it’s like one of those systems where everything’s always in the right key so you can’t go wrong! But, having said that, people feel empowered by this.

IW: Yes, fair enough.

MW: So the idea is that you get these, it’s a bit like you know, girls in a cage, all around the auditorium, people volunteer to come up and take part in a performance which is quite nice. So that’s not exactly the world’s cleverest piece of interaction but it is interesting and it’s never been done before to my knowledge. But there will also be parts of the narrative they’re building where they will be controlling effects, a storm for instance or a… and this is all going to be in 3 dimensional sound, together with, you know connected with 3 D visual implementation.

IW: Good that’s it, we’ve done all that.

MW: Good, my brain’s empty now – I’ve got loads more stuff…

IW: well thanks very much Martyn, that was fantastic, great

MW: Yes, good, excellent, How many other people have you…?

IW: I’ve interviewed four other people so far.

MW: And how many do you need?

IW: I’d like to get six.

MW: I’ve got some other people.

IW: Have you got anyone involve with theatre and multimedia? I interviewed a very interesting guy, Andy Lavender.

MW: Yes, Theatre and multimedia, I’m not really, no.

IW: Yes, the trouble is they’re more difficult to get hold of.

Gleen and I live on BBC London radio this lunchtime!

2011-06-18T02:28:00.000-07:00

Don't forget to tune in to hear Glenn and I on Gary Crowley's radio show from noon to 2pm today love - brand new acoustic versions of Temptation and Let Me Go on the show!

Music For... launch

2011-06-02T12:56:00.000-07:00

ditto is proud announce the launch of “Music for…”
a brand new ditto produced radio show with Glenn
Gregory and Martyn Ware of Heaven 17, available
exclusively on Radio ditto. Glenn and Martyn have
the kind of taste buds that can only be developed
through years of enthusiasm and curiosity. The results
are evident in their spectacular output under various
creative monikers, be it Heaven 17 or The British
Electronic Foundation. They are also manifested in
their extraordinary record collections – something
they have fortunately decided is also too good to
keep to themselves, but will share across the airwaves
ahead of October’s eagerly anticipated BEF festival at
London’s Roundhouse.
Comprising tracks from their enviably eclectic
collection, interspersed with mutual heckling, the
laugh-out-loud show invites the listener on a tour of
musical intrigue, combining classics you know and
love with hidden gems from established artists and
breaking acts.
Ever committed to shining a light on new talent, “Music
for…” features the segment Found on Soundcloud, in
which Glenn and Martyn share the discoveries they
can’t get enough of. To submit your own or anyone
else’s new tunes of any colour or hue, email musicfor@
ditto.tv
The first instalment launches on Thursday 2nd June,
exclusively on Radio ditto, and available at
www.ditto.tv/radio
The only question is why they didn’t do it sooner?

Rehearsals at Tate Modern

2011-06-02T06:21:00.001-07:00

All going well - The space looks astounding and it sounds incredible also

My new 3D composition 'HypnoScape' is ready to go...

Dress and final tech/ spatialization rehearsal today and tomorrow

Preview Saturday - can't wait

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Tate Modern

Heaven 17 and BEF at the Roundhouse

2011-05-11T10:32:00.000-07:00

so if you don't already know... Following the success of Heaven 17’s ‘Penthouse and Pavement 30th Anniversary Tour’ in 2010, Martyn Ware’s production project, ‘British Electric Foundation’ (B.E.F.) is proud to present ‘Music of Quality and Distinction Live’, a 2-day festival at London’s prestigious Roundhouse from October 14-15th, celebrating 30 years of seminal electronic music and unique collaborations.

Heaven 17 will perform the world premiere of their 1983 album ‘The Luxury Gap’ on Friday October 14th, followed by B.E.F.’s first ever live performance featuring tracks from the albums ‘Music of Quality & Distinction Vol. 1 & 2’ on Saturday October 15th.

Tickets go on sale Thursday April 12th at 10am. Ticket hotline: 0844 844 0444. Book online: www.ticketmaster.co.uk. Day tickets: £23.50. Weekend tickets: £42.50.

Performed on Friday October 14th for the first time, Heaven 17’s The Luxury Gap album went to #4 in the UK Album chart and spawned 4 hit singles - Let Me Go, Temptation, Come Live With Me, and Crushed by the Wheels of Industry. The concert will be performed using 3D soundscape composition techniques pioneered by Martyn Ware and Vince Clarke.

Over the last three decades, B.E.F.’s work has achieved a cult status and universal acclaim. Their 1981 debut album Music For Stowaways was recently hailed by Uncut magazine as one of the “50 Greatest Lost Albums of All Time.” The B.E.F. concert will be entirely devoted to their groundbreaking 30-year career of electronic pop, featuring some of the artists who originally performed on the Music of Quality and Distinction albums.

Guest vocalists confirmed for the Music of Quality and Distinction concert include Elly Jackson (LaRoux), Boy George (Culture Club), Green Gartside (Scritti Politti), Sandie Shaw, Kim Wilde, Andy Bell (Erasure), Shingai Shoniwa (Noisettes), Midge Ure (Ultravox), Glenn Gregory (Heaven 17) and Polly Scattergood (more names to be confirmed shortly).

ReAnimate!

2011-04-07T03:51:00.001-07:00

Our Future Of Sound/Folded Wing event called 'ReAnimate!', taking place at the National Portrait Gallery on August 5th, is turning into a monster!

8 different artists creating soundscapes in response to various portraits and lot's of live performances and DJ"s on the night.

Official announcement to come soon, but we've got some VERY big names to appear on the night and to contribute to an iPhone app as a guide to the soundscapes

More to come - I'm very excited...

Martyn Ware

2011-03-29T02:58:00.000-07:00

Goldsmiths NPG Competition

2011-02-14T01:48:00.001-08:00

Exciting day ahead judging a competition for Goldsmiths students to create a new form of portrait for the Road To 2012 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

Techniques can include sound, film or multimedia.

Should be fascinating...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:London,United Kingdom

Worldometers - real time world statistics

2011-02-13T02:23:00.000-08:00

Worldometers - real time world statistics

My top 10 albums for headphones

2011-02-07T09:35:00.000-08:00

Vince Mendoza – Epiphany
Magnificent orchestral arrangements reveal their true beauty and detail on headphones – listen to Ambivalence

Quincy Jones - Sounds Like…
Incredible attention to detail and spectral mixing combined with beautiful and emotional arrangements – listen to Love Me By Name

Frank Zappa – Orchestral Favourites
I use this to demonstrate any form of sound system including great headphones – amazing dynamic clarity - listen to Strictly Genteel

Beach Boys – Surf’s Up
The best combination of songwriting and soundscaping ever - listen to Surf’s Up

Minnie Riperton – Come Into My Garden
The magnificent Charles Stepney and his perfect combination of beauty and detail gorgeously revealed on headphones - listen to Les Fleurs

Earth Wind And Fire - Earth Wind And Fire The Greatest Hits
Charles Stepney again – sounds as fresh as the day it was mixed – listen in particular for the fantastic rhythm arrangements and balance - listen to In The Stone

David Bowie – Low
Just to show that headphone mixing is not just about high fidelity – it’s about innovation and arrangement too – listen to Warszawa

Everything Everything – Man Alive
Brightest hope for intelligent sonic balance and arrangement currently – listen to Schoolin’

Leonard Bernstein – Romantic Favourites For Strings
Amazingly beautiful dynemics and detail perfectly revealed by headphone listening – listen to Fantasia On A Theme By Thomas Tallis

Philip Glass – Koyaanasqatsi
Minimalist giant creates luscious spectral soundscapes which envelops the listener hypnotically – listen to Cloudscape

Heaven 17 @ HMV Picture House Edinburgh, 22nd November 2010, taken by Fishbones Glover: Safe Concerts Photo Gallery: festival photos, gig and event photos and our Oi, you in the crowd galleries

2010-11-24T05:58:00.000-08:00

Heaven 17 @ HMV Picture House Edinburgh, 22nd November 2010, taken by Fishbones Glover: Safe Concerts Photo Gallery: festival photos, gig and event photos and our Oi, you in the crowd galleries

New interview with me at the Selector

2010-11-19T07:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.selector-radio.com/

BBC Music review of P&P collectors edition

2010-11-18T09:52:00.001-08:00

A fascinating insight into the remarkably rapid development of a genre.

Mike Diver 2010-11-18

Stone-cold classic or sacred cow? With synth-pop a prevalent pop force again, La Roux and Little Boots carrying torches first lit in the late 1970s, first-wave acts like Heaven 17 are arguably more fashionable now than ever before. The Sheffield band’s 1981 debut album is regularly cited as hugely influential, a landmark of its time. And it’s certainly a super listen, mixing the steely cool of Ian Marsh and Martyn Ware’s previous outfit, The Human League, with an assured funkiness that echoed the Brian Eno-produced Talking Heads albums of the era. But faultless? Of course not – it’s a debut, with all the inconsistency that typically entails.

The album’s singles remain striking, though, however much some of the surrounding material has inevitably dated. The first, March 1981’s (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang, took leftist ideology into the (lower end of the) chart, much to the dismay of Radio 1’s Mike Read who promptly banned it from airplay. The track was the highest-charting cut from Penthouse and Pavement – proper mainstream recognition would arrive with 1983’s The Luxury Gap and its number two success, Temptation – but Play to Win and the title-track are similarly superb. The former is a twitchily insistent ode to positive mental attitudes, whatever the risks involved; the latter, a sublimely smoothly backed portrait of a work-hard, play-harder attitude and the cost to the soul in question.

Affixed to the end of the original nine-track album are the first of this set’s bonus tracks – 12" versions of I’m Your Money and Are Everything, and Decline of the West. The latter originally appeared on the cassette-only release Music for Stowaways, and further B.E.F. (British Electronic Foundation – "the new partnership that’s opening doors all over the world") tracks appear on the second disc, a collection of lost demos from 1980. These carefully restored recordings illustrate just how keen Ware and Marsh, and vocalist Glenn Gregory, were to expand the synth-pop palette. The demo tracks exude a greater organic quality than their glossed-up final mix counterparts, the band clearly feeling their way around new ideas and directions; they’re ultimately inferior as songs, but certainly interesting, even the instrumentals. Several alternate B.E.F. takes are superbly sharp and direct – the evil pulsations of Uptown Apocalypse and Music to Kill Your Parents By particularly unsettling, a world away from the glamour of The Luxury Gap.

The fine assortment of bonus tracks – and an accompanying DVD documentary – will sell this latest packaging to existing admirers, but newcomers have never had it better either. In its outtakes and experiments Penthouse and Pavement reveals its truest colours yet: it’s no masterpiece, but it is a fascinating insight into the remarkably rapid development of a genre which shows no sign of drifting quietly away into the night.

Heaven 17 P&P collectors edition boxed set - it's gorgeous

2010-11-17T04:22:00.000-08:00

The collector's edition of Penthouse and Pavement has just arrived - seen it for the first time...

We were heavily involved in the design of all the content - it really is probably the best package we've ever released

You can buy it on tour signed by Glenn and I - I strongly recommend it - totally collectable

It contains...

CD1 - remastered P&P

CD2 - original previously unheard and long-lost demos and experiments from post HL split to recording P&P

DVD - The Story of Penthouse and Pavement - our one hour documentary previously only seen on BBC2 this year

5 x double sided card replicas of the 12 inch single covers

detailed full colour booklet with exclusive previously unseen photos

and last but not least...a full-size poster of the original P&P cover artwork scanned at high-res

all in a beautiful 5 inch box featuring the pristine original artwork

It is covetable.....

Martyn x

Heaven 17 on UK tour

2010-11-15T09:16:00.001-08:00

Following Heaven 17s recent performance on Later With Jools Holland, the band will embark on a highly anticipated 30th Anniversary tour of their seminal album "Penthouse And Pavement". The tour kicks off Monday 22nd November at the Edinburgh Picture House.

This will be the first time H17 will perform the Penthouse And Pavement album in its entirety on a nationwide UK tour.

The 8-date tour is as follows: Edinburgh Picture House (Nov 22), Glasgow o2 ABC (Nov 23), Manchester Ritz (Nov 25), Birmingham HMV Institute (Nov 26), London HMV Forum (Nov 28), Oxford o2 Academy (Nov 29), Brighton Corn Exchange (Nov 30) and Bristol 02 Academy (Dec 1). 24 Hour Box Office: 08700 603 777, www.seetickets.com.

To read the press release online - http://www.noblepr.co.uk/Press_Releases/meanfiddler/heaven17.htm

For interview opportunities, review tickets and photo passes, please contact:
Peter Noble at Noble PR Consultancy; 0207 272 7772, peter@noblepr.co.uk

Kubla khan

2010-11-09T03:03:00.001-08:00

Starting work today on a 3 minute soundscape for Radio 4 to accompany the famous Coleridge poem Kubla Khan

The most famous drug driven lyric in history - made in 1797!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Wren St,Camden Town,United Kingdom

Times interview today re Heaven 17

2010-11-08T09:49:00.001-08:00

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:London,United Kingdom

H17 at Leadmill on Wenesday

2010-11-08T06:54:00.001-08:00

Looking forward to this full length gig in prep for our P&P tour layer this month

Still tickets available - and we've never played the Leadmill before!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Glenn and Martyn Q&A at screening of 'The Story Of Penthouse And Pavement'

2010-11-03T06:12:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow night (Thursday 4th at 2045)

As part of the Sheffield Documentary Festival, there will be a screening of the Story of Penthouse and Pavement

Glenn and Martyn will be taking part in a Q&A afterwards

http://sheffdocfest.com/films/show/5043
Now As It Was Then - Heaven 17 The Story of Penthouse & Pavement

Director(s):
James Strong
Producer(s):
James Strong

o United Kingdom
o 2010
o 60 min
o HDCAM 1080/50i
o English

Thirty years after its original release the film tells the story of how Sheffield pop icons Heaven 17's recorded their debut LP Penthouse & Pavement against a backdrop of economic hardship and social division. This is the story of a band, a city and an era that defined popular music.
“It is only right the lens should fall on arguably Sheffield's most influential music period.”
– The Star

Bookmark and Share
Strands

Doc/UK, Music Docs

Festivals:

Credits

Executive Producer:
Andrew Beint

Contact

James Strong

Director/Producer

Strong Pictures

james.strong@mac.com

+44 2073122430

www.strongpictures.co.uk

electricity club interview

2010-11-02T13:04:00.000-07:00

HEAVEN 17: History Will Repeat Itself

Interview with MARTYN WARE

Photo by Tracey Welch

The HEAVEN 17 renaissance continues... following a well received collaboration with LA ROUX for BBC 6Music and not one, but two TV specials featuring the triumphant concert at Sheffield Magna and The Story Of Penthouse and Pavement, Glenn Gregory and Martyn Ware are about to embark on a full UK tour celebrating their landmark debut album after a successful European excursion earlier this year.

Martyn Ware of course was a founder member of THE HUMAN LEAGUE before leaving with Ian Craig Marsh to form the production company BRITISH ELECTRIC FOUNDATION (BEF). With its pop subsidiary HEAVEN 17 featuring Glenn Gregory, the success of Penthouse and Pavement and The Luxury Gap with its international hits Temptation and Come Live With Me led to it becoming the priority project over at BEF Head Office. Simultaneously though, Ware was able to maintain a successful production career which over the years has taken in artists such as TINA TURNER, ASSOCIATES, TERENCE TRENT D'ARBY, ERASURE and MARC ALMOND.

He later founded Illustrious with Vince Clarke to exploit the creative and commercial possibilities of 3D sound technology. Through Illustrious, he also conceived Future Of Sound, a not-for-profit organisation to provide a forum for the discussion of new and convergent art forms. Among those involved are HEAVEN 17's guitarist/programmer Asa Bennett and artist Malcolm Garrett, best known for his album artwork for DURAN DURAN and SIMPLE MINDS.

As part of the 30th Anniversary celebrations, the homecoming show at the Magna featuring the Penthouse and Pavement album and the extended cut of The Story Of Penthouse and Pavement are released as a double DVD package. Featuring additional BEF cover gems Perfect Day and Wichita Lineman alongside Ball of Confusion sang by Billie Godfrey and These Boots Are Made for Walking featuring PROPAGANDA's Claudia Brücken, Strong Films have successfully captured the evening's vibrant performance including the futuristic LED screen projections where a variety of visual artists were given free reign to interpret HEAVEN 17 and BEF's music of distinct quality. These digital videos have been included as bonuses along with rehearsal footage to give a unique multimedia insight into this special live presentation.

Also being released is a deluxe 3 disc collector's edition of Penthouse and Pavement featuring a CD demos from 1980 with versions of songs from the 'Pavement' side predating the Linn Drum Computer. These showcase a unique hybrid funk driven by crashing early HUMAN LEAGUE style rhythm sounds. In addition, there are alternate mixes of instrumentals like Music To Kill Your Parents By, Uptown Apocalypse and A Baby Called Billy from the BEF Music For Stowaways sessions.

In the midst of a busy promotional schedule for the Penthouse and Pavement tour and its related artefacts, Martyn Ware took time out to talk to The Electricity Club about his career and the resurgent interest in HEAVEN 17.

How was it playing Back To The Phuture night at Bestival in September? I understand you played And That's No Lie?

It was an amazing event actually. We did an hour with Elly from LA ROUX on Radio Bestival or whatever, so that was before we even went on stage, that was quite fun. It was in a big top, we headlined that night. It's kind of a warm-up because the main days are Friday, Saturday and Sunday but there was like 8500 people there. The big top was completely full but more to the point, it was about 90% people under 30 and they all got it. It was not a shock as such but very heartening to see that people were digging it and presumably, most of them weren't familiar with a lot of the songs!

Elly from LA ROUX joined you on stage for Sign Your Name. Are there any plans to work together in the studio?

We're constantly talking about doing stuff. It's not so much us. Elly, she's writing a new album and I think she's trying not to be too distracted. But we are intent on working together. Obviously at some point, we've still got an intention of possibly re-releasing Temptation with her singing the lead part.

I spoke to your backing singer Billie Godfrey earlier this year and she suggested that Are You Ready? from Before After might be good as a LA SEVENTEEN collaboration?

*laughs* She would do cos she co-wrote it! We love Billie. I do like that song; we've only performed it live once I think at The Scala so we may revisit that. We've got seven albums worth of stuff to pick from so you can't fit everything in, it's impossible!

You have a UK tour this November playing the whole of Penthouse and Pavement. Have you arranged anything different for the forthcoming shows?

Me and Glenn were discussing the tracklisting for the new tour and he put a provisional one together. I looked at it and it was two hours long! Even hardened HEAVEN 17 fans would find it a bit wearing! We do have a lot of stuff and we will do a couple of interesting 'new' things on the tour.

Anything you can give away?

Not yet, we haven't really narrowed it down but we are planning to do at least one track HEAVEN 17 track that we've not done before and then another BEF track.

How did you find touring Europe in your own right earlier in the year?

Photo by Lori Tarchala

Tremendous, it was a lot of fun. It was great touring on a sleeper bus, everyone loved it. Not particularly comfortable but Glenn liked it because he could hold court and it was like being in his own pub travelling around! Of course, I've given up drinking now which is not a good thing when you're touring. It's good fun for us, not a chore and I'm sure we'd think differently if it was like 50 odd dates. A short tour, we look forward to very much. Also, the people we work with are all so professional, a lot of them work with other bands and say they enjoy working with us a lot. It's a nice vibe. It's driven by a love of music and everybody gets on. Isn't that the ideal kind of job to have?

I was at the Cologne show and it was a mad evening that went on for ages due to a few technical hiccups but you really rose to the occasion with Glenn doing a few acoustic renditions. What are your personal memories of that night?

Is that the one where the drum kit fell apart?

Yes, and someone threw some underwear at you!

Oh, I loved that! The underwear was great! The one I particularly remember was Hamburg at Fabric. It was astonishing, just doing loads of encores until we ran out. The reception that we received generally in Germany was just outstanding, we weren't really expecting it. We thought we'd be well received but as a curious pleasure rather than in some cases, ecstatic! So if we get that kind of response on the British shows, we'll be very happy.

Photo by Tracey Welch

Which song did you find the most challenging to recreate for the live environment?

I'm Your Money, it's difficult because it's such a particular sounding record that. We weren't writing songs with the anticipation of playing them live so I'm Your Money is very... say for instance we waved a magic wand and it was exactly the backing track that we did... we can't do because we don't have the original tapes. But if it was exactly the same backing track as we did in the 1981, I think it would really jar on the ear! It's incredibly repetitive and monotonous but on record, it sounds great. So you kind of have to back off on the frequencies that really hurt and really make it work in a different way. What's made it work for us is the brilliance of Julian Crampton on the synth bass; he's given it all sorts of funky inflections. It's leaning toward that FUNKADELIC thing which is great. It wasn't difficult in terms of programming; it was more in terms of vibe.

I've noticed Glenn has a habit of missing his cues live. What's the thing you always hope you don't do during a gig?

Losing my voice towards the end is a big issue because I do a lot of singing, probably more than people realise. The focus is on Glenn obviously and Billie but when are only touring with one girl, which is what we're doing with the Penthouse and Pavement line-up, what we normally use the second girl for plus all the unison and harmonies stuff with Glenn is me and it's tough on the voice. What's particularly tough is the whole monitoring set-up is for Glenn which is fine for him because he's got in-ear monitoring and he's the lead singer so he can have what he wants basically...I normally have to put up with what's left! *laughs* So you can easily strain your voice if you're not careful. It doesn't matter on one-off gigs particularly but on a tour you've really got to be careful.

Have you had any voice training or anything?

No, but I know how to breathe and how to achieve what I want economically and when to do chest and when to do falsetto, what my break point is; and I've learnt through just literally being streetwise about it, what works and what doesn't. Like Glenn, my voice has got more powerful over the years... if we were to sing acappella, I'd out-sing Glenn in terms of volume! Also, I've got a tendency in winter to get chest infections if I'm not careful so it's always an issue for me... it's happened on two tours so far and it's a horrible thing when you have to sing through that! *laughs*

HEAVEN 17's profile had been enhanced by the LA ROUX collaboration and the two Penthouse and Pavement programmes on the BBC including the documentary.

That was amazing! It's an endorsement of the idea that you should just do stuff rather than think about it too much because a good friend of ours, Joe Strong of Strong Films had wanted to do proper HEAVEN 17 documentary about that period of our development for a while. He'd heard all the stories when we were out getting p*ssed and thought it would make a good story. So we did it for our own reasons and we were just going to release it on DVD.

It was just one of those fortunate coincidences. Joe has a lot of contacts in the BBC and at the time, he mentioned to somebody that he just finished editing and this person said "that's good because we're just doing an 80s season on BBC2, would you like to launch it?". Originally, the idea was to have two solid hours of HEAVEN 17 on BBC and we were going "this is insane!", you couldn't buy that kind of exposure! The only other band that's got that kind of exposure this year as a legacy act is THE ROLLING STONES!

Of course, it cost quite a lot of money to push it though and get it all edited and we're still trying to make the money back but the point is, if you show faith in quality material and it's shot well and the story's interesting, it creates a virtuous circle of people having confidence that you're doing things for the right reason. That means a lot in the BBC in particular because they're not so commercially driven, they just want good quality stuff.

And it's led to all sorts for us. It's led to a massively increased amount of live work because we've just signed to William Morris Agency who are huge. And at the very outset from when we signed to them, we said "there's no point in getting signed to a bigger agency if we're going to get lost in their vast slate of artists but we want establish ourselves as credible artists from that period and we want top perform as credible artists, not just some trixy 80's pop band! That's where we want to go, can you help us?" And they said "That's fine, then if you do it properly, we can get you into all sorts of festivals." We've hardly scraped the surface in terms of festivals across the world, we've done a couple in Europe but the rest have been in the UK. We've never yet played properly live in America which is amazing frankly seeing as we had a No1 record in the Billboard Dance Charts in the 80s with Let Me Go.

So we have a vision for the future for the first time in a long, long time. We have a structured plan and we got David Stanbury who's our new manager... we're really putting some effort and money into it. For the first six months of this year, we were running at a loss. But now it's paying back. It's a big thing to do when you don't have the support of a record company, much harder. There's lots of things you can do that don't require big time logistic support like The Electricity Club and lots of other blogs around the world. We've put a lot of effort into it, we believe in what we're doing and we believed what we were doing in the past was really good and we believe that we're good at performing it. So do fortunately, the audience.

How did you convince Phil Oakey to discuss the break-up of the original HUMAN LEAGUE on the documentary?

What it was, we were going up to Sheffield to perform at a charity gig for a friend of ours Dave Kilner from Radio Hallam who unfortunately died. We'd done some filming when Glenn and James said "can't you just ring up Phil?" cos we're mates now. But he's notoriously difficult to contact, let alone get him to approve anything! So they kept bugging me and bugging me. I said I'd give Phil a call and see what happens! I said "we're in Sheffield City Hall... it will take about quarter of an hour, would you come down?". And he said yes! I couldn't believe it! So I took my little flip HD camera, set it up on my home tripod... it came out looking like CCTV footage in an interrogation room which I quite like because we didn't have any proper lighting or anything! But we didn't have anything planned. He didn't say "don't ask me about this", I just asked him as a mate what he thought and he was very candid.

You're working a lot with Mark Jones and his Back To the Phuture brand. Of course, his Wall Of Sound label have signed THE HUMAN LEAGUE... you know what I'm going to ask? Any chance of you and Phil Oakey writing or recording together again?

I don't know, I personally would love to do it. I don't have any issues left. Some of the best creative work I've ever been involved with was writing with Phil, he's a brilliant lyric and leadline writer. What can I say? The first two HUMAN LEAGUE albums Reproduction and Travelogue have some genuinely fantastic moments on them. Still 'til this day, I think things like The Black Hit Of Space and Marianne are unsurpassable in that genre to be honest. I'd love to work with Phil, it might be a bit strange after all these years but I personally would love it.

I understand Phil might be doing a solo album in parallel with THE HUMAN LEAGUE so I don't know if...

... there's an opportunity possibly! Yeah, he seems a lot more open to collaboration now. He's always done a bit before, he did Together In Electric Dreams and that stuff with ALL SEEING EYE at one point but it's good for him to spread his wings a bit because he's got an iconic voice and songwriting style. It's not for me to say but there is a possibility he could work in different environments other than THE HUMAN LEAGUE. Sometimes it's just good to free yourself to do something with no expectations.

So have you got anything going on outside of HEAVEN 17 at the moment?

I'm doing the new BEF album Dark. I'm a bit nervous about saying which tracks I'm doing in case anyone nicks the idea but I suppose I could tell you one of them... last week I just finished Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time by THE DELFONICS. It sounds amazing even though I say so myself, I'm so pleased with it. It's done in a kind of darker fashion.

Are you able to say who's singing it?

I don't know, I haven't got any singers yet, I've just done the backing tracks. I'm still open to suggestions if you've got any ideas! But it has to be either established artists or contemporary artists who are quite high profile, that's the only thing! I've got plenty of people suggesting complete unknowns to me and I just haven't got room for that because I've got to sell some albums. Talent we're not short of but I need to get some famous people on board.

The concept works and I'm really pleased with it. Glenn's obviously going to do it and Martin Fry from ABC's agreed to do one. I've not asked Elly from LA ROUX but I'd be surprised if she said no... and so on and so forth. There are various people, contemporary singers that I like. I really like the singer from EVERYTHING EVERYTHING, I like his voice a lot. I think he might be suitable for something quite dark. I'm thinking about getting some actors in as well. I quite like the Rod McKuen kind of direction or William Shatner, depending on how you look at it *laughs*

Penthouse and Pavement is being reissued in a 3 disc package with a CD of demos. How different do these sound compared with the recorded versions? As different as the two versions of Temptation?

Some of them are...some of them are very similar and we just polished them up. But the biggest revelations are the demos that we found that were lost for 30 years literally of Play To Win, Penthouse And Pavement and Soul Warfare which are awe inspiringly different and funky. They sound like 'rare groove' versions of HEAVEN 17. Both myself and Glenn had completely forgotten they existed. Just for those three tracks alone, I was so vibing on that... I think that's worth the purchase price alone. But there's a whole bunch of half baked/half finished experiments, there's about half an hours worth of different experimental tracks that never turned into anything which we found as well which was really exciting. That CD is pretty damn good actually, I must say! And it was all made 'round about this time thirty years ago.

With those three 'Pavement' demos you just mentioned, can I just ask what you were using rhythmically on those because I'm assuming you didn't have the Linn Drum Computer at that point?

No, it was just immediately prior to us getting the Linn Drum so those original demos we'd have been using the Roland System 100. If the whole album had sounded like the 'Penthouse' side, then it would have been based on these demos if you know what I mean. But the guitar and bass playing, this was when we first met John Wilson and there was no pressure on him, he was pouring out... very relaxed playing and super funky! He was a very young guy bear in mind, so we go into a professional studio... he still great on the album but now you can hear the difference. He was very relaxed in Sheffield, kind of loose in that great way but down in Townhouse when we recorded him, he was more pin sharp but not quite as loose.

Can I ask whatever happened to John Wilson?

Yes, you can. He recorded with us for three albums and then he just kind of disappeared. He worked with various people as a session player for a while but he was always incredibly shy, he wasn't made for the rough 'n' tumble of the music business. And I think what happened if I remember rightly is somebody didn't pay him for a bunch of sessions he did. These are the sort of things you have to roll with the punches or else you'll never have a music career, disappointment happens on a weekly basis! But he just couldn't handle it, he was very religious and I think he just thought "I don't want any of this" and went back to his bedroom... I think! For all I know, he might be out there playing, we'd love to contact him and offer him some work.

You were harnessing a lot of new digital technology like the Linn Drum Computer at the time which was one of the distinguishing features of HEAVEN 17 at the time. How did that open up your horizons as to what you could achieve musically for the album?

The Linn Drum became within a day, the new direction... that and discovering John Wilson were the two things that defined Penthouse and Pavement. I just got on well with programming it. It appealed to my mentality because you had to approach it from breaking the song down into bars and then at the end of a section you fill, it appealed to the logical part of my brain very much. It got to the point where I could programme really complex stuff in an hour for a 4-5 minute song. That would be the definitive thing, it's not like "it kind of sounds alright, what shall we do?" because the sounds were very solid and good. They responded to an experienced engineer or producer toughening them up or compressing them.

It was our idea of heaven after subjecting ourselves to desistitudes of live players. Suddenly, we controlled something that sounded kind of real so it was the ideal bridge for us from the purely electronic world to the apparently real world. But it was rhythmic surrealism because there was loads of stuff I could do with the Linn Drum that was physically impossible for a drummer... and that I got criticised by various drummers saying "you couldn't even play that!" But well, that's good because then we're doing something no-one else has ever done before!

So how does Joel McFarland, your live drummer find doing all this stuff?

He regards it as an amazing challenge. He's got a first class degree in percussion from The Royal Academy of Music, he's one of these dudes who could do the EVELYN GLENNIE thing with multiple mallets and stuff. He can play STOCKHAUSEN, all that sh*t! His favourite thing is Linn Drum programming so we've got the actual original sounds and we just put them into his Yamaha brain, the central processing unit for his drum kit and we just wind him up and let him go!

What did you use for percussion on the more electronic 'Penthouse' side, was it an analogue drum machine?

I think it was all System 100 although we did have a Roland TR606 but the sounds were so terrible! And the only other drum machine we had was a Doctor Rhythm.

The subject matter in Penthouse and Pavement is still relevant in the current climate. Musical trends are cyclical but so it seems are politics and economics. What are your thoughts on that?

Incredibly sad! But I've got a funny story for you... somebody on Facebook today said "Can't believe it! Miners are celebrating, Liverpudlians are celebrating! Is Margaret Thatcher dead?" It just made me laugh, it's very good isn't it?

I think what is doubly ironic is one of the lines on the first song of Penthouse and Pavement is "History will repeat itself"... and it has! And oh my god, we've got some suffering to come! I mean morally and conceptually, I fear for the working classes in Britain. I think there will be civil insurrection. And I've lost count of the number of people who say we should reissue (We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang!

Are there any plans to take The Luxury Gap out live in the future?

Yes! Glenn in his traditional role as sceptic is 'um-ing' and 'ah-ing' while in my traditional role as 'bull in a china shop' is going "of course we're going to do it"! So it's somewhere between the two. It's looking quite likely that we'll be doing another European series of dates in late Autumn next year. And we almost certainly will do The Luxury Gap there as a trial before we bring it over to Britain.

It's a different kind of album to do live because I think it's going to require an extra keyboard player because of all the brass and the strings. We don't really like putting too much on the backing track, you can end up sounding a bit karaoke if you're not careful. But then it's a cost issue, it's all difficult. For instance, the European tour we did... even though it did very well at the box office, it just about broke even because of the production we were carting around with us. It's a bit more economical in Britain because we'll be selling more tickets anyway. It's fine here but in Europe, you have to show faith and spend a bit of money to break the market.

The Luxury Gap sold a lot more than Penthouse and Pavement, it was more directed at the general public rather than the cognoscenti. That's the definition of popular music, if you can do it intelligently then you've got the best of both worlds. I'm very proud of The Luxury Gap, it a very good album. Musically it's very intelligent, there are certain elements that are superlative frankly like having THE PHENIX HORNS ESQUIRE, Temptation etc. Some of the lesser known tracks work really well, you've got Simon Phillips on drums...

... Lady Ice And Mr Hex is one of my favourites

Yeah, I mean it's a brilliant piece, certain elements of it are serendipitously brilliant but then I'm a big fan of How Men Are looking back on it. I think it's an underrated album and that was when we were probably in our most daring and creative phase. I regard Penthouse and Pavement as the most ground breaking of the albums but that's primarily because of what was going on around it at the time.

Looking back on the Pleasure One and Teddy Bear, Duke & Psycho period after that, what do you think now?

I think after How Men Are, several things happened. There was an overall moving away from daring music that was going on in the British music scene towards a more structured marketed thing. We weren't new anymore so the only path we had to go down was carrying on writing good pop songs. And during How Men Are when we were trying to get on Top Of The Pops to do Sunset Now, Glenn exploded his cartilage in his knee on the day we were meant to film that and he had to go to hospital. And nobody but nobody f***ed off the BBC in those days! If you ever f***ed up their schedules, you never got on Top Of The Pops again and that's exactly what happened! Which is really wrong but that's just the way it was! That kind of killed the promotional activity on that album which is a real pity... not abroad but just in Britain.

So consequently when it came to making Pleasure One, we'd lost our confidence a bit because it felt like we were slipping. So we started employing more session players and moving towards a more traditional rock sound. And that wasn't a deliberate decision. We lost confidence not in our songwriting but in the sound that we had, so it like really lost a bit of identity...

... yes, it happened to THE HUMAN LEAGUE, OMD, ULTRAVOX; it happened to the whole lot of you!

We wanted to move on but there wasn't anywhere to move on to from a sound point of view. We couldn't go back to being all electronic, it seemed like we had to keep trying new stuff but in the end, it sounded a bit more old fashioned. Having said that, I think Contenders is one of my favourite tracks we ever did, I really like that. But generally, the album wasn't fantastic I have to say!

And Teddy Bear, Duke & Psycho was the nail in the coffin; we'd completely lost our way by then as far as I was concerned! We were retreading some ideas and some of the things we were doing were not working. I think we all knew it had run its course at that point. But ironically, it wasn't that we'd run out of musical ideas, it was just that vehicle because at that time, I was doing TERENCE TRENT D'ARBY's album which showed myself, Glenn and Ian that we'd still got creative ideas but we'd lost focus on what HEAVEN 17 should be at that point.

Photo by Tracey Welch

The break did you good as you came back with Bigger Than America in 1996.

I really like that album, it was our attempt to get back to the electronic sound. I said we've only got one chance to do this 'retro' thing and show people because everyone was in the middle of that 'dance' thing at that time. We thought we'd show them what these original sounds are like in a song context and things like Dive, Bigger Than America and We Blame Love, they're really good.

But you had a setback almost straight away. Any thoughts about how that album disappeared off the radar?

It was bad timing, we signed to an imprint that was owned by the guys who did SNAP! They then basically lost interest in their label about a month after our record came out and it reverted back to Warners in Britain who'd got no interest whatsoever in the album so they just killed it!, They were just terrible, they'd got no idea and didn't particularly like it. It was just marking time really. Which was a pity because there was some good things on that album, it could have been more successful. I think we might re-release it on our website.

You've re-released your last album Before After through the website as a limited edition of 100, each in unique artwork. How did this idea come about ?

What happened was we originally couldn't find anybody to put it out so we pressed some up ourselves to sell it and then it got picked up by another label. But we'd forgotten there were 100 that we'd pressed up that were just sitting around in a box. So these albums are still in the wrapper, we might as well sell these. And then we came up with the idea from seeing an exhibition of an artist who had done 50 different covers for a 12 inch single. And I thought wouldn't it be great to do 100 different album covers and do it as an art piece, signed with a letter of authenticity. It'll help pay for the next album that we make or whatever. And so we did it and it came out really well. They're all excellent, the great thing is people have started going when they get their copy "oh, I've got Number 43 and this is what it looks like... " and because they're all completely different, they post them up on line. It's really nice. We'll sell them at the gigs as well and it'll sell out once we start touring.

Photo by Tracey Welch

What's next for yourself? Will you do another ambient project with Vince Clarke?

We're not going to do anymore new stuff on Mute but there is ten years of Illustrious output which I've never released. So I might do a big boxed set in some interesting format which I've yet to determine.

I love Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle ...

... it's good isn't it? We've got seven or eight hours of this stuff, some of it's really good. I'm sitting on it really because I know somebody will want to buy it eventually. Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle is not facile stuff, some thought went into it and it's beautiful... it's not whale song or terrible spa music! And that album was rendered in binaural so it does mess with your head when you listen to it on headphones.

Anything else?

I'm just negotiating doing a Future Of Sound event in Sydney Opera House next June which is going to be called Future Of The Centres. I'm probably going to compose a new piece for that together with various other artists. I've been talking to The British Film Institute about doing a soundtrack to a quite important Russian science fiction film from the 1920s which I can't reveal what it is. That would almost certainly be on at the BFI in the middle of next year. I'm looking at various other compositional stuff with the BFI where they're re-examining what was new over the years. I'm hoping to be the music curator for that. There's quite a lot of stuff coming up.

The Electricity Club gives its warmest thanks to Martyn Ware

Additional thanks go to Peter Noble at Noble PR and Kayleigh Watson at Name PR

The deluxe 3 disc collector's edition of Penthouse and Pavement is released by Virgin Records on 22nd November 2010

The Penthouse and Pavement Live in Concert with The Story Of Penthouse And Pavement double DVD is released by Blink TV on 15th November 2010 and will be available at the merchandise stand during the tour.

HEAVEN 17's 30th Anniversary Penthouse and Pavement Tour

Ticket Hotline - 08700 603 777 or www.seetickets.com.

Dates include: Edinburgh HMV Picture House (22nd November), Glasgow O2 ABC (23rd November), Manchester Ritz (25th November), Birmingham HMV Institute (26th November), London HMV Forum (28th November), Oxford O2 Academy (29th November), Brighton Corn Exchange (30th November), Bristol O2 Academy (1st December)

www.heaven17.com

www.illustriouscompany.co.uk

www.futureofsound.org

by Chi Ming Lai
23rd October 2010

Bookmark & Share

.netShoutout

100zakladok

2 Tag

2linkme

7Live7.com

A1‑Webmarks

Add.io

Adifni

Aero

All My Faves

Amazon

Amen Me!

AOL Mail

Arto

Aviary Capture

Baang

Baidu

Bebo

Bentio

BiggerPockets

Bit.ly

BizSugar

Bleetbox

Blinklist

Blip

Blogger

Bloggy

Blogmarks

Blogtrottr

Blurpalicious

Boardlite

Bobrdobr

BonzoBox

Bookmarked

BookmarkingNet

Bookmarky.cz

Bookmerken

Bordom

Box.net

Brainify

Bryderi.se

BuddyMarks

Buzzzy

Camyoo

Care2

Chiq

Cirip

CiteULike

ClassicalPlace

Clickazoo

clp.ly

Cndig

Colivia.de

Communicate

Connotea

COSMiQ

Delicious

DesignBump

Designmoo

DigaCultura

Digg

Diggita

Diglog

Digo

DigThisHost

Digzign

Diigo

Dipdive

DoMelhor

Dosti

DotNetKicks

DotShare

Douban

Drimio

Dropjack

Dwellicious

Dzone

Edelight

eKudos

elefanta.pl

Email App

Embarkons

euCliquei

Evernote

extraplay

EzySpot

Fabulously40

Facebook

Fark

Farkinda

FAVable

Faves

favlog

Favoriten

Favorites

Favoritus

Flaker

Floss.pro

Folkd

FollowTags

forceindya

FreeDictionary

Fresqui

FriendFeed

Friendster

funP

fwisp

Gabbr

Gacetilla

Gamekicker

GiveALink

GlobalGrind

Gmail

Good Noows

Google

Google Buzz

Google Reader

Gravee

GreaterDebater

Grono.net

Grumper

Haber.gen.tr

Hacker News

Hadash Hot

Hatena

Hazarkor

Healthimize

Hedgehogs

HelloTxt

Hipstr

Hitmarks

Hot Bookmark

Hotklix

Hotmail

HTML Validator

Hyves

ideaREF!

Identi.ca

ihavegot

Informazione

Instapaper

iOrbix

iSociety

iWiW

Jamespot

Jisko

JoliPrint

Jumptags

Kaboodle

Kaevur

Kipup

KiRTSY

Kledy

Kommenting

koornk

La tafanera

Laaikit

Ladenzeile

Librerio

Lifestream

Link Ninja

Link-a-Gogo

Links Gutter

LinkShares

Linkuj.cz

Livefavoris

LiveJournal

LockerBlogger

Logger24

Lynki

Markme

Mashbord

Mawindo

Meccho

meinVZ

Mekusharim

Memori.ru

Menéame

Messenger

Mindbodygreen

Mister Wong

Mixx

Moemesto.ru

mototagz

mRcNEtwORK

Multiply

myAOL

Mylinkvault

MySpace

N4G

NetLog

Netvibes

Netvouz

NewsTrust

Newsvine

Nujij

OKNOtizie

Oneview

Orkut

Osmosus

Oyyla

Packg

Pafnet

PDF Online

PDFmyURL

PhoneFavs

PimpThisBlog

Ping.fm

Planypus

Plaxo

Plurk

Pochval

PopEdition

Posteezy

Posterous

Prati.ba

PrintFriendly

Pusha

QRF.in

Quantcast

Qzone

Read It Later

receeve.it

Rediff MyPage

RedKum

Scoop.at

Segnalo

Sekoman

Shaveh

She Told Me

Simpy

Sina Weibo

Slashdot

SMI

SodaHead

Sonico

Speedtile

Sphinn

Spoken To You

sportpost

springpad

Spruzer

Squidoo

Startaid

Startlap

StoryFollower

studiVZ

Stuffpit

StumbleUpon

Stumpedia

Stylehive

Surfpeople

Svejo

Symbaloo

TagMarks.de

Tagvn

Tagza

Tarpipe

TellMyPolitician

The Web Blend

Thinkfinity

ThisNext

Throwpile

Tip'd

TopSiteler

Transferr

Translate

Tulinq

Tumblr

Tusul

Tvinx

TweetMeme

Twitter

TwitThis

Typepad

Urlaubswerk

Viadeo

Virb

VisitezMonSite

VKontakte

VybraliSME

Vyoom

Webnews

Whois Lookup

Windy Citizen

WireFan

WordPress

Worio

Wykop

Xanga

Y! Bookmarks

Y! Buzz

Y! Mail

Yammer

Yardbarker

Yigg

Yoolink

Yorumcuyum

Youblr

Youbookmarks

YouMob

Zakladok.net

Zanatic

ZooLoo

Get AddThis for Firefox Privacy AddThis

Heaven 17 play the Leadmill Sheffield next week!

2010-11-02T06:28:00.001-07:00

Heaven 17 @ Sheffield Leadmill - Wednesday November 10th

Before the UK Tour kicks off at the end of the month, the band have announced a very special warm up show at The Sheffield Leadmill as part of the venue's 30th Anniversary celebrations, on Wednesday 10th November 2010. And to follow the show The Leadmill will be bringing back its legendary 80s night 'Planet Earth'.

Tickets are available here : http://www.leadmill.co.uk/gigs.php?id=256

a film of Paul Morley interviewing Heaven 17 for Guardian Online

2010-10-29T08:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/interactive/2010/oct/29/paul-morley-showing-off-nostalgia

Heaven 17 by Paul Morley

2010-10-27T10:20:00.000-07:00

As pop music has spiralled back and forwards across its own time and space over the past 20 years, while simultaneously fragmenting into thousands of genres and sub-genres, and as sampling, MP3 culture and a fundamental collaging mentality has got carried away with modifying the past, some music, which seemed doomed to stay stuck in the past, has resurfaced in the present and sounds just about as fresh and pertinent as ever. We now live in The Aftermath, where all pop music is either actually from the past, freed from its imprisoned context by the internet, where everything recorded can happen at once, or is a mutant, intoxicating transformation of the past, randomly, attentively mixing up genres, eras, instruments, styles, beats, fashions. The Aftermath is where the past gets gossiped about; it's a series of colliding echoes about the past; it's a gathering of rumours about what happened to pop music up to and including and beyond the vinyl era.

Those groups that indirectly predicted such a liquid world of self-invented make-believe and who anticipated the ability to use electronics to construct unlikely fantasy genres make a little more sense now than they have done for a quarter of a century. The nicely-now Gorillaz model of a themed suite of interconnected, attractively pulsating electronic moodscapes that use carefully organised enticing vocal appearances to tell a story is very much rooted in Heaven 17 and their original parent company, the British Electric Foundation. During the Britpop time of Blur and co something like Heaven 17 seemed particularly antique, and not necessarily the type of thing that would automatically enter the middlebrow Q magazine-type canon, and those of us who fancied it as one of the great British albums had to keep quiet or appear a little Simon Bates.

During the 1990s, playing Heaven 17's debut album Penthouse and Pavement felt like looking back just a little too much. The album itself seemed to tell an abstract story about the 80s, the excess and brutality, the hedonism and synth drums, the inequality and MTV gloss, that quickly felt old-fashioned. The 80s was in the process of becoming a decade like the 60s and 70s, where what was done was done, and to stick with such music meant that you were not keeping up with important trends, and you were exiled from the current. This was the most shameful thing imaginable to fans of pop music who had arrived in their 20s just in time to experience the ideologically reinforced experimental energy of post-punk music, having lived as awakening teenagers through the years where the serious, suggestive glam of Roxy, Bowie and Bolan had transformed into the revolution of punk. Suddenly, you could feel abandoned, passionate about a music that was now left in the past, like the music you initially rejected because it seemed incapable of moving with the times, of responding to the various new technologies, social contexts and entertainment possibilities that were constantly shifting into position. Age had hit you, and of course, as Angela Carter had pointed out, nostalgia was the vice of the aged.

Penthouse and Pavement contained conceptually exuberant post-Kraftwerk electronic music designed with an attitude that mixed a fan's appreciation for strange, obscure music and seven inch pop's dazzling highs with an almost theoretical approach to the form and function of pop music. On its release in 1981, Penthouse and Pavement seemed all about the future, and as in the moment, and on the edge of the very next moment, as pop is meant to be.

By the 1990s the relentless forward momentum of electronic music, and its explosion into a remixed variety of dance forms that incorporated experimental approaches, appeared to have left Heaven 17 stranded. This seemed especially wounding considering that the group, emerging from the changing shape of the Human League, who had set in motion many of the textures and techniques of a certain sort of witty, wary machine-modelled robotic pop, were so in favour of a future that pulled away from the idea of revivalism and nostalgia. In a way, the Human League and then Heaven 17 satirised and converted the temptations of nostalgia, and turned their own obsessions with what had happened before, which tended to be 50s and 60s versions of a possible future, into a 1980s version of a possible future. This version of the future was deeply suspicious of third, fourth, fifth hand guitar rock poses and any more rounds of the kind of riffs that seemed to have reached a limit during punk.

Heaven 17 failed to add anything to their 80s repertoire, overrun by the house and acid of those that took Kraftwerk and co into the club, and during the1990s were pretty much suspended in time, on what turned out to be a long voyage into the future. Two remaining members of the original trio, Glenn Gregory and Martyn Ware, patiently kept the name alive, even as the group lay in cold storage. Now and then, the group woke up a little too early. They dabbled in those creaky Here and Now nostalgia package tours, which threatened to consign them forever into that version of the past labelled at best kitsch and at worst Tremeloe Hell. The Here and Now experience, which they relate with horror and which involves them drawing a line in the sand at Butlins in Minehead, encouraged them to go back to sleep for a while as their journey continued. Eventually, they could wake up in a new world of Google, Hot Chip and LCD Soundsystem, where their policy of sound, and their combination of art, science, glam, image, pop, post-punk and Sheffield feel is part of an internetworked pop universe more Kraftwerk-shaped than Beatles-shaped. They arrived in The Aftermath, where they belonged all along, where the playing and celebrating of Penthouse and Pavement is totally permitted. The group can go on tour playing the album in its entirety, not looking back in desperation, anxiously lusting after dead and gone pseudo-good old days, but as a speculative examination of how pop music has ended up the way it has, as an aftermath.

In The Aftermath, new young pop stars like La Roux treat them with reverence and American hip-hop pop technicians replicate their drums sounds and electronic patterns.This means that they were somewhere between being ahead of their time and fortunately being from that era that new shuffle-era pop musicians making their music on computers and samplers fetishise over in much the same way 60s rock guitarists would worship and decode the picking and chording of original blues pioneers.

Glenn and Martyn visit me in the Showing Off... studios, and much to our delight, we can discuss the past, present and future of Heaven 17 not in the context of the shameful end of the pier and dismal nostalgia shows. They found the future where they thought it would be in the first place. In the 21st century, near shadows thrown by A Clockwork Orange, 1984 and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, where nothing is quite what it was, because the past can now be put together in radical new ways. They travelled through time, and arrived at their destination intact.

• Heaven 17's 30th Anniversary Penthouse And Pavement UK tour starts in Edinburgh on 22 November. Virgin/EMI Records release a Penthouse And Pavement: Collector's Edition set the sam day. Further info: www.heaven17.com

Heaven 17 on BBC2 tonight at 2355

2010-10-22T01:39:00.000-07:00

Today, 23:55 on BBC Two (except Northern Ireland (Analogue), Wales (Analogue))

Joining Jools on the sixth show of the series will be: Duffy, as the Welsh songstress returning with her second album Endlessly, the follow-up to her multi-million selling debut album in a career launched on 'Later' some three years ago; Sheffield's finest Heaven 17, back in the saddle again for their 30th anniversary UK tour celebrating their groundbreaking album, Penthouse And Pavement, with its synth-popfunk take on the first years of Thatcherism and hits like Temptation; New Jersey rock and rollers The Gaslight Anthem with songs from their second album, American Slang, updating the blue collar rock that makes Bruce Springsteen a firm fan.

Jazz legend Herbie Hancock chats about his latest multi-artist album, The Imagine Project, plus there's chat with Peter Asher, former pop star, A&R supremo and producer, about the early days of Apple.

Heaven 17 at the HMV Forum in London

2010-10-21T10:05:00.000-07:00

80s electro-pop sensations Heaven 17, return to the stage to perform in its entirety, their highly acclaimed album, Penthouse and Pavement, celebrating its 30th birthday and special edition re-release!

Featuring original members Glenn Gregory and Martyn Ware, Heaven 17 come to the HMV Forum, on Sunday 28th November, support coming from Mark Jones, Wall of Sound DJ playing in the best in 80s and electro!

This multimedia show is the first of its kind, integrating art and concert all in one show! From the moment you walk through the door, you will be immersed in Penthouse and Pavement with contribution from the most established and up and coming names in art and design.

Dont miss your chance to witness Heaven 17 reignite this seminal album, 30 years after its release!

Legendary... crossover pop at its greatest" - NME

Penthouse and Pavement is absorbing... a tribute to the lost industry of Sheffield" The Guardian

www.seetickets.com for tickets

Vintage at Gooood 2010 Highlights

2010-10-20T02:52:00.000-07:00

2010-10-20T02:42:00.000-07:00

Heaven 17 on Later Live last night

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00vjfqp/Later_Live..._with_Jools_Holland_Series_37_Episode_6/

And somebody has put it on the Youtube already...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIiJ3B1t1gI

I'm speaking at this Ted event

2010-10-18T12:33:00.000-07:00

http://blog.ted.com/2010/10/18/thomas-dolby-hosts-a-tedx-and-youre-invited/

TED’s Musical Director, Thomas Dolby, lives at the crossroads of music and technology — and he’s hosting a TEDx that will take you there too. On Nov. 6, 2010, he and the TEDxAldeburghMusic team invite you to the Snape Maltings concert hall, just outside Aldeburgh in Suffolk, for a day of talks and performances from the edge of music and tech.

Speakers including William Orbit (he produced Madonna’s Ray of Light) … David Toop (author of the classic Ocean of Sound, ex-Flying Lizards) … Tod Machover (watch his TEDTalk) … Imogen Heap (watch her TEDTalk) … Martyn Ware (founder of the Human League and Heaven 17) … pianist Louis Lortie, sound designer Nick Ryan, cellist and composer Peter Gregson, musician/inventor Tim Exile, with images from United Visuals Artists … and all hosted by Thomas Dolby (watch a few of his TEDTalks).

Campfire lecture at ditto

2010-10-15T05:18:00.000-07:00

http://vimeo.com/15324887
highlights of Campfire at ditto - I'm talking about my 30 year career in music

Heaven 17 on Later with Jools Holland

2010-10-12T05:55:00.000-07:00

Heaven 17 have been confirmed as special guests on Later With Jools Holland. The programme will be transmitted LIVE on Tuesday 19th at 10.00 p.m. on BBC2 and the pre-recorded programme will transmit on Friday 22nd October at 11.45pm on BBC2.

Heaven 17’s appearance on Jools Holland will precede the highly anticipated 30th Anniversary tour of their seminal album "Penthouse And Pavement". It will be the first time the band will perform the album in its entirety. The tour includes the following dates: Edinburgh Picture House (Nov 22), Glasgow 02 ABC (Nov 23), Manchester Ritz (Nov 25), Birmingham HMV Institute (Nov 26), London HMV Forum (Nov 28), Oxford 02 Academy (Nov 29), Brighton Corn Exchange (Nov 30) and Bristol 02 Academy (Dec 1).

For further information about Heaven 17’s tour, click here: http://www.noblepr.co.uk/Press_Releases/meanfiddler/heaven17.htm

The UK tour coincides with the "Collector’s Edition" of Penthouse And Pavement, released by EMI Records as a 3-disc set. CD#1 includes the digitally re-mastered edition of Penthouse And Pavement. CD #2 includes previously unreleased demos from the Penthouse album, plus never-before-heard tracks. The 3rd discs is a DVD which includes the Penthouse And Pavement promotional video and The Story Of Penthouse And Pavement: 2010 Documentary (1 hour).

BlinkTV will release a 2-disc DVD package called “Penthouse and Pavement Live in Concert” on November 15th. The concert was filmed in the band's hometown of Sheffield earlier this year, and is shown in its entirety for the first time. The package will also feature a special extended edition of the documentary, "Heaven 17: The Story of Penthouse and Pavement" that will include exclusive new footage of the band.

For interview opportunities and info about H17’s Penthouse And Pavement UK tour, please contact:
Peter Noble and Will Taylor at Noble PR Consultancy
Tel: 0207 272 7772, peter@noblepr.co.uk, will@noblepr.co.uk

Glenn, Craig Charles and I on The Funk and Soul show

2010-10-04T01:17:00.000-07:00

2010-10-01T03:25:00.001-07:00

Design Week article re my sonic portraiture work for National Portrait Gallery Road To 2012 project

MW interview with David Buckley

2010-09-30T03:11:00.001-07:00

1
‘We’re Going To Live For A Very Long Time’: the Second
Coming of Heaven 17
When the original Human league split in two in 1980, the world got two great bands for the
price of one. Martyn Ware, member of the original League, founder of Heaven 17, and multimedia
polymath, talks about Heaven 17, past, present, and future.
Martyn Ware talks to David Buckley
DB: How are you then
MW: Good, very busy.
DB: Where are you?
MW: In my studio...
2
DB: Is this where great ‘meisterwerks’ are being composed as we speak then?
MW: No, old ‘meisterwerks’ are being remixed at the moment. I’ve given up drinking you’ll
be shocked to hear. I just decided to one day. Actually, I’d been thinking about it for a while
and then I got unreasonably drunk in Norway where we were playing. It took me two days to
recover and I thought – this is ridiculous! I might as well pack it in frankly. It’s a pain in the
arse after gigs, it’s a nightmare really. It means that, if I’m ever going to lose weight, I’m going
to have to either give up booze or food. I love my food too much though, so.
DB: Are you feeling better?
MW: I feel more boring. I don’t know if that’s better. I feel like I’m twiddling my thumbs a
lot of the time. There’s no reward at the end of the day, you know, I’ve worked hard I can have
a beer and go read a paper in the pub, I can’t do that anymore.
DB: Obviously you made a kind of commitment for the first five years of Heaven 17 that
you weren’t going to perform live at all. Now, I saw you in Munich in March and in December,
you’re on tour in November. What’s driving this? What’s driving the fact that you are now a
very good live act?
MW: We’ve been playing live a long time really. It seems as though we’ve just started but
it’s been twelve years now. At this kind of level, it’s an experimental phase for us trying to get
it to the highest level we can get to. In fact, we just had a production meeting yesterday talking
about the logistics behind doing Luxury Gap for instance, and what the implications are and
what we would have to do to make that work. Would it work for the promoters? The
interesting thing is that we’re kind of reliving our career, particularly the first three albums, in
chronological order, it’s about the same spacing. It does give us a kind of developmental path,
a development theme. First simplistic stuff, Penthouse and Pavement, a bit funky, moving into
super, shiny, epic pop on The Luxury Gap and then moving to the, not experimental, but more
daring shall we say on How Men Are, plus obviously including pop stuff on there. Actually
doing daring and experimental stuff in a pop framework is much more difficult than doing
daring and experimental stuff full stop. So, doubly daring! And it gives us a reason to keep
playing live and going back to the same venues and same promoters year after year saying
we’ve got something new.
DB: So you would do Luxury Gap and How Men Are in their entirety.
3
MW: Yeah I think that’s the idea. We are talking about doing Luxury Gap. And now that
we’ve recently put together, well Glenn has, he’s put together a version of ‘That’s No Lie’
[from How Men Are] which was always going to be problematical as a track for live.
DB: I read somewhere that you were quite keen on doing Reproduction and Travelogue as
well live, is that still an ambition?
MW: I’m very keen on doing that. We’d want to do it as Human League but as a different
version of the Human League. Which obviously involves Phil’s incorporation and probably
entails the girls standing down for a particular gig which I suspect isn’t going to happen. But
we are cooking some plans at the moment for next year which might be extremely enticing for
them.
DB: Meaning?
MW: I can’t tell you now. I’d like to but it’s too delicate potentially in terms of negotiations.
It’s too complex to talk to anybody at the moment.
DB: It’s funny that they’re still referred to as ‘the girls’ when they’re coming up to fifty.
MW: The girls will be the girls until the day they die. That’s still how they’re selling
themselves.
4
DB: Are you surprised at the, I wouldn’t call it the resurrection of Heaven 17, but just how
much attention has been on the band in the last year.
MW: The attention has largely been driven by the amount of energy we’ve been putting into
it. Until eighteen months ago, it was always a bit of a side project. We hadn’t really performed
live in any kind of concerted way, not enough to make it our main income. About eighteen
months ago we decided to give it a good shot, really. There’s probably a time slot of say, from
two years ago to the next two or three years, were we are all young enough, fit enough, funky
enough, enthusiastic enough, to want to do ... to play the final series of hands in this game of
poker which is Heaven 17. We still hold a few cards up the sleeve, the main one was the
credible route for the live stuff and I think the timing is right, to be honest. So we owed it to
ourselves to give it a shot and to see if there was enough interest, seeing as we were actually
popular in a lot of different territories, not just Britain and Europe, but across the world. So if
there is an appetite from promoters world-wide to put us on then you have to give yourself the
best chance to do that. It’s not just a matter of ‘of we’re still here’. You have to be seen to be
moving forward and to be enthusiastic and to be seen to be developing a live show. Now we’re
in this kind of phase where we’re reproducing an authentic sound with contemporary
production values. It’s a different thing from just slavishly copying how it sounded, if you see
what I mean.
DB: From what you just said then would you say that there is an ending to Heaven 17, there
is a point where you cannot continue any longer?
5
MW: I think it’s when the appetite runs out. It’s appetite from our end, it’s appetite from
promoters’ end, from people around us – you have to have a team of people to make things
happen.
DB: Can you see yourself doing this in fifteen years time?
MW: That would make me seventy. Not really, no. In reality, I would say there is an absolute
maximum of a further ten years. I don’t know what we’d be doing beyond that it would be like
fucking Van Morrison or something!
DB: But there’s plenty of people. Ian Hunter’s, what, seventy-four, Jet Black from the
Stranglers is seventy-two, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, they’re all coming up to seventy.
MW: I think it’s a bit sad. It’s almost like an admission that there’s nothing else that you can
do, which is part of the reason why we’d never clung on, like clinging on to the edge of a cliff
to our career. If there’s no appetite for it or the stars aren’t in alignment – do something else. I
intend to be a creator until the day I die and I’m sure Glenn feels the same way. Obviously
provided people want to see us and there’s enough money in it, provided it’s not too physically
onerous we’ll carry on as long as possible. But we’d give it up. It’s not like it’s the only thing
that we can do. I’ve still got to do my symphony in the ballet!
DB: Do you consider Heaven 17 as being a heritage act, or do you consider the possibility in
the future like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, like the Human League, of making a new
record, because it’s not that long ago since Before/After (the latest Heaven 17 studio album,
released in 2004).
MW: The whole point about a new record is, again, appetite - appetite of the market place.
We simply cannot afford to not be earning money in some shape of form in let’s say, four
months it takes to make an album. Without any financial support it’s not going to work. My
overheads are huge. Glenn is likewise under a financial cosh. I think it’s a positive thing
because it’s an engine which keeps you working. But the downside to it is, is that you’ve got to
keep the money coming in. There is no standing still, ever. If you can’t justify the potential
rewards of an album, even in time, let alone the fact that sales are so poor. I mean if an angel,
or an investment bank or whatever paid for us to make an album we’d consider it. But I can’t
imagine us taking the time out to do something like that for less than thirty or forty grand. I
can’t see anybody coming up with that money.
6
DB: Are you frustrated as a musician? Surely you’re still recording music, you’re still
demoing new ideas or are you not?
MW: I do all sorts of stuff. Composing is only one part of what I do. I write stuff all the
time. I write soundscapes, I have a thriving career in lecturing and I’m also an event producer
so I do all that stuff. There’s all sorts of strings to my bow if you like. It’s not just a simple
thing of being in a band anymore. There’s lots of things going on. I’ve just recently in the last
three days I’ve got jobs in which have nothing to do with Heaven 17. So they’re all connected
in some way with sound and music. So that’s the way it goes. One of them’s in Liverpool. It’s
not nailed on yet but they’re building a new Beatles museum in Liverpool. There’s a good
chance that we’ll be the sound partners doing the three dimensional sound.
DB: Now tell me. Obviously this is billed as the thirtieth anniversary of Penthouse and
Pavement but it’s not quite is it, it’s the twenty-ninth year. I saw you in March and I’ve never
had so much fun for ages at a concert. It was absolutely wonderful. However much I love the
first side of Penthouse and Pavement it is the second side that is my favourite piece of Heaven
17 music. I don’t dance normally and I was dancing!
MW: Oh, thank you.
7
DB: Did, we’ve spoken about Penthouse and Pavement obviously in the past but do you
have any specific anecdotes about making that album? You were very driven, weren’t you; you
were in competition at that point. You felt slighted, you wanted to fight back [Martyn left the
original Human League along with Ian Craig Marsh in November 1980 to form Heaven 17].
MW: Slighted is not the word – devastated I think. About twenty different emotions wrapped
up in one really. Betrayed. It felt like a race to get the thing done really. It was really like the
classic driven thing where it just pours out. There was no mediation involved. It literally was a
lot of ideas coming out simultaneously but also with an intensity which meant that you could
realise them very quickly. So it wasn’t just like a million ideas and actually three quarters of
them were shit when you looked at them on the day – they were all pretty good I have to say.
To the extent where there were very few things that we did at the time which didn’t make it on
to the final record which obviously sped up the process of making the record. I’m going
through the old original demos which we did for Penthouse and Pavement at the moment and
the only things that didn’t make it, there were no songs that didn’t make it, but there were quite
a few experiments in terms of rhythm and very early song structure which you will hear when
it’s released. It basically was, not that we were conceited or anything, but everything we did
seem to work and it worked for us and we thought it was a very exciting direction. And when
you’re in that kind of frame of mind you just try to get it down as quickly as possible while the
ideas are flowing. It was like opening a giant tap for a hose and it was just blasting out.
DB: Obviously the album was released September 1981 and I think the original line up of
the Human League ended in November 1980, round about then. So did you begin work on the
album instantaneously?
MW: When was it released again?
DB: September 1981.
MW: Yeah we started working on it immediately within I would say two or three weeks.
DB: So before Christmas 1980?
MW: Oh yeah.
DB: Were there any ideas that you’d be working on with the League – musical ideas?
8
MW: Yeah I’d say probably, I can’t really remember but I suspect probably a lot of stuff on
the second side of Penthouse and Pavement were originally in a basic form already written,
possibly. I can’t remember to be honest, but I think they were written ... they were probably
half-baked ideas which then went on to become songs which were originally going to be part
of the third Human League album. It had no vocals on them, none of the real song elements –
they were just instrumental.
DB: Whose idea was it specifically to move up the first side towards a funkier area with,
‘real instruments.’ Was that your idea?
MW: It was all our ideas. It was during the making of ‘Fascist Groove Thing’ that we wanted
to make a stab at nicking something that sounded like Parliament/Funkadelic. We wanted to
be honest with ourselves and go - right, this is actually the music that we’re consuming and the
music that we love. We may not be great funk players or whatever but we think our alternative,
coming at it from a different angle combined with our love for that subject would make an
interesting combination. Part of the tools that we needed for that was to free ourselves from the
restrictions of pure electronics and so it was more a freeing of the shackles rather than a
different direction. What really drove it then, as part of the freeing of the shackles, stumbling
across John Wilson [bassist and guitarist on the album], that just confirmed that we were
making the right move. From then on it was all systems go, really.
DB: Did you like bands like Level 42 at the time?
MW: I quite liked funk but I thought it was a bit white. I’ve got a bit of a problem with white
funk. I know we’re white funk in some respects but John certainly wasn’t white in any
respects. It’s too rinsed. I can’t describe it any other way that very accurate stuff. It’s like what
they did to Chicago House by making European House. It’s just too regular, too straight.
DB: Did the breakthrough for Heaven 17 come with Penthouse and Pavement or Luxury
Gap? When did you feel to be a pop star?
MW: Oh definitely when we made Luxury Gap. I don’t think we really felt like pop stars with
Penthouse and Pavement we felt like very interesting, indie stars, just under the radar. Top of
the radar for trendy mags and everything but not with the public. I knew as soon as we’d made
‘Temptation’, no ‘Let Me Go’ I thought was going to blast us into orbit to be honest but it
9
proved to be ‘Temptation’ which did that. We knew, despite the fact that we had to try to
persuade, for various reasons, we had to try to persuade Virgin to put it out, we knew that that
was going to be a big hit. It had to be because it just sounded like a big hit to us! Mind you, we
were more inexperienced at that point and we thought that about ‘Fascist Groove Thing’.
Looking back it was a bit edgier to be honest!
DB: So what can people expect in November? Is it going to be pretty much the multimedia
you put on in Munich on the spring tour?
MW: It will be similar in a lot of respects to the springs shows but we’ve got a few surprises
up our sleeves.
DB: And I believe one of them’s a cover of Bowie’s ‘Drive In Saturday’?
10
MW: Maybe! Quite conceivably. We’re kind of rotating a few cover versions in a B.E.F style
and we’re probably having different guests throughout the tour as well.
DB: Did you feel, for example, the collaboration with La Roux, is that something that you’d
like to do something more of?
MW: Oh we’re going to definitely. I think I’m right in saying that she’s going to be guesting
with us at Bestival in September. She’s djing down there so she’s going to pop on stage and
we’ll do ‘Sign Your Name’ [Terence Trent D’Arby song, produced by Martyn Ware] together
which should be nice. We’re like joined at the hip it’s ridiculous. I think they’re going to be
touring America when we do the tour in November which is a real pity, but we’re determined
to do more work together. They’re going to be touring to publicise their new album when it
comes out and we’ll probably help them out.
DB: What does Martyn Ware do when he’s not working?
MW: I only ever work.
Penthouse and Pavement spent 56 weeks in the UK album charts in the early Eighties and
remains a classic album. It will be reissued this November in a deluxe edition and supported
by a UK tour. Don’t miss either.
© DAVID BUCKLEY 2010

more TEDx details

2010-09-30T02:59:00.001-07:00

Saturday 6 November 2010
Autumn - Winter TEDx Aldeburgh Music: Ideas worth spreading - A Conference

TEDx allows organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences, hence TEDx Aldeburgh Music.

Hosted by Thomas Dolby, Musical Director of the TED Conference, the event will feature live talks by Louis Lortie, Martyn Ware, Tim Exile, Imogen Heap,
United Visual Artists, David Toop and others.

The gathering of people and ideas will coincide with Aldeburgh’s New Music New Media course for emerging professional composers and musicians, led by Tod Machover also presenting on the day. The opportunity to have in one place great minds and explorers of contemporary music is here.

H17 on Radio 6 show this weekend

2010-09-30T02:55:00.000-07:00

Heaven 17 will be interviewed by Craig Charles on the BBC 6 Music's The Funk & Soul Show on Saturday October 2nd from 8-8:30pm

TED talk at Aldeburgh

2010-09-30T00:47:00.000-07:00

I'll be speaking at the TED talk in Aldeburgh on Saturday 6th November

http://www.aldeburgh.co.uk/events/tedx-aldeburgh-music-ideas-worth-spreading-conference

Heaven 17 at The Devil's Arse!

2010-09-28T02:54:00.000-07:00

Just confirmed....Heaven 17 will be performing an hour-long greatest hits set on 10th December at The Devil's Arse cave in Castleton in the Peak District, Derbyshire - huge cavern holding around 650 people!

http://www.peakcavern.co.uk/

Heaven 17 at the Devil's Arse - you couldn't make it up!

I'm visiting the LHC at CERN,Geneva

2010-09-28T00:31:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my good friend Simon Lowery, my son Gabriel and I have been invited to a private tour of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva.

The worlds largest ever machine - the main ring's circumference is over 27km and is 100m underground

Atomic particles are accelerated to 99.99% of the speed of light and smashed into each other.

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/lhc/HowLHC-en.html

In a bizarre twist, we'll be joined on the trip by the band Supertramp who are also friends of Simon!

Design Week article on my work with National Portrait Gallery

2010-09-26T06:08:00.001-07:00

http://www.designweek.co.uk/martyn-ware-works-on-sound-installations-for-national-portrait-gallery/3018459.article

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Arlington Rd,Camden Town,United Kingdom

H17 doc up for awards

2010-09-24T07:53:00.001-07:00

Heaven 17's documentary 'The Story Of Penthouse And Pavement' has been...

* Entered for BROADCAST Awards - Best Documentary.

* Accepted in to screen at the prestigeous Sheffield International Doc Fest who describe it as "a classic Sheffield tale. It gets to the heart of a city and its
music with
energy, wit and some brilliant characters."

* Was described as 'elegiac and beautifully made' THE GUARDIAN, "the best music film in years" THE TIMES. Pick of the Day THE INDEPENDENT

It's being entered for more as we speak...

and its
music with
energy, wit and some brilliant characters."

* Was described as 'elegiac and beautifully made' THE GUARDIAN, "the best music film in years" THE TIMES. Pick of the Day THE INDEPENDENT

It's being entered for more as we speak...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Route de La Turbie,Èze,France

Death And The Powers

2010-09-23T23:01:00.000-07:00

I'm off to Monaco today to see the world premiere of Tod Machover's robotic opera Death And The Powers - production design by my good friend and 5D colleague Alex McDowell and sound design by my buddy Chris Full using 3D AudioScape to create a theatre-filling 3D soundscape.

This promises to raise the bar on immersive entertainment...

This is the future

Feelosophy exhibition launch blog

2010-09-23T00:16:00.000-07:00

http://www.designbridge.com/blog/our-feelosophy-exhibition-launches-in-london/

Illustrious 10 year archive

2010-09-23T00:11:00.000-07:00

a day of massive archiving...

soon our entire Illlustrious compositional catalogue will be on SoundCloud - private but available on request direct to me

if you want to watch our documentary

2010-09-20T12:03:00.001-07:00

http://www.noblepr.co.uk/Press_Releases/meanfiddler/heaven17.htm
contains a link to view our P&P documentary

Creators Project Beijing

2010-09-20T09:10:00.001-07:00

From Tom Belton for Illustrious in Beijing...

Quick update from the Creators Project.. The event is the biggest yet spread over a number of buildings in the super cool arts district. Our installation is in its own room which is a 18m x 8m rectangular space. There's been a never ending string of technical blunders at the PA end, and as a result of an apparent lack of jack to XLR cables in Beijing, we're only running 8 speakers. That said, the installation has a good feel about it and sounds good too. I can't connect my camera up at the moment but have taken some video of it if you'd like to see it when I get back!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Beaumont St,Paddington,United Kingdom

Individual artworks personalised by Glenn and Martyn for sale

2010-09-18T06:51:00.000-07:00

From Glenn...

'Just the other day Martyn ware found in the depths of ‘the forbidden cupboard’ a stack ofcd’s. They were promo copies of the Heaven 17 album ‘Before After’.100 cd’s to be precise, no covers no artwork just the bare cd’s…

Martyn had the idea to sign each one and put them in the H17 web storeas special items…
...
I then rather rashly suggested I would make individual covers for eachof the 100 cd’s using photographs from my own collection I would design andprint all the covers making everyone different!I am now 10 days into the task and wishing I hadn’t started it.

However they do look great and we are going to sign each one and then put them up for sale.

There are only 100 there will be no more. Heaven 17 have lovingly crafted these personalised album artworks tovery reasonably high (if not a little homey) standard.Each one has photographs from the H17 private collection and is numberedand signed to guarantee its authenticity.

It was the last recorded Heaven 17 album and has some great songs…Here’s what my mom says about it.“oh it’s lovely it should have been high up in the charts”

Well I finished them… martyn and I signed them all on the cover and the cd and each come with a letter of authenticationalso signed by the two of us… that was a lot of signing…'

They are now for sale at Heaven17.com - totally original artworks...

Remember - only 100 - once they're gone that's it

We expect them to sell out quickly, so don't tarrySee more

The Heaven 17 Official UK & European Store

www.bandstores.co.uk

Online Shop for Heaven 17 T-shirts and other Merchandise

Interview for Design Week

2010-09-18T06:07:00.000-07:00

http://www.scottbillings.co.uk/?p=74

Interview for Design Week

H17 and LaRoux ont' Radio

2010-09-17T07:56:00.000-07:00

http://www.mixcloud.com/BestivalRadio/la-roux-and-dead-guy-feat-heaven-17-bestival-radio-2010/

Glenn and I on Bestival Radio with Elly from LaRoux last week

john wesley barker and Dark

2010-09-17T03:06:00.000-07:00

I'm very pleased to say that John Wesley Barker has agreed to join my team of collaborators for the making of my new BEF album - MQDVol3 Dark

John was responsible for the original string arrangements on 'Temptation', 'Come Live With Me' and the rest of The Luxury Gap and I'm thrilled to have him on board - he is a very talented and experienced orchestral arranger.

mastering P&P collectors edition at Abbey Road

2010-09-15T01:30:00.001-07:00

Off to Abbey Road today to master the Collectors Edition of Penthouse and Pavement 2CD plus DVD box set out in November

CD2 is a 56 minute 20 track CD of unearthed demos from 1980 which even Glenn and myself had not heard for 30 years -we'd forgotten they still existed!

Feelosophy exhibition

2010-09-14T05:15:00.001-07:00

Putting the final touches to our 3D soundscape for Feelosophy at Design Bridge - opens to the public next Monday - on for a week

An all-senses exhibition about the essence of Clerkenwell

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:London,United Kingdom

Dark is coming

2010-09-14T02:54:00.000-07:00

Finally started work on my new BEF album 'Dark' - I'm very excited

The search for singers/performers starts now...

Electro-minimalist versions of passionate songs

Ideas for singers welcome...

Campfire event - free

2010-09-14T01:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.ditto.tv/campfire/category/storyteller/martyn-ware/

ditto - Lighthouse
Unit 1A - New North House
190 New North Road
London N1 7BJ

Only a few spaces left - come along...

Sheffield Documentary Festival and Heaven 17

2010-09-14T00:55:00.000-07:00

Our Heaven 17 documentary 'The Story Of Penthouse And Pavement' has been selected for participation in the prestigious 2010 Sheffield Documentary Festival in October.

As part of the presentation, we will be hosting a Q&A session after the viewing.

More details re date and time to come...

Drunk History vol. 2 - Featuring Jack Black

2010-09-13T14:48:00.000-07:00

Campfire event

2010-09-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

http://www.ditto.tv/campfire/category/storyteller/martyn-ware/

Illl be speaking at this event organised by my friends at Ditto about my career

Heaven 17 interview

2010-09-12T10:41:00.001-07:00

The Sunday Mail interview: Heaven 17 make presence felt with milestone gigs http://t.co/ndQz7gg

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Princess Rd,Camden Town,United Kingdom

Singularity University Limited Briefing

2010-09-11T00:52:00.000-07:00

Singularity University Limited Briefing

hav a look at this - very interesting

Our Feelosophy at the London Design Festival

2010-09-09T02:26:00.000-07:00

Our Feelosophy at the London Design Festival

As part of London design Week - fantastic brand new multi-sense installation launches next week at Design Bridge featuring an Illustrious 3D soundscape about the essence of Clerkenwell - don't miss it...

Student Viva day tomorrow at Queen Mary, University of London

2010-08-30T02:12:00.000-07:00

Looking forward to fulfilling my professorial duty at Queen Mary College, University of London tomorrow...

Student Viva day for the Doctorate students of the Media and Arts Technology course - including two projects in collaboration with Illustrious and Smartlab UEL at Threeways SEN School in Bath - both very impressive....

'Keir Williams

http://smartlab.uel.ac.uk/ http://www.illustriouscompany.co.uk/

'The Train Line of Doom': Digital story telling with special needs students. Working with the Smartlab research group, Illustrious and Threeways special needs school in Bath, Keir has been exploring the creative processes and
tools that are used in creating digital stories with special needs students. The focus of this project is to discover ways to make digital creative processes accessible for children with communication impairments. Through an interrogation and comparison of the digital and non-digital approaches used in a specific digital story telling project
he will look to create a tangible interface for the improvisation of digital media for students in the schools digital sensory theatre.

David Meckin

http://smartlab.uel.ac.uk/ http://www.illustriouscompany.co.uk/

Through my Advanced Project Placement in conjunction with SMARTLab and Illustrious I am developing an electro-mechanical musical instrument to help facilitate creative expression for children with physical and learning difficulties. I am formulating two interface prototypes for the instrument as well as making it open for further
interface development. This project is also based at Three Ways School in Bath.'

Evidence that time is moving backward

2010-08-27T01:22:00.000-07:00

1 The Tories and the Whigs are in power
2 Concorde no longer flies
3 The Space Shuttle is nearly finished
4 Light entertainment rules the TV schedules
5 Racist movements are growing
6 Heaven 17 are rising again
etc. etc. etc.

See 'Counter Clock World' by Philip k Dick
Hear 'Almost Medieval' by The Human League

The brilliant Vintage At Goodwood

2010-08-16T05:30:00.001-07:00

Here is a copy of the email I've just sent to everyone involved at Vintage...

'Hi All

I just want to say that Vintage was without doubt the best festival I have ever been to - by a country mile

Wayne, Gerardine and Lord March – you deserve huge credit for your belief and passionate enthusiasm in the face of difficult odds.

The curators...

Awe inspiring work and authenticity means that the whole event felt very real and not at all pastiche in any way...

The glue that held it all together for me was the non stop excellence of the musical content – brilliant!

I could have stayed at any or all of the tents/stages all day – but a very special shout out for Torch, Soul Casino and Leisure Dome...fantastic...

Favourite moments...

Earth, Wind and Fire, the Wailers, Wayne Djing at Soul Casino, the big bands at the Torch Club, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, performing with H17 on the Main Stage, Roy Wood, the beautiful outfits and makeup and hair and on and on and on...

I’m still buzzing – and EVERYONE I know who went loved it to death – and to cap it all my daughter Elena was selected by Grazia stylespotters for one of the Best In Show awards!

Fantastic stuff – thanks for one of my favourite weekends ever....

As I said on stage – if Vintage was a permanent town, I would live there...

Love

Martynx'

Harvard

2010-07-31T03:18:00.000-07:00

There are few places in the US that can compete with Boston and Cambridge mass for a sense of beauty and history

Definitely my favourite US city

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Harpenden Rural,United Kingdom

Lecturing at Harvard

2010-07-28T04:33:00.000-07:00

Flying to Boston today to give a lecture on future uses of immersive soundscaping and altered sonic realities to a bunch of top architects at the Harvard Graduate School of Design

Should be fun!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Astounding discovery

2010-07-22T01:48:00.000-07:00

In the process of digging around for extra rarity material for the special boxed set release of penthouse and pavement later in the year, we discovered the long lost original 8 track recordings for the tracks on p&p and all original bef Instrumentals including several never before released

To H17 this is like stumbling across the Holy Grail!

We are completely thrilled...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Varndell St,Camden Town,United Kingdom

Inception review

2010-07-19T23:51:00.000-07:00

went to see Inception at the IMAX...

equal parts fascinating, sleep-inducing, 70's James Bond, over-complex and bollocks

It made me feel dizzy, but not necessarily in a good way...

it's like being forced to eat a cake with way too many ingredients in it

also - the first 40 mins the script is like reading an instruction manual - really clunky - as they try to shoehorn the explanation of a million concepts into supposedly realistic dialogue

has all the hallmarks of a great film restructured by focus group/committee (the studio's input) then over-egged by the director to compensate

like a lot of contemporary blockbusters, more designed for multiple DVD viewings and establishing a franchise than as a standalone piece of filmmaking

Very busy week ahead

2010-07-14T06:39:00.001-07:00

Today in Sheffield for showing of our h17 Penthouse and Pavement documentary at the Showroom in anticipation of announcement re who's won City of Culture bid tomorrow - fingers crossed...

Tomorrow and Friday setting up our 3D sound installation for Creators Project on Saturday, and meet up with good friend choreographer Michael Clark to sort out immersive sound rehearsal next week in the turbine hall at Tate Modern

Also Saturday H17 play big outdoor gig at Peterborough

Phew!!

Martyn

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Nottingham,United Kingdom

Mermaid Parade on Coney Island

2010-07-13T08:19:00.000-07:00

A film I made of Coney Island's Mermaid Parade held every year

Vintage cars and every shape of Mermaid inspired costume

Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson Kind and Queen!

Wild!

http://vimeo.com/13299996

New H17 merchandising site launched

2010-07-13T01:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.bandstores.co.uk/shop/heaven17/index.php

Help us finance the recording of a new h17 album - buy some exce;llent new designs in t-shirts and in particular the Martin Bedford lithographs are beautiful.

All the money goes directly to Heaven 17 - dig deep for victory!

Ryanair

2010-07-06T01:55:00.001-07:00

Ryanair never ever fails to astonish by their utter money-grabbing ruthlessness

If all airlines were like this I would never fly again

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Di Mainstone

2010-07-05T06:45:00.000-07:00

Please do yourself an enormous favour and check out the work of Di Mainstone on dimainstone.com

One of the few truly innovative artists working in this field- I'm an enormous fan and will be collaborating with her on various forthcoming projects

I
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Mornington Crescent,Camden Town,United Kingdom

Red Bull Music Academy - Video Archive - Martyn Ware

2010-07-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

Red Bull Music Academy - Video Archive - Martyn Ware

RBMA Radio - Martyn Ware (Human League, Heaven 17, Sheffield) - Toronto Treasures

2010-07-01T11:41:00.000-07:00

RBMA Radio - Martyn Ware (Human League, Heaven 17, Sheffield) - Toronto Treasures

New York

2010-06-23T09:45:00.000-07:00

Sitting having breakfast on Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side in Manhattan about to meet my good friend Michael Stack to watch England's moment of truth

I love New York...it's expected to reach 100 degrees today and 75 percent humidity

One thing occurs to me...either you feed off the innate energy of this extraordinary city or it feeds off you

I find I swing from exhaustion to elation here, there seems to be little inbetween

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Creators Project -Nick Zinner/ Illustrious collaboration

2010-06-22T14:26:00.000-07:00

Nick Zinner is best known as the guitarist for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but he
is also a gifted songwriter, producer, and a distinguished photographer
who studied the craft at Bard College. Nick’s band tours have inspired
three photography books that document life on the road and the group’s
...adoring fans. Lucky for us, he managed to carve some time out of his
insane schedule to create an exhibit for The Creators Project
conference in NYC.
His work A.D.A.B.A.combines his photography work with a score Nick composed especially for the exhibit. As if that weren’t enough, he’s enlisted Human League and
Heaven 17 alumnus Martyn Ware to mix the music into a three-dimensional
audio experience.

New York

2010-06-18T05:42:00.001-07:00

Off to Grand Central Station Oyster Bar this evening for champagne and oysters after cocktails at Rare View rooftop bar on Madison

Yayy

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:E 42nd St,New York,United States

Illustrious...Sonic couture from the future

2010-06-17T04:03:00.000-07:00

The big day...

Super immersive all-senses experience featuring Illustrious 3D soundscape composition for the launch of major Yves Saint-Laurent perfume

Amazing...

Heaven 17 P&P documentary BBCHD and iPlayer

2010-06-16T05:56:00.000-07:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00shclx

Showing again on Friday at 3am and all week on IPlayer

Creators Project

2010-06-07T11:19:00.000-07:00

Been working like a dog on exciting 3D sound content for launch of new Yves Saint Laurent perfume in NYC this month

Multisensorial!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Beech St,City of London,United Kingdom

Michael Clark

2010-06-07T10:05:00.000-07:00

Off to see Michael Clark at the Barbican - hoping to be working with him soon

Martyn's blog

Martyn at XML Bath 16th March 2012

West St Story

Kim Wilde Joins Boy George’s Charge Back to 1980s Pop in London - Bloomberg

Croatian Newspaper review of the Heaven 17/BEF weekend

Heaven 17 Concert Setlist at Roundhouse, London on October 14, 2011 | setlist.fm

Huffington Post on H17 Luxury Gap

Busy, busy, busy...

New Radio Ditto iPhone app featuring Heaven 17's Music For...radio show

2manydjs support BEF at Roundhouse Oct 15th

Music For BEF radio show

Illustrious 3D soundscape at Brighton's White Night Festival

H17 and BEF news press release

my interview on Remember The Eighties

New scientist review of ReAnimate!

Today's The Day for ReAnimate! and it's free

Summation if my speech at the European Parliament last week re artist copyright issues

Transcription of an interview from 2008

Gleen and I live on BBC London radio this lunchtime!

Music For... launch

Rehearsals at Tate Modern

Heaven 17 and BEF at the Roundhouse

ReAnimate!

Martyn Ware

Goldsmiths NPG Competition

Worldometers - real time world statistics

My top 10 albums for headphones

Heaven 17 @ HMV Picture House Edinburgh, 22nd November 2010, taken by Fishbones Glover: Safe Concerts Photo Gallery: festival photos, gig and event photos and our Oi, you in the crowd galleries

New interview with me at the Selector

BBC Music review of P&P collectors edition

Heaven 17 P&P collectors edition boxed set - it's gorgeous

Heaven 17 on UK tour

Kubla khan

Times interview today re Heaven 17

H17 at Leadmill on Wenesday

Glenn and Martyn Q&A at screening of 'The Story Of Penthouse And Pavement'

electricity club interview

HEAVEN 17: History Will Repeat Itself

Interview with MARTYN WARE

Bookmark & Share

AddThis for Firefox

Make sharing easier with AddThis for Firefox.

Heaven 17 play the Leadmill Sheffield next week!

a film of Paul Morley interviewing Heaven 17 for Guardian Online

Heaven 17 by Paul Morley

Heaven 17 on BBC2 tonight at 2355

Heaven 17 at the HMV Forum in London

Vintage at Gooood 2010 Highlights

I'm speaking at this Ted event

Campfire lecture at ditto

Heaven 17 on Later with Jools Holland

Glenn, Craig Charles and I on The Funk and Soul show

Design Week article re my sonic portraiture work for National Portrait Gallery Road To 2012 project

MW interview with David Buckley

more TEDx details

H17 on Radio 6 show this weekend

TED talk at Aldeburgh

Heaven 17 at The Devil's Arse!

I'm visiting the LHC at CERN,Geneva

Design Week article on my work with National Portrait Gallery

H17 doc up for awards

Death And The Powers

Feelosophy exhibition launch blog

http://www.designbridge.com/blog/our-feelosophy-exhibition-launches-in-london/

Illustrious 10 year archive

a day of massive archiving...soon our entire Illlustrious compositional catalogue will be on SoundCloud - private but available on request direct to me

if you want to watch our documentary

http://www.noblepr.co.uk/Press_Releases/meanfiddler/heaven17.htmcontains a link to view our P&P documentary

Creators Project Beijing

Individual artworks personalised by Glenn and Martyn for sale

Interview for Design Week

H17 and LaRoux ont' Radio

john wesley barker and Dark

mastering P&P collectors edition at Abbey Road

Feelosophy exhibition

Dark is coming

Campfire event - free

Sheffield Documentary Festival and Heaven 17

Drunk History vol. 2 - Featuring Jack Black

Campfire event

a day of massive archiving...

soon our entire Illlustrious compositional catalogue will be on SoundCloud - private but available on request direct to me

http://www.noblepr.co.uk/Press_Releases/meanfiddler/heaven17.htm
contains a link to view our P&P documentary