Excursions in Ambience
White Noise + Toby Marks + Andrew Heath + Joseph Hyde
On the first Sunday of Frome Festival The Silk Mill are delighted to present White Noise (David Vorhaus and Michael Painter), Toby Marks (Banco de Gaia), Andrew Heath (Disco Gecko Recordings), Joseph Hyde (Sensonic) & Patrick Dunn (visuals). Artists in sight and sound come together to explore contemporary ambient and experimental electronic music. Featuring the self-made instruments of the legendary White Noise, the ambient end of Toby Marks’ solo and Banco catalogues, Andrew Heath’s lower-case piano and field recordings and Joseph Hyde’s modular analogue experiments, plus Patrick Dunn’s live video interpretations.
Line Up
Experimental electronic music project established in London in 1968, originally as a group project between David Vorhaus and BBC Radiophonic Workshop members Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson. From the second album onwards (1975), White Noise became the solo project of David Vorhaus. In the mid-1990s Vorhaus began performing sporadically live under the White Noise moniker, playing songs from all eras, assisted by Mark Jenkins until 2011. Since 2011, White Noise members are David Vorhaus and Mike Pinder who continue to record and perform.
Toby Marks has been performing and releasing for over 25 years now, along the way becoming one of the music industry’s most maverick innovators. His legacy is as glittering as it is diverse, ranging from Hollywood film sound credits to the critically acclaimed ‘Last Train to Lhasa’, released in 1995 under his Banco de Gaia alias to a rapturous reception.
Andrew Heath produces ambient, piano based, lower-case music. Quiet and intimate, it explores sounds from both acoustic and electronic sources, along with processed field recordings and gathered, ‘found’ sounds. His latest releases, “Soundings”, “Triptych in Blue” and “Lichtzin” continue these themes and chart meetings with musicians and collaborators across Europe including the legendary Hans-Joachim Roedelius, experimental electronic and classical composer, Christopher Chaplin and Dutch ambient guitarist, Anne Chris Bakker.
Andrew’s music is not static though. It drifts. It constantly shifts as it charts new topographies, creating and following maps that are full of change. If you listen carefully you’ll often hear quiet, random glitches or shimmering dissonances which fall by happy accident, in exactly the right place.
For nearly 5 years, Joseph Hyde has been painstakingly building a unique synthesiser. The sound is completely analogue - warm and fuzzy, always microscopically shifting with the innate errors of vintage circuits. However, it’s controlled by the latest digital technology and specially-developed software, which allows this beast to be at least partly tamed.
What he's trying to do is get it absolutely perfectly in tune, and not using the compromised tuning of most Western instruments but rather the pure ratios found in natural sounds and many non Western musics. The result is as minimal as he can possibly make it – an elemental meditation on perfect ratios and harmonic resonance.
