Lost Property presents Infrasection #8:
To celebrate Delia Derbyshire’s birthday itself there would seem to be no better choice than former Brighton resident the musician and engineer Sarah Angliss. She will be joined for this occasion by Ingrid Plum, sound artist, singer and founder of the Bechdel series of events.
SARAH ANGLISS
Sarah Angliss is a composer, performer, roboticist and sound historian. A prolific live musician, Sarah’s known for her skills on theremin which she combines live with Max, electronics, recorder, saw, keyboard and her many found sounds and field recordings. On stage, she’s often accompanied by musical automata – machines she’s been devising and building since 2005 to give her stage performance an arresting and uncanny physical presence.
Sarah also works in theatre, creating distinctive sounds that blur the boundaries between sound design and musical composition. Sarah’s work reflects her lifelong fascination with ancient music, faded variety acts and defunct machines. Though her music, performance and writing, she explores the uncanny properties of technology, revealing resonances between European folklore and early notions of electricity and sound.
Sarah is currently completing her solo album Ealing Feeder and working as sound designer on Hart and Kaufman’s 1930 play Once in a Lifetime (for The Young Vic, directed by Richard Jones). Funded by a Jerwood Opera Writing Fellowship and supported by Aldeburgh Music, she’s also composing Giant, an opera about the life, death and contentious afterlife of Charles Byrne (working with librettist Ross Sutherland).
Now based in London, Sarah is a resident artist at the former Limehouse Town Hall and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Sound Practice Research Unit, Goldsmiths. She’s recently been on a part-time residency at the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol where she was researching human motion capture in inanimate objects (funded by Arts Council England). She continues to contribute to an ongoing EPSRC-funded research project Being There – a practical exploration of humans and robots in public spaces.
Combining the arts and engineering
Hard to pigeonhole as a composer, engineer or kinetic artist, Sarah’s actually something of all three. In fact, she’s been combing these interests since she was a child in the 1970s, building mini cable cars across the garden and put together soundtracks, on a portable Phillips cassette recorder, about futuristic trips to the Moon.
Sarah has always composed music and her early fascination with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop drew her to study electroacoustics, an engineering subject, for her first degree. This was followed by a masters in biologically-inspired robotics (evolutionary and adaptive systems) and an Associateship in Early Music Performance from the Royal College of Music. On graduating as an engineer, Sarah had a brief spell in the building industry, where she assisted the chief acoustician in a busy London engineering company, There, she fell for the peculiar charms of vintage electronics, when she was asked to work on an ancient, hybrid thermal-modelling computer. She later found her way to the Science Museum, London, where she was encouraged to combine her interests in the history of technology, interactive design and live performance. In 1995, Sarah opted to leave the Science Museum and work independently, focusing on the sonic arts and writing. She worked solo and collaborated with other makers, most notably the sculptor and cartoonist Tim Hunkin who introduced her to PLCs and other control systems for machines. Over the years that followed, Sarah honed her skills in music, electroacoustics and robotics and found her own way to combine them in her compositions and on stage.
INGRID PLUM
‘Gorgeously atmospheric vocal techniques woven around field recordings & electronics’ – The Guardian. She is the founder of Bechdel, a DIY event platform for female experimental/noise/spoken word/improv/free folk/free jazz/folk/Neo classical acts and is based between the UK and Denmark.
Plum uses her voice with extended technique, improvisation, field recordings and electronics, to create layered soundscapes, spoken word and songs. Having performed and exhibited installation sound art and visual art since 2002, she creates work that sits between sound art, improvisation, multi-media installation, neo-classical and contemporary Nordic folk music.
The intimacy Plum creates in her recordings and live performance has the honesty of a confessional with the sonic scope of the forests and open coastlines of her native Denmark, that inspire much of her music. With installations that create meditative, sensory stimulative environments and performing stripped back, minimal gigs, she entices you into her hushed world.