The British Machine
THE BRITISH MACHINE
The British Machine (TBM) is a conceptual work conceived by Kirsty Whalley and Peter Cobbin of Such Sweet Thunder. TBM project will be a sound installation, instrument and art piece that celebrates British industrial ingenuity past and present.
In it’s most basic form, The British Machine will also be a music release involving new treatments and arrangements of iconic British compositions.
In addition a selection of original compositions will be produced reflecting the coming of Britain’s new industrial age; mechanical, electronic and computational.
But at the heart of The British Machine is the unique electro-mechanical modular instrument over 2 meters long which will be used to create, record and perform these works. The British machine, literally is a wall of sound is also a collaborative art piece painstaking crafted by local artists that makes use of disused industrial meters, valves and audio testing equipment and adapted so that these can be incorporated into the input or output of the music works. It is possIble to play TBM as a conventional keyboard input but the ingenuity comes to life when the machine will randomise it’s own possibilities that work with the composition. TBM has a number of input sources including mini tapes machines, cassettes, crystal radio, the dolphin telephone, an original iPod mp3 player record player, streaming library speech and sound sources from the British library, EMI archive and Radiophonic workshops. The onboard mixer can combine a midi and audio source via any of the machines hardware devices and then programmed to perform these via it’s own speaker and microphones used to record itself. TBM blurs the lines of the conventional music studio by combining artist, instrument, engineer and the control room into one entity. It is entirely possible to improvise to create a new work based on sound samples generated within TBM.
While a thoroughly modern device The British Machine has a build aesthetic of another era with oscilloscopes and CRT displays playing a visual installation of linocut machine age modernism.
Artwork for TBM and web pages will be newly commissioned pieces drawing on inspiration of British modernist print makers such as Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power.
