Ambrose Field

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Ambrose Field: composer, electronic performer, three time Prix Ars Electronica award winner (digital music composition, honorary mentions in 1996,1997, and 2006).

Field creates a high-octane sound world from instrumental and vocal performance fused with digital audio technology. Broadcast regularly by the BBC, with notable performances on Mixing It and Hear and Now, his work is released on the Sargasso, Centaur Records, and Memnosyne Media labels. Field specialises in creating surround audio presentations of his work for live performance, and is currently preparing a large-scale, 16.8.2 surround audio show for a well known San Francisco venue later next year, and an album of Renaisannce inspired new music.

Current Reviews of Storm!

Friday November 17, 2006
The Guardian
Pascal Wyse

*** Storm :: Ambrose Field

If you need to thank the RAF in the sleeve notes of a CD, you have probably gone further than most to collect your sounds. Here, metal workshops, riots, machine guns and jets taking off are heavily processed and mixed with more familiar studio sounds, to create a story that as Field admits, has "more in common with Operation Desert Storm". Even the gargantuan purring cat on Wall of Windows sounds deadly. Storm! is a riveting, futuristic action-pic for the blind - which figures, since Field has been called over to LA to give the latest Dolby cinema systems a beating with this material. What's compelling, apart from the unfathomable sheen of the audio fireworks, is the way an alien planet is built from things our ears already comprehend - possibly Field's reminder that the seeds of our destruction are all around us. And, perhaps most disturbing of all, the future still seems to have metal guitar solos.

Ars Electronica Jury Statement 2006 :: Digital Musics

Amidst the plethora of the musique concrete oriented pieces we found a vigorous, rip roaring, high octane opus entitled Storm! A few of us were familiar with its author, Ambrose Field, but once this uncompromisingly relentless “audensity” hit our ears we were curiously smitten. Here was a composer and sound designer who was putting all his cards on the table and still leaving much to our collective aural imaginations. The tension, drama and impact were intensified by enhanced guitar-like timbre streams and strong cinematic effects which draw the listener into personal moments of sonic intimacy or vaster accelerations that appear “larger than life”. Constructing a convincing surround composition from recorded environmental sound sources and customized computer metamorphosis is always a musical challenge and the uncommon results we encountered here helped to ignite fresh audio insights into a rather profound acousmatic world.

photo: Phil McPhee
The Worldscape Laptop Orchestra

The Worldscape Laptop Orchestra is an ensemble of 50 performers, each working with a laptop as their instrument. Custom software for the ensemble was produced to enable wireless communication, and the composition of new musical works undertaken by composers Angie Atmadjaja, Jethro Bagust, Alex Harker (with Matt Posstle, Trumpet) . The systems were performed at two concerts of "Worldscape", a 3hr multimedia entertainment, by students of the Music Department at the University of York, UK.

Technology is now commonplace and essential to many aspects of musical performance, and the last ten years has seen an exponential growth in the number of musicians and ensembles using computers for live music making. With the Worldscape Laptop Orchestra, we set out to specifically investigate how new methods of musical creativity would be suitable for a large number of performers.

Laptop Orchestras themselves are not new; since the 1970s many ensembles have chosen to continuously stretch the limits of emerging technology (such as The Hub, Rhythm and Noise, and recently an advanced fifteen member laptop orchestra from Princeton University)*. It is clear that digital performance has a stable future, but how can the next steps towards larger-scale interactivity be made?

It is rare to have the opportunity to assemble 50 laptop performers in the same space for a musical event, and the resulting challenges are both technical and musical. In technology, existing solutions to audio-over-wireless networking which would otherwise be perfectly acceptable for small-scale ensembles of under 20 performers can run into significant performance issues when applied to larger forces. We wished to present a clean and modern aesthetic, free from nineteenth century ideas of what an instrument is supposed to do or sound like, and it was essential that our performers were cable and clutter-free.

Musically, the computer is a new instrument, and is treated here on it’s own terms. The sound made by the orchestra does not replicate or emulate traditional instruments in any way: instead, the orchestra (in this sense taken to mean 'sounding together') is treated very much like a vast and very expressive, human-controlled synthesiser.

Supported by Apple Computer, the performers were able to communicate the large amounts of control and gestural data generated by this ensemble to a series of audio servers via high-bandwidth AirPort Extreme networking solutions. Each performer communicates their information to the others through custom software written specifically for the event by the composers in the Pure Data (Miller Puckett, UCSD) and MaxMSP(Cycling 74) audio programming languages.

Reviews
The Guardian
+ news interview broadcasts on BBC Radio, World Service and commercial radio and television networks.

References

Truman,D. Why a Laptop Orchestra, Organised Sound 10(3): 255–66.
Pure Data: Miller Puckett
Max/MSP: Cycling 74
Other Laptop Orchestras

Papers, and documentation site in preparation.

Ambrose Field presented his new multi-loudspeaker work World Facts at the World by Ear: Globalisation concert at the ICA London on the 21st June.

World Facts combines 190 audio strands (aprox 1 per nation) into an elaborately cut-up and funky electronic soundscape. Using freely available data sourced from America’s Central Intelligence Agency Online World Fact Book, this music maps the provision of relative economic wealth, basic human needs such as sanitation, and the international flow of oil money, into sound.

The ‘developed’ west gets big, monolithic and featureless slabs of audio, whilst the ‘developing’ nations draw attention to themselves with interesting and often unstable rhythmic structures. You could think of World Facts as a version of this kind of visualisation.

World Facts is available as a live performance set or multichannel media piece. Use the secure contact form for all enquiries.


Setting up::the ica crowd

The making of Storm!

From the stadium-sized guitar driven impact of Cathedral, to the hyper-real California 911(on stepping outside each day, you only have to wait a few seconds between hearing the sirens of police and firefighters) Storm! had to be an unusual experience. This page notes some of the techniques used in producing the album.

Recording

Storm! consists of a dense and volatile soundworld occupied by instruments, synthetic sounds, and location field recordings.

Whilst the instrumental and electronic parts were relatively straightforward to realise, I spent a while working out where would be good locations to capture unusual outside sounds. With the advent of very high production values in mainstream TV and the movies, and the impact of personal downloadable audio, we are hearing more and more sonic diversity in our everyday lives. The challenge was to come up with sound material that could satisfy and intrigue an audience used to regularly hearing a wider range of music and audio than at any time before.

Some of my best field recordings were captured from visits to the national parks of the United States, where i managed to find interesting sounds even amongst vast open wildernesses. In complete contrast, I also chose a variety of urban locations to source the sounds of democratic protests. Useful tip: when recording in unpredictable areas it is best not to use what's commonly known as a shot-gun mic as your intentions can be easily misunderstood!

Technology-wise, i used any medium available: for 'unplanned sounds' and things i came across in the street this was usually a simple consumer minidisk recorder or dictaphone, and for the planned recording of not-to-be-repeated sessions, such as the recording of jet aircraft from the runway-edge, underground caverns, and the amazing sounds of a local metal workshop we took along a hi-definition field recorder.

Performance in the studio

It was important to me that the creation of these pieces was done in a spontaneous, interactive manner so that the album had a vitality normally found in live performance. I used a simple working method which permitted me to add elements to a mix in real-time without visual reference, so that everything had a feel that is difficult to achieve by working alongside a computer screen. Some pieces were even mixed to analog tape: a little noisy, but great sound. It's wonderful finally to now have computer software which can do this effectively, but at the time very few packages could cope with the high-resolution audio used extensively on this project. Instrumental parts, percussion and additional electronics were then written, recorded and added using standard studio techniques. The resulting mix was then re-processed extensively and edited to further develop the sound-world.

Mastering

Every effort was made to bring the resolution, bite, and outrageous dynamics of the original recording to the final product. Sargasso, the record label, were absolutely meticulous in making sure that every part of the finished master was transferred to the manufacturing plant with bit-for-bit accuracy and without digital error. What you hear on these disks, unlike many CD's, is a perfect clone of the original master.

Sargasso SCD 28054
Image: Jac Depczyk

High impact, over-the-top sonic grandeur meets blistering metal guitar solos in Ambrose Field's award winning electronica album Storm!.

In an album having more in common with Operation Desert Storm than anything natural, excess meets understatement head-on. The raw energy of Storm! is driven by a highly original sound world: Ambrose journeyed to locations the world over to source field recordings desolate spaces, unique personal stories, military hardware testing, and urban protests.

Bizarre stories, such as the personal yet public protest of a disillusioned theme park employee mingle with stadium-sized, post-digital rock tracks created from a plethora of electronically manipulated guitars and unusual percussion.

Described by the BBC's Hear and Now programme as "Music pushing against its boundaries - aspiring to the visual" Storm! was four years in the making, and picked up an honorary mention at this year's prestigious Prix Ars Electronica awards. An explosive mix to be played loud!

order a copy from Sargasso

Northern Loop @ Huset, Copenhagen: live across two nations!

Northern Loop (Ambrose Field, Paul Fretwell) conducted their trademark live, just-before-time collaborative composition approach to live electronic media at Huset, Copenhagen, courtesy of the icmc on August 29th. We would like to thank everyone at Huset for making this technically demanding set go without any problems whatsoever.

Linked by real-time multichannel audio over i/p connection, Ambrose was able to work live in Copenhagen with Paul producing loops live from London. We setup a two-way exchange of high resolution audio, and a talkback channel, so that each of us could hear what the other was doing. Via compensation for network delays, the piece we jointly performed from two locations was assembled only a few minutes before you heard it from the house PA.

We chose to structure the music so that any network problems would be mitigated. Thankfully, there were none, enabling the work's beautifully smooth and silky surface to be enjoyed in full resolution. We hope that due to the continuity achieved, some audience members might not have even been aware that this was a split-site performance.