THE ORIGINAL BRIEF

As part of the Birmingham wide Forward Festival BEAST is commissioning three new pieces by three electroacoustic composers based on 3 regions of the city of Birmingham. The composition will take sounds directly from the areas of the city on which it is based and through consultation with local people the composers will not only create a piece that represents the area in the year 2000 but touches on the aspirations local people have for the future.

Alongside this process an education project will run in two other areas of the city where BEAST composers will work with local children and their parents to collect sounds that will create two more new compositions. The work will take the form of small installations in each of the selected areas of the city which will be open to the public and accessible for two months in duration. The installations will be at community venues such as schools or community centres. The pieces will also be performed as part of BEAST's 2000/2001 series. The project will be documented using photographs and a CD will be made that includes the three professional pieces and the two school pieces.

De(re)construction

The Digbeth area of Birmingham is known for its industrial heritage, soon to be swept away with the East Side development program.

De(re)construction visits factories and workshops, some of which have operated in the area for decades, and talks to owners and workers about the future. Is there a place for manufacturing in the new media-based Digbeth? Will the grind of thread rolling machines and clack of steel stampers be forever lost, to be replaced by the hiss of the cappucino machine?

De(re)construction is both a historical document of a vanishing industry and a celebration of a vision for the city of the future. A city where the currency of manufacturing is being replaced by one of ideas, knowledge and learning.

De(re)construction will feature on an album of electroacoustic works to be released on Resonator Records.

Letting the Beast out for City Scape Project

BEAST
CBSO Centre, Berkley Street

Commissioned by the Forward Festival, a team of Birmingham Electro-Acoustic Sound Theatre composers went out into the field, recording sounds in the local community for this City Scape project.
Back in the studio, this audio fodder was sculpted into finished pieces, to be dispersed around BEAST's multi-speaker sound system.

The concert's six pieces were co-ordinated by team-leader Trevor Wishart, with a foyer surround-sound installation to set the lobes a-tickle.
The first half favoured a uniformly subtle ambience, with Richard Whitelaw's initially cliched Urban Odysseys 2 developing a visceral thrust towards its close, weaving in dialogue provided by the homeless folk of St Basil's Centre.

The odd piece out was Simon Emmerson's abstracted Frictions, a very ruminative exploration of the soft-textured rattles of indigenous Brazilian and Zimbabwean percussion.

James Bentley and Derek Thompson (aka Hoodlum Priest) worked with pupils from the Bourneville Junior and Four Dwellings schools, and it was the latter's 4D Reservoir that provided one of the evening's stun-gun blows, emerging from a dark industrial rock corner, crashing out with great concrete blocks of white noise interference.

Immediately following this, the concert closed with some genuine industrial music.

Simon Scardanelli's De(re)construction literally built up from Digbeth factory thrashings, clankings and clumpings, with true-life-of-a-foreman interviews rising up from the decibel crush, the participants very wary of the Millennium Point media-focused makeover driving out the old grimy factories.

This was clearly the best fulfilment of the City Scape brief.

There will be another BEAST installation at the Ikon Gallery over the weekend of December 9/10, 11am-6pm.

Martin Longley