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EVIL​[​a​]​LIVE

by Andrew Leslie Hooker

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1.
NAWR 19:48
2.
EMIT 22:44

about

Two solo no-input mixing board concerts from 2018 & 2019 respectively.

Please consider playing as loudly as possible, through speakers not headphones.

Track A
NAWR
Recorded live in Swansea, south Wales at NAWR ANOIS #5 (which on this occasion took place at BBC Hall, Swansea Studios, University of Wales Trinity Saint David) on 21 June, 2018.
Presented by NAWR music.

Track B
EMIT
Recorded live in St. Petersburg, Florida at the EMIT festival of experimental music on 22 February, 2019.

Reviews:

EMIT is a 23-minute record of a performance given by Hooker at the EMIT festival of experimental music in Florida, 2019. Though sonically pretty different from Trinity (Hooker's EP with trumpeter Nick Janczak), the piece nonetheless shares a predilection for the consequences of bringing together highly contrasting ideas. The most prominent is a polarisation between free-wheeling and rhythmically regular movement which, though it comes to dominate the piece as a whole, takes a while to establish itself. The first few minutes, featuring squalling electronic tones meandering forcefully over restrained burbling noise, only hint at regularity, and even then maintain a strong unpredictability. The volatility of the material almost seems to be actively preventing it from taking a hold, but from around the 6-minute mark, in the wake of loud buzzing notes, the whole soundworld starts to judder and shake with considerable force. Part of the way this plays out involves an evolutionary toing-and-froing between materials inclined towards or away from a pulse, but also the two often occur simultaneously, leading to some violent and mutually disruptive episodes. A particularly exciting one – the first big climax in Florida – takes place nine minutes in, when a big surge is followed by rapid pulsations that give the impression of a pitched idea being massively distorted due to overwhelming vibration.

The contrast of pitch and noise is also present in Florida, though here they feel less like discrete elements than poles on a continuum which the music veers wildly between due to the nature and extent of its internal wrangling. This is perhaps what i find most attractive about the piece overall; there’s something extremely tactile about the way Hooker’s sounds are pulled around and keep changing shape. They feel physical, plastic, as if Hooker were literally wielding pieces of sound in his bare hands, pulling them to shreds, pushing and shmushing them back together in new forms, passing electric currents through them, setting them on fire, placing them beneath different coloured lights, or just blowing them up. Electronic music so often sounds like an obvious product of hardware and software, which isn’t of itself a problem of course, though it can rob the music of evocational heft, giving it the same kind of uncanny lightness that plagues so much CGI in movies. Florida doesn’t do that at all: throughout, it sounds and feels like an intense physical struggle taking place, a grappling that keeps falling in and out of metric alignment, always volatile, often violent, all of it seemingly constructed from imaginary fragments of three-dimensional sonic matter. If music could be 3D-printed, i imagine it would sound just like this. To do the piece justice i strongly recommend following Hooker’s listening advice: “Please consider playing as loudly as possible, through speakers not headphones.”
SImon Cummings - 5against4

credits

released March 5, 2021

Andrew Leslie Hooker (no-input mixing board, various electronic filters & amplification).

Edited, mixed & mastered by ALH in north Wales, August 2020 - January 2021.

Recording on Track A by Jenn Kirby.

Thankyou:

Track A
Rhodri Davies for so kindly asking me to perform at NAWR.
Jenn Kirby for recording the concert and being such a generous host.
Daryl Feehely for the wonderful photographs.

Track B
Anoikis Contemporary Dance, Melissa Pasut and Rachel Sweeney, two glorious choreographer/dancers who performed alongside me that evening with an inspired, butoh-contaminated act of improvised burlesque.
Alex Pasut for the crucial procurement and loaning of gear.
David R. Manson for so kindly asking us to perform at Emit.

For my beautiful boy Eden.

In memory of Sarah James, 1963 – 2005.

Artwork: detail from original drawing by Ed Pinsent (The Sound Projector).

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about

Andrew Leslie Hooker Wales, UK

A composer of electroacoustic/no-input music based in north Wales.
He is currently undertaking a PhD in music composition
at the University of Huddersfield whilst contemporaneously working on
various sound, dance and extended cinema projects.
His work has been published by Entr'acte, Dinzu Artefacts, Subcontinental Records, The Silent Howl, Korobushka Records & Wormhole World.
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