My solo practice as an improvising percussionist explores the relationship between performer, material, microphone, speaker, and space. I am interested in how sound is shaped not only by gesture, but by the behaviour of the whole performance environment. In this work, the microphone is not simply a tool for capture or documentation, but an active component within the music itself. Distance, placement, movement, feedback, resonance, and acoustic response all become part of the performance language.

I am drawn to the moment when an instrument stops being a single object and becomes a situation. A microphone, a loudspeaker, a surface, a room, a gesture – each part affects the others. Sound is not simply produced and projected, but negotiated. It moves through fragile systems of proximity, pressure, feedback, and attention.

Amplified performance systems

Rather than approaching percussion as a fixed collection of instruments, I work with it as a shifting environment. The instrument is sometimes the object, sometimes the microphone, sometimes the speaker, sometimes the room itself. Small actions become unstable. Quiet material details can expand into dense sonic fields. The work lives in these thresholds, where listening becomes physical and where control gives way to response.

For me, performance is a way of entering into dialogue with a space. Each location changes the behaviour of the system and asks for a different kind of attention. I am interested in how sound listens back; how amplification can reveal, distort, resist, and transform; how a performance can become a temporary ecology between body, object, technology, architecture, and audience.

Some of the materials I use come through a relationship with a spring factory in Yorkshire (UK) that has operated for more than 150 years. Industrial off-cuts that might otherwise be discarded enter the system as resonant bodies with their own density, resistance, and acoustic behaviour. They are not only reused objects. They alter the music. They push back.

During the residency at Neimënster, I want to place this system in dialogue with a new architectural and acoustic context. I will use the time as a period of focused experimentation, exploring microphone placement, feedback, resonance, spatial configuration, and recorded studies while observing how the work changes when it meets a different environment.

The project forms part of a longer period of solo development supported by Arts Council England and will lead towards recorded works and future public presentations. The residency itself is important as a space of experimentation: a place to test, adjust, and allow the work to be informed by its surroundings.

You could say the work does not try to fix sound in place. It follows it. It listens to what happens when a performance system becomes sensitive enough to respond.