Stephen Cornford
Domestic Music
Stephen Conford is a media artist who works primarily by re-engineering consumer electronics into expressive and reflexive devices as a means of critiquing the ideologies they embody. "A state of enclosure” was recorded May 2020 for Amplify 2020: quarantine. “A finite number of rooms” was recorded June 2020 for the ‘Building A Better Reality’ Black Lives Matter benefit compilation on JMY Music. Both are loosely based pages from ‘A Score for Piano’ written by Sarah Hughes in 2010. “After their de…
Kinetic Sculptures
2015 Release. Includes an insert with liner notes by Stephen Cornford (Japanese translation by Nao Nishihara and Yoko Sato) and Minoru Hatanaka (English translation by Yoko Sato and Stéphane Shibatsuji-Perrin, and an 8-page booklet with black and white photos by Stephen Cornford. CD compiling recordings of installation works for musical instruments made between 2006 and 2010. Stephen Cornford’s practice exists at the junction between sculpture and music, using sound and noise to investigate the …
Constant Linear Velocity
**Limited and numbered to 150 copies** "Constant Linear Velocity" features recordings of a now lost sculptural work that was originally commissioned in 2016 for Colour Out of Space festival. The work consists of over 100 empty computer cases, fitted with 16 customised and automated DVD drives. Between 2016 and 2018 it was exhibited in Brighton, Athens, Croydon, Oxford and Rennes, on each occasion being reconfigured into a new form. The most ambitious of these being at Detritus Festival in 2018, …
Electrocardiograph Of A Cathode Ray Tube
"Electrocardiograph of a Cathode Ray Tube is an audiovisual project which applies a bio-medical sensing technology to an obsolete media apparatus. For decades CRT televisions mediated our perception of the world beyond our direct experience, our imaginations modulated by their machine rhythms. This performance uses brainwave / heart-rate monitors to pick up the electromagnetic resonances of the CRT screen and render them audible. The television is transformed from object to subject." Stephen Co…
Music for Earbuds
Music for Earbuds is composed entirely from headphone feedback which makes some surprisingly organic (as well as electronic) sounds, Stephen Cornford writes to introduce his new CD. A collection of sounds stark and stubborn, as a listener you hit against their form, slide on their surfaces. These sounds so alien yet alluring call you to spend time with them, attend to them. They mark the edges of hearing and understanding. The edge here is the ear that hears as listening encounters nothing but i…
Boring Embroidery
Boring embroidery features five beautiful, fragile yet raw improvisations for pianos and electronics performed by two of the UK's brightest talents. Picking up from where 2010's Turned moment, weighting release on Another Timbre left off, Boring Embroidery inhabits a slow, precise musical world that references Feldman and Tudor, yet remains resolutely improvised. Recorded in 2010 and 2011, this album possibly marks the end of the duo's piano collaborations but if so, it provides a perfectly matu…
Binatone galaxy
Binatone Galaxy is an installation for numerous portable cassette recorders which, rather than being used as intendedare loaded with self-amplifying cassettes that make audible the rattling mechanics of this dead medium. Superseded as dictaphones, the machines become instruments in their own right. Replacing the contents of each tape with a microphone allows us to hear the rhythmic and resonant properties of these once ubiquitous plastic shells, revealing the acoustics of the cassette and the vo…
Turned Moment, Weighting
'Stephen CORNFORD is better known for his work in sound sculptures and installations than as an improvising musician. But on ÔTurned Moment, weighting' (at-b07) he uses the piano as a source for feedback patterns, which he blends with the gentle Feldmanesque playing of pianist Samuel RODGERS to produce three extended improvisations of astonishingly delicacy. Samuel RODGERS has said that 'though being aware of and struggling with the tradition and limitations of the instrument, I have found the…