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Light Tales And Familiar Sounds At Copped Hall – A Foggy New Dawn

Delighted to announce my return to Copped Hall, the spectacular partially-restored ruined mansion in the heart of Epping Forest on Saturday November 22nd, for the latest in the long-running Dark Tales And Strange Sounds events. Only this time they’re shaking up the formula and transforming the evening for one night only into ‘Light Tales And Familiar Sounds’ – which will be quite a feat if we can live up to the title in the middle of November in one of the coldest buildings I’ve ever encountered!

We’re in with a good chance, mind you – the line-up is fast class as ever and I’ll be bringing the Howlround sound system to lively up the intermission, which as usual features local craft ales and a roaring fire to get those cockles in order. These events are always an absolute highlight of my year and sell out pretty sharpish, so don’t delay – further information and tickets are available here.

What you’ll hear:

▪ Fanny Burney’s Evelina  ▪ The Blind Magistrate

▪ The Taj Mahal and its connection to Copped Hall

▪ Miller’s wife Joan and her miraculous hen

▪ Sounds from the wonderful Erddig mansion

▪ Sylvia Pankhurst and her Red Café in nearby Woodford

▪ Live, natural nightsounds from the Copped Hall estate

▪ Your own words woven into a completely new soundscape, via the medium of quarter-inch tape, before your very ears! [that’s me – obviously!]

Our performers:

• Alan Gronner  • Ben Davis  • Brona Martin  • Durdana Ansari OBE • Edie Bailey & Dubmorphology  • Ivano Pecorini • Julia Stallard  • Karina Townsend  • Minnie Wilkinson • Robin the Fog  • The Witch of Brussels

In other news, it’s been a little quiet on these pages of late, but that’s certainly not for lack of incident – alongside the rather more formal broadcast work that keeps the lights on, I’ve also had the pleasure of working with the Totally Thames Festival, British Library’s Story Explorers, the XMTR Festival, the Chickenshed Theatre Company and most recently some interactive installations trying to successfully replicate the sounds of dinosaurs and other prehistoric mammals stomping around and fighting over carcasses – and I can reveal that simultaneously syncing the heavy tread of eight legs on terrain that alternates between marshy and sandy might actually be the thing that one day sends me over the edge!

Making a lovely noisy mess live on Resonance FM with a live remix of Gem Archer’s ‘Longplayer’
The second longest loop of my career with some help from The Chickenshed!
Floating Stage: Live broadcast from Hermitage Moorings for Totally Thames Festival with Karina Townsend and Simon Fisher Turner – plus a lot of boat traffic!
Helping to inspire the next generation of weird sound-makers at the British Library

Also, Ken Hollings and I have polished off a rather fine third offering from our duo the third The Howling, which we’re hoping will see the light of day in early 2026. Plus I’ve been beavering away like mad on some new Howlround material that I’m equally excited about. That might just come out next year too, but we’ll see. I’m not in a desperate rush – it will see the light of day when it’s ready. Got a few more dinosaur footsteps to finish off first!

There was also a whale, but thankfully it didn’t require any feet synchronisation at all!

Between The Ears: Dead Man’s Handshake

Appropriately enough everything about this account of a well-known cave diving incident in the Yorkshire Dales in 1978 chills the blood. The divers talk about near panic in a void of darkness, the disappearance of one of their number and an agonising choice: leave him to a horrible, lonely deathor continue searching, thereby running the risk of being left with too little air themselves. Martyn Farr, whose book, The Darkness Beckons’ is in its third edition, is involved, as is Geoff Yeadon, who led the expedition. You will find it hard to tear yourself away from this nightmare. A haunting, specially composed score adds to the almost unbearable tension.

David McGillivray, Radio Times.

Absolutely delighted to have provided the original score to Leo Hornak’s frankly terrifying documentary exploring the dark and murky depths of the cave diving community with an original Howlround score, which I’m going to christen as the first outing of a brand new genre I’ve decided to call ‘CLAUSTROPHONICS’ – and also my first namecheck in The Radio Times! It’s a tough listen for anyone with even a hint of an active imagintion, so tune in here – then go for a nice walk somewhere very bright and spacious!

Between the Ears descends into the pitch-black underworld of Britain’s ancient, flooded limestone caves. On a cold day in 1978, three experienced cave divers entered an underwater tunnel at Keld Head, in the Yorkshire Dales. Hours later, one of them had disappeared, seemingly without a trace. With first-hand testimony from cave diver Geoff Yeadon, who led the expedition, and a specially commissioned soundtrack by analogue tape composer Howlround, Dead Man’s Handshake is a haunting voyage into the depths, where rescue is almost impossible. As diver Michael Thomas warns: “If you play this game long enough in places where humans aren’t adapted to live, you will meet trouble. And soon the Grim Reaper is sitting on your shoulder, having a little chat.”

VOX AETERNA II At Project DIVFUSE

Following the success of Vox Aeterna I in 2024, Howlround are returning to Project DIVFUSE on May 17th 2025 for one afternoon only to collect more materials for creating new work. For this workshop and performance, participants will learn about the wonderful world of analogue tape, recording the sounds we find around us, creating loops and building up multiple layers of interlocking sounds and voices that blend, morph and disintegrate together before your very ears – although given that this is vintage technology, nothing is ever certain! What we can guarantee is that we’ll create sounds that nobody else has ever made before and we’ll create them together. The workshop will culminate in a performance featuring all the tape loops that have survived!

Tape Loop Workshops : Saturday 17 May 2025 – 3:30pm + 6:00pm

£8 | 8 places per session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets

Switch Off That Trash Machine

From a darkened radio studio within an unassuming office building in a crepuscular backstreet somewhere near London’s South Bank, Johny Brown and The Band Of Holy Joy take over the airwaves every Friday night to bring you Bad Punk on Resonance 104.4FM. And for this latest edition they’ve very kindly thrown open their doors to The Howling, for a full ninety minutes of ‘pure trash perpretation’. The show opens with a recording from the launch of Ken’s latest book Paradise at the Horse Hospital before launching into a live session in collaboration with the Holy Joy Players that takes in the first ever performance of a recently discovered archive text ‘Under God’ and then a brand new track from The Howling’s forthcoming third album Be Quiet In This Church, out later this year on The Tapeworm, plus some new Howlround tape loop experiments and even a singing bowl or two. It’s quite a trip. For more information on the show and all the many and varied activities of Johny Brown (including his recently published book Corpse Flower, visit http://johny.co.uk.

Speaking of The Tapeworm, Nigel Wrench’s remarkable and harrowing audio documentary Switch Off That Machine is out now on their sublabel The Wormhole. Recorded between 1986-88 in Apartehid-stricken South Africa, it’s a combination of reportage, oral history and field recording dedicated ‘to everyone who has raised their voices against authoritarianism. And those who still will’. Needless to say in our current climate the themes it explores prove more relevant than ever. I’m proud to say it’s also my first EVER official mastering job! I’ve never marketed myself as a mastering engineer – it’s a dark and strange art – but burrowing out archive recordings from underneath mountains of tape hiss is very much my wheelhouse!

MANIFEST:IO Electronic Arts Festival

Delighted to be working with MANIFEST:IO and IKLECTIK again, with a live Howlround performance on Day 2 of their Electronic Arts Festival at St James Hatcham Church, Goldsmiths, after last years’ memorable live set in Berlin in front of the most gigantic screen of my career! This latest event starts at 5pm on Friday 11th April and continues all day on Saturday 12th from 2pm and features a fabulous programme of talks and performances throughout. Tickets available for both days from the IKLECTIK website.

Live in Berlin, 2024

For this edition, we confront the theme “Fragmenting Places, Imagined Spaces”, exploring the dissolution, transformation, and occupation of environments—erased by gentrification, reshaped by conflict, or reclaimed through radical imagination. As it expands to London, the symposium creates a space for critical engagement, inviting voices from across England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Northern Ireland to share their practices, stories, and strategies for artistic resistance.

With a strong emphasis on Connection, Community, and Play, this edition sparks new forms of collaboration and exchange in a city where creative spaces are increasingly contested. Join us as we reimagine what it means to belong.

Speakers and Performers on Day 2:

Atau Tanaka, Pauric Freeman, Florence To, Patrick Hartano, Ambient Gaza Collective, Hackoustic, Tom Fox – Vulpestruments, Howlround, ILÃ, 𝙼𝙸𝚂𝚂𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙼𝚄𝚂𝙸𝙲 (aka Suren Seneviratne), HAAR and more!

Tickets for Day 1 here and Day 2 here. Can’t wait – see you there?!

To The Manor Burned: Dark Tales V, Saturday 29th March at Copped Hall

The Dark Tales And Strange Sounds Team return to Copped Hall on Saturday 29th March for another evening of storytelling, performance and spooky sonics amongst the picturesque environs of this partially restored stately ruin.

Julia Stallard will be telling the grim story of the Witch Trial of Agnes Waterhouse, and we’ll delve into the horrors of 18th Century healthcare and hear the grim story of eye-surgeon Chevalier John Taylor. Spooky tales will be provided by Minnie Wilkinson and by Sinister Masterplan (Laura Sampson and Sam Enthoven), who will recount H D Everett’s The Whispering Wall – the tale of a haunted mansion in which there’s a wall with a mysterious voice, reputed to tell you where you’re going to die…

We’ll also discover the grim details of Agnes Waterhouse’s 16th Century Witch Trial and find out why men of the Essex Marshes boasted of having up to ‘five-and-twenty wives’! Sound artist Karina Townsend will be on hand to capture the sounds of the Hall’s resident bat population – they always make an appearance at these events! Plus of course the usual live tape loops from me and the machines, including mandatory audience participation. Plus a well-stocked bar and a roaring fire. Wrap up warm – it’s the coldest building imaginable!

I love these events so much, always a highlight of the calendar and in the most fantastic surroundings! Last few tickets available here. Do make sure you read the small print – it’s an old building in the middle of nowhere, so you’ll need to be able to get there and get home under your own steam. Otherwise you might just be doomed to roam those spooky corridors forever…

Shaking The Birley: Tape Loop Workshop & Performance In Preston

Join sound artist and composer Robin The Fog for an afternoon exploring the magic and the chaos of composing with magnetic tape. Learn to create your own far-out analogue sound worlds with little more than a microphone, a razor blade, some sticky tape, and a sense of adventure – and with not a single pedal, plugin or synthesiser in sight!

Last remaining tickets are £5 and can be found here (suitable for ages 12 and up). There’s also a free performance in the evening from 7pm, using some of the loops created during the workshop! Just turn up at The Birley, PR1 2QE.

This short course will equip you with a fundamental awareness of working with magnetic tape, both as a tool for recording and playback but also as a remarkable gateway to new ways of sculpting sounds, performing and improvisation, through the basic techniques of musique concrète. From its origins in post-war Paris via the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the theme from Dr. Who, to the experiments of Brian Eno and its role as the backbone of dub, reggae and decades of electronic and ambient music, you will learn from the masters and gain an understanding of basic recording and editing, create tape loops, experiment with delay and also get a chance to test your newly found performance and editing skills in a final improvised performance.

Sandbox is an open and informal gathering where leading sound practitioners share their latest work and meet fellow sound artists. Delivered by Modus Arts, a National Portfolio Organisation with Arts Council England, presenting sound arts projects across the UK encompassing installations, live performances, acousmatic musics, sound sculpture, sound archives, oral histories, and workshops.

Can’t wait for this – hope to see some of you there!

A Year Where Time Became

Hello You. A very hasty round-up written in the dying moments of 2024. Truth be told a LOT has ben going on and I should probably be having a stab at something a bit more substantial, but I’m having to type this squeezed onto a desk that barely has room to contain my laptop, one of Mum’s potplants, a boombox playing Indonesian Noise Music and the oversize keyboard I’ve had to use ever since the letter ‘N’ on my macbook stopped working. Tidy up? I think you know me better than that!

First things first, I am absolutely chuffed to bits to have the latest Howlround LP included in Electronic Sound Magazine’s Albums of the Year list yet again! And this just happens to coincide with the fact that you can currently pick up a copy of A Loop Where Time Becomes on attractive purple vinyl for HALF PRICE while stocks last due to the current Castles In Space end of year FLASH SALE! Turns out they have so much coming out in 2025 that they urgently need the warehouse space, so click here to snag yourself a bargain!

Thanks once again to the team at Electonic Sound for their support – always a stimulating read and this month featuring Jean Michel Jarre, the man I always think of as my very VERY first exposure to the wonderful world of strange and beautiful sounds. Comes with a tasty 7” too!

Speaking of a Year In Review, the good folk at Touch Music recently asked me to resurrect their long-running Touch Radio series with a round-up of my favourite Touch-releated tracks from 2024. The resulting hour long mix is the first stirings on these pages since 2021, and takes its place alongside an archive of 150+ episodes hosted by the great and the good of the experimental community and stretching back well over a decade – so get stuck in!

As mentioned earlier, I really should spend a bit more time writing a review of a year that has seen more than its fair share of audio adventures, from a spectacular Berlin light-show to a cave far beneath Margate, to an appearance on East Midlands Tonight (I think that’s what it’s called?!), a smoky room in a ruined mansion, a festival tent in Wiltshire, friendly welcomes in Barrow in Furness, Hastings, Coventry plus a triumphant Howling Homecoming at Cafe Oto. Even ended up in Normandy having an absolute stone-cold legend of acousmatic music buy me dinner! And that’s just off the top of my head. A better blog post would have provided photographic evidence, but this desk is driving me mad and I think wine might be opening downstairs, plus I’ve got to take the dog out. Cute dog pictures I CAN do!

Thank you so much to the many friends, co-conspirators and fellow nerds who have come along for the ride once again this year. Wishing you all a Happy New Year and here’s to more Sonic Adventuring in 2025!

NOISEMAS 2024

Iklectik Presents NOISEMAS 4 – In Aid of Palestine and Lebanon

12-Hour Non Stop Fundraising Music Marathon

Sunday 15 December 2024 | 12pm – 12am

Tickets: donate what you can https://link.dice.fm/J03fbd4099de

100% of proceeds will go to Medical Aid for Palestine and Lebanon, supporting health and dignity for Palestinians living under occupation and as refugees.

We’re beyond excited to announce that our cherished Noisemas Party is back! We know it’s short notice, but after much consideration, we felt the urgency to come together and make a meaningful difference.

Join us on Sunday, 15th December, at LOKI in Brixton, for a 12-hour music marathon from 12pm to 12am (or maybe even longer!)

77 incredible Live performers, VJs & DJs

Noisemas is celebration of community, music, and solidarity. Not be missed!

TDK – The Tapeworm Celebrates 15 Years With A Howling Horrorshow

Hello You. Been a while since I wrote anything on these pages, but certainly not for lack of incident round these parts. I’ve been beavering away behind the scenes, mostly on mixing and editing audio in more formal environments for the delight and edification of various media empires, while simultaneously trying not to use my powers to fuel the forces of darkness (which in our current political and economic landscape is harder than you might think). But it’s not all dreary (dis)honest toil round these parts as Ken Hollings and I have been hard at work on new material for The Howling and are preparing a rather special HAPPENING which will take place this Hallowe’en, of which more in due course. For now you can come and hear at least some of it this Friday 27th at Cafe Oto as our fabulous label The Tapeworm is celebrating 15 magnificent years with what they’re calling a Dalston Knees Up – or just TDK. See you there?

In other news, I’m very happy to announce that my Resonance FM show ‘FogCast’ is now back on the airwaves for a new season, every Wednesday evening at 11pm UK time, plus repeated 2.30am on Sundays. Also that Resonance has just finished building its brand new studio near Blackfriars in South London, which means for the first time in four years we can start broadcasting live again – a real achievement. To celebrate please enjoy this very special first episode which is actually a repeat of one especially commissioned for after-hours playback at the recent We Out Here festival.

Pity I couldn’t have accepted their ticket offer and gone along to hear it in situ, but as I mentioned before the current media landscape is very demanding. What is the world coming to if a chap can’t even slope off to a festival anymore?!

Anyway, three cheers for Resonance getting their studio back! As always this most excellent broadcaster and registered charity is currently in need of financial support, so do please consider visiting their fundraising page and bunging them some much needed cash. And hopefully see some of you on Friday?