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John Wall

British experimental musician and composer

John Wall (born 1950) is an English autodidact electronic composer, whose contribution to the field is widely noted by critics of new music. His work has moved from early plunderphonic compositions – where he brought together unlikely combinations of musical genres to create fantastical new works – to large-scale works composed of thousands of tiny fragments that create the impression of virtual orchestras.2

From Wikipedia’s article on John Wall (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born 1950.1

About

Critics have remarked on "his extraordinary feeling for musical narrative" which is achieved through a working method that has been described as "phenomenally painstaking". According to one critic, Wall's "releases sound like the most finely crafted audio sculptures, somewhere between the contemporary composition of Lachenmann and the experiments of early laptop musicians of the mid 90s."

From Wikipedia’s article on John Wall, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2

Companies

Career

Occupation: composer, experimental musician.4

Early work

At the age of 40 Wall acquired a Casio FZ-1 – a mono sampler with very little memory – and used this in conjunction with an 8-track reel-to-reel tape recorder to make his first plunderphoninc works, which he released as Fear of Gravity on his own Utterpsalm imprint. Fear of Gravity uses long, often identifiable samples from other people's works as well as looping and repetition – all features which would quickly disappear from his work.

Work 2006–2011

Wall returned in 2011 with a document of his collaboration with spoken word artist Alex Rodgers. Richard Pinnell interviewed the pairing for The Wire magazine and wrote in a separate review: "While Wall’s anger can be heard in the music, Rodgers’ spoken word parts are equally acerbic. He sounds constantly on edge, his voice slurs in places, growls in others and has a gruff bite to it that is only amplified by the cheap dictaphones used to record many of his parts. His words move between a bitterly spat-out stream of angry obscenity-ridden disgust and a carefully worked out and scripted sense of surrealism all wrapped up in a Beckettian verbal sensibility."

John Wall is credited as editing John Edwards and Mark Sanders Nisus Duets (Emanem Records, 2002) CD and as producing the final edit for harpist Rhodri Davies' Over Shadows (Confront, 2006). He recorded the poetry series on the Stem label featuring Leslie Scalapino, Maggie O'Sullivan, Allen Fisher and Peter Manson. He also served as recording engineer for John Edwards solo album Volume (PSI, 2008).

From Wikipedia’s article on John Wall (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Personal life

  • CitizenshipUnited Kingdom5

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

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