Patterns in Radical Spectra

This paper contextualises my creative practice produced over the past 20 years and discuss how some of the themes arising from this work relate to some of my contemporaries and wider musical and cultural thinking. These works have little or no percussive content yet are still loosely defined as, or considered to be, ‘post-techno’ (I discuss this term below). Here I describe these works, consider my relationships to them, and reflect upon my responses to those works – leading to the installation ‘The Moment of Impact’ (exhibited as part of the Beyond Pythagoras Symposium, March 2014). It is intended that the following offers a contextual framework within which a critical reading of the installation can be composed. It is also worth noting from the outset that I made the piece following a previous visit to the University of Huddersfield where I was in a severe car crash (my partner drove into the path of an oncoming bus). ‘The Moment of Impact’ therefore refers to the sense of time standing still typically encountered in near death experiences (Saniga, 1998) and plays upon notions of inert or a-temporal gestalt.