It’s Wednesday afternoon, and the scene in a room on the campus of Falmouth university looks like after-school clubs the country over: a handful of teens, some enveloped in hoodies, some eating crisps and sweets; a couple of tutors. There the similarity ends. The desks are piled with an array of electronic music-making equipment: oscillators, modular synthesisers, a visibly homemade “white noise machine”, pens with contact microphones attached to them, an old four-track Portastudio connected to a series of effects pedals, a DJ turntable playing sound-effects records. Intermittent squeaks, whooshes and honks emerge as the teenagers start fiddling with them. A selection of microphones hang from a beam: swinging over small amplifiers on the floor, they produce squeals of feedback that shift in and out of phase, an idea borrowed from Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music, a 1968 piece subsequently covered by both Sonic Youth and Aphex Twin, who hails from just a few miles away.
This is a rehearsal by the Cornwall Youth Noise Orchestra, the brainchild of Matt Ashdown and Liz Howell of Moogie Wonderland, which began as a club night and now bills itself as “a participatory arts organisation”. Ashdown is also guitarist in “improvisational noise-rock trio” Mildred Maude, while Howell is descended from electronic music royalty: her dad is Peter Howell, a mainstay of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop throughout the 1970s.
