Scott Mc Laughlin - Composer

News and Concerts

News

17-10-11: Just back from the excellent 3rd Third International Conference on Music and Minimalism in Leuven, Belgium. A great four days of new people, new music, and new biers. Did a talk on aspects of minimalism and reductionist aesthetics in my own work, with a focus on Bateson's epistemology of difference; seemed to go down well. I'll write this paper up soon and it'll be posted on the conference site, which I'll link to.
Also, next week Sebastian Berweck plays my new piece for synthist + MaxMSP, Bifurcations in a Continuous System. The originating idea was to write a piece that is pianistic to play but doesn't sound like a keyboard envelope, so this piece maps the duration between notes to frequency; the notes themselves are inaudible, but the time between this note and the next is turned inversely into sustained tones, faster notes equal lower pitched tones and vice versa.

25-07-11: New website for my sax/electronics duo with Iain Harrison, check out Apropos-music. The design is minimal at the moment, will make it more prettierised later in the year, probably...

09-07-11: The wonderful Eric Honour has just released his new CD called Phantasm: Music for Saxophone and Computer, including his recording of my piece Whitewater, which he also toured extensively in 2009. Here's the iTunes link for downloads now, the full release is July 26th on Ravello Records.

26-07-11: Busy day today, Trio Scordatura performed my 'at least two things' this morning at the wonderful BEAM festival, then I performed this evening as Apropos (Iain Harrison - saxophone, me - live electronics) with guest Hervé Perez at a Discus event in Sheffield. I'll put recordings up when they arrive; and will soon have a perfomance section on the site for my iprov things.

24-07-11: My paper for the Word Event symposium on text notation has been accepted. I'll be talking about different sites of interpretation in the scores of Manfred Werder.

18-05-11: Just finished and intense but excellent one-day workshop in Scotland with Mr McFall's Chamber. They're running a 5-day set of workshops on pieces for electric quartet of strings (vln,vla,vc,bass/b-guitar) with live electronics, and blogging the whole thing. It's an excellent idea, both the workshops themselves and the putting of all that material online, I wish more ensembles could do it.
The blog contributions for my day and a recording of the piece are here.

12-03-11: Currently working on expanding my thesis work on chaos theory and indeterminacy. Have papers accepted for this year's Time's Excesses conference in Caen (France), and the Chaos Modelling and Simulation conference in Crete, and now also the 3rd Third International Conference on Music and Minimalism in Leuven, Nov 2011.

20-02-11: From April 13-20th I'll be in New York for talks at Columbia (April 19th) and SUNY Stony Brook (April 15th + concert!) on my game piece Shoals, which is currently being developed as part of a 'Gameplay as Community' fellowship with the awesome Analogous Projects in NYC. See here for the game rules and software. Unfortunately as far as I know these are not public talks but if you're in the area and want to come along then throw me an email and I'll see what I can do.

Upcoming and Recent Concerts

27th Jan 2012 - Rymer Auditorium, University of York, 7pm
[untitled]
Peyee Chen (voice) and live electronics
1st Dec 2011 - St Paul's Hall, Huddersfield, 1pm
Nano
Ann Evans (saxophone)
27th Oct 2011 - Phipps Hall, Huddersfield, 5pm?
Bifurcations in Continuous System
Sebastian Berweck (synth + MaxMSP)
25th Sep 2011 - InTime Symposium, Ellen Terry Building, Coventry University, 1.30pm
Nano
Ann Evans (saxophone)
26th June 2011 (11am) - BEAM Festival, Brunel University, Uxbridge
at least two things
Trio Scordatura - (Mezzo, synth, viola)
25th May 2011 - Ökumenische Jahrestagung der Polizeiseelsorge, Rastatt, Germany
Music in Two Dimensions no.3
Duo Contour - (quartertone trumpet and electronics/malletkat)
19th May 2011 - Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany
Music in Two Dimensions no.3
Duo Contour - (quartertone trumpet and electronics/malletkat)
15th April 2011 - Staller Center Recital Hall, SUNY Stony Brook, New York
Action at a distance ("no one is an island")
Sarah O'Halloran (voice) and live electronics
4-7th March 2011 - Trio Scordatura tour
at least two things
Trio Scordatura - (Mezzo, synth, viola)
4th March 2011, UK Microfest 4, Vortex Club, London
7th March 2011, UEA Norwich, time/venue TBA
8th March 2011, 1.15pm, St Paul's Hall, Huddersfield
4-5th(TBA) March 2011, UK Microfest 4
Music in Two dimensions no.3
Duo Contour (quartertone trumpet and electronics/malletkat)
27nd February 2011, 7pm, GEMdays,Phipps Hall, Huddersfield
Action at a distance ("no one is an island")
Peyee Chen (voice) and live electronics
22nd February 2011, 1.15pm, St Paul's Hall, Huddersfield
There are Neither Wholes nor Parts (II)
Jonathan Sage (Clarinet)
20th January 2011, 1.15pm, St Paul's Hall, Huddersfield
There are Neither Wholes nor Parts (Ia)
Iain Harrison (Saxophone)
13th November 2010, November Music Composers Club, s-Hertogenbosch, Holland
There are Neither Wholes nor Parts
Iain Harrison (Saxophone)
23rd October 2010, 8pm, Project Arts Centre, Dublin
Primes
Marja Gaynor (violin), Fergal Dowling (computer)
12th October 2010, 8:30 p.m, Karnatic Lab, Amsterdam
Clockwise Counter-Clockwise
Xenia Pestova (toy piano)

For older performances please see here.

Biography

Scott Mc Laughlin was born in Ireland (Co. Clare) in 1975. He playing in indie-rock bands until his mid-twenties, then studied music at the University of Ulster at Jordanstown where he gained a BMus degree in 2001. He completed a PhD at the University of Huddersfield with Pierre Alexandre Tremblay and Bryn Harrison in 2009. Currently, he is an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at CeReNeM (Uni. of Huddersfield).

His music is concerned with relationships between minimal processes of transformation and proliferation: ideas of recursion, hysteresis, difference, cluster-microtonality, chaos/complexity theory, interactivity. Scott is also an improviser (cello or live electronics), and plays in the pop/alt-folk duo Phantom Dog Beneath the Moon. Recent performances have been given by Sebastian Berweck, Jonathan Sage, Metapraxis Ensemble, Crash Ensemble, Trio Scordatura, and the public attendees at Analogous Projects’ ICMC 2010 event in New York.