jonathancrossley

This 4th installation in this son0_morph series is not only a solo recording project, but also a reflective journey into my history as a performer. I began my career as a classical guitarist, but remember always being engaged with music technologies via listening to multiple musical genres, simply loving acts like Tangerine Dream to Jean-Michel Jarre whilst growing up. Later in classical performance studies I ‘discovered’ Glenn Gould. His pianistic style was a revelation to me, the micro-attention to note volumes, and durations in recording drew me in musically. Mauer says that ‘Gould’s work teaches us that listening can be [...]

live on bandcamp 30/04/2021 The four works on this album are an audio document - a recording of a conversation between two musicians from very different backgrounds. Composer and wind instrumentalist Cameron Harris (Dancing a Stone - Dahinden/Kleeb/Harris) works here with cor anglais and Max for Live creating dense pointillistic pitch-based materials in response to the ambient soundscapes from Crossley’s guitar work. It is in the technologically mediated moment of meeting that the music/sonos emerged and with a generosity of spirit, these four collaborative ‘moments’ resulted. These works unfold slowly, and can draw the listener into a textural visual [...]

This multi-year research project set out to develop an expanded musical instrument, one which enabled the user or wearer to expand their capabilities whilst not abandoning or impinging on instrumental skills that may have taken a lifetime to perfect. Many digital systems often shift the performer behind a laptop or even forcing musicians to fake ‘liveness’. This system sought to build on, rather than change existing performer capabilities through prosthetic extensions to the instrument and the wearing of an exoskeleton. This particular result was dubbed the cyber-guitar: an extended electric guitar which has its signal modified in part via [...]

In 2013 electrical engineering, digital arts and music at Wits University partnered up again, this time to take twist up the saying ‘no pain no gain’ and to flex some sonic muscles. I had been following Daito Manabe, a Japanese visual and music artist for a number of years and continue to do so. At that point he had taken the world by storm with his myoelectric face stimulation videos. In these tests, and the following musical works, Manabe and volunteers electrically stimulated the muscles in their faces, leading to twitching and squirming in synchronisation with the previously made [...]

The musical pencil project was a research and performance project, undertaken in 2012 between Wits University departments of electrical engineering, digital arts and music. I proposed a pencil that could ‘realise’ the music as it was written as if the actual writing process or notating of the music generated the sound in the moment it occurred. In 2011 MIT had developed an audio enabled pencil which they called the drawdio and had made the circuit available to use. This simple circuit involved using the graphite inside the pencil to ‘close’ a circuit on a sheet of paper, dense with graphite [...]

Tricosmic was a research and performance project that took place in 2014 with the Wits music and resulted in a ‘silent’ performance at the Planetarium in Johannesburg. The questions posed wondered what it would be like to be to sit next to someone at a concert, to have your ears completely uncovered, hear them breath and move next to you, yet only hear music inside your head trough a ‘third ear’? How would you know if this experience was shared? How could you know they were hearing the same things as you did? And with the band only meters [...]