ARCHAEOLOGY WRITING MUSIC  
 

RECORDINGS

My musical career began in 1974, when at the age of 18 I joined the Hull Truck Theatre Company as an actor and musician, under the direction of Mike Bradwell, its founder.
This was followed by a long and successful career in film music. Working largely alone, I produced music for hundreds of TV programmes, mostly documentaries for the BBC and Channel Four.
For a short time I was a composer in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and some of my tracks are included on the 2008 CD:
BBC RADIOPHONIC WORKSHOP - A RETROSPECTIVE

A selection of my film music tracks can be heard HERE

For several years I was completely immersed in African music.
In 2004 I played at WOMAD and made several BBC live broadcasts with Senegalese singer Laye Sow. I also produced and played guitar on his album DJAMANO. The album is a beautiful hybrid of Senegalese folk and American blues, with slide guitar by Richard Caswell. The late Charlie Gillett loved it.

Richard Caswell & I also collaborated in 2004 as The Howard Hughes Suite - samples, electronica and real instruments.
Four tracks can be heard on SoundCloud:

  

VIDEO

In 2012 The London Science Museum restored the only surviving Oramics Machine and made it the centrepiece of its Oramics to Electronica exhibition. I was one of a group of specialists invited to co-curate the exhibition. Nick Street made two excellent videos:
ORAMICS TO ELECTRONICA - 12 min documentary chronicling the Science Museum's co-curation process.
REUNION - 45 min video of a 'public reunion' session in the Science Museum theatre, featuring former members of the Radiophonic Workshop and EMS.
Although I no longer perform or record as an instrumentalist, I continue to develop my overtone singing and particularly enjoy singing in interesting acoustic spaces. A few examples are on YouTube:
ALTON OVERTONES - me singing in an empty Norman church in Wiltshire.
FINGAL'S CAVE - singing on the island of Staffa on an unusually calm day.
AMAZING GRACE - the well-known hymn sung as overtones.

Also on Soundcloud:

HINYANJA - 30 min radio documentary about Yorkshire comedian & poet Rory Motion travelling to a remote corner of Lake Malawi to perform stand-up comedy in the local language. I went too, as the sound recordist.

THE PSYCHEDELIC GARDEN - an entire hour of psych pop that I mixed for Shane Quentin's radio show The Garden Of Earthly Delights. It includes some remastered tracks by Raspberry Parade.

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HOLE IN THE GROUND - singing down a pipe into one end of a reverberant underground chamber; recorded from a pipe at the other end of the chamber.
TELSTAR - me playing the Stylophone, accompanied by Rachel Knoedler on keyboard

Text & images Copyright Steve Marshall 2013. All rights reserved