Positive Ambisonics
Ambisonic, immersive audio residencies
on the fringe of the Scottish Rainforest
© bethchalmers.com
John Wills
John has been experimenting with sound and sound recording from an early age. Starting with a family reel to reel tape recorder before moving on to multitracking and looping cassettes on several machines. He spent the summer of 1978 in Slade School of Art helping his friend to make soundscapes for his finals with a VCS 3 synth and an eight track recorder with little knowledge and was immediately hooked.
Alongside this he is a musician and has toured internationally with two art noise bands on the Beggars Banquet label (Loop and The Hair & Skin Trading Co.) who achieved top 40 albums
His love of recording meant it wasn’t long before he was in demand from independent labels to record and produce their bands. At the same time he was a live sound engineer touring with these bands playing clubs and festivals.
He was asked to record and co produce the debut album from Beggars Banquet new signing, Pinkie Maclure and it was soon clear that they both had a similar approach for creating and recording music using a large element of experimentation in traditional songwriting.
They went on to record eight albums under the name Pumajaw touring in Europe regularly.
They also created a multimedia show with film and music called ‘Song Noir’ for the Edinburgh Fringe which was performed by them at Summerhall for two consecutive years and was included in the top 50 shows in the festival by The Scotsman.
Soon after John went to Orkney to work with BBC sound recordist, Chris Watson to create and record a piece for the Orkney Festival to be played back through a quadrophonic sound system at St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall.
During this time Chris introduced John to ambisonic recording, a form of recording enabling the capture of a fully spherical, three dimensional sound.
It was something John had always wanted to do but was unaware that with newer, more powerful computers this was now possible. As soon as he returned he invested in a small eight speaker array for his house and an ambisonic microphone.
He made many recordings and created a collage of ambisonic ambiences and environments to create an hour long piece called ‘Drift’ which was played through an eight speaker ambisonic array at Birnam Art Centre during The Platform Festival.
He is also a big fan of radio and during the first Covid lockdown recorded eight hour long podcasts call The Great John Cage Podcast where he invited contributors from all over the world to record 4 minutes and thirty three seconds of their lockdown environments in the spirit of Cage. The results were fascinating and were contributed to The British Library.
Working with Pinkie again they co created an ambisonic performance for eight speakers which they performed four times as part of Pinkie’s three month, critically acclaimed exhibition of stained glass called ‘Lost Congregation’ at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow.
Now John has created a small eight speaker ambisonic studio called +VE on the fringe of the ancient Scottish rainforest in Argyll on the Sound of Jura set in 1.75 acres of woodland garden with accommodation and he is inviting artists of different disciplines to record in the studio and the field to create and experiment in this very special place.