Bringing the Noise

Working at the cutting edge of improvisation, Henry McPherson (2008) has learned to meld together music and other media to create art that both challenges and engages.

Riding the knife edge of creativity in the middle of an improvisation session, Henry McPherson (2008), has to be open to opportunity – available to the possibilities as he finds himself right there in the midst of performance. But during his musical and creative journey to date, this willingness to grasp the opportunities presented has proven to be invaluable, helping him move into the world of experimental and improvisational music, harnessing the creative power of new media and navigating the pitfalls faced by creatives during the pandemic lockdowns.

Brought up in a household where his mother was a musician and music teacher, Henry was surrounded by music, playing and performing from an early age. Coming to Radley on a dual Music and Drama scholarship supported by the Foundation, he split much of his time between the Theatre and Music departments throughout his time here – and this combination is one that he has circled back to with the focus of his current PhD studies in Improvisation and Music & Dance. In his time at the college Henry was, unsurprisingly, very involved in many of the performances, singing in the choir, the chamber choir, Radley Clerkes, as well as doing lots of work for the Inter-Social Partsong competitions. As a pianist, he played in the orchestra, for theatre productions and also took part in the piano extravaganzas, and even in all his work in the experimental music community he has still not played in anything since that had quite so many pianos! From early in his time at Radley he would head across to use the music departments by himself in his spare time on Sundays to use the facilities there to compose his own original pieces. His interest in music and in particular composition only grew under the tutelage and guidance of the academic staff and visiting music teachers. Even now, over a dozen years later, he cannot stress enough how vital the VMTs are for musicians at Radley. Anne Martin-Davis for piano, Emma Taylor for singing and John Rockcliffe for Percussion were particularly key to Henry’s development. Together with the academic staff they helped him prepare for his application to study composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow, arranging a mock-interview for him with an established composer in London. Needless to say despite composition being a rather niche pathway and not a common route out of school, the preparation and interview were a success and he was accepted to study there.

Whilst studying composition at Glasgow, he found that he wanted to continue to perform and to get back on stage himself and it was the courses run by a visiting group of improvisors from Estonia, led by Anto Pett and Anne-Liis Poll, that introduced Henry to the opportunities available through this approach. Improvisation by its very nature is a practice of live composition and performance, in fact it is also known as ‘instant composition’, and he was taken by this freer way of working as an alternative approach to traditional notated composition. Composition is still traditionally done in isolation – writing a score over months that is then passed on to an ensemble, who rehearse it and then perform it. It can be quite a lonely business but presented with the opportunity to collaborate more immediately in performance, rather than handing his work over to musicians at a distance, Henry dived in. Having done a small amount of collaborative work with creators from other disciplines such as film makers during his studies, he realised that combining improvisation with collaboration could be an important and productive approach for him. Starting to work with other groups and performers interested in spontaneous working in and around the Glasgow area, he realised he had found his community and immersed himself in it.

Initially performing at an improvisation conference, and as part of an interdisciplinary improvising ensemble at the Conservatoire, it was there he met two other performers, Adam Hall and Inkeri Kallio. With a shared interested in working collaboratively to explore LGBTQ issues in a concert hall setting, they founded the performance group, Savage Parade. Their aim was to engage in socially engaged practice in a politicised sphere, examining issues that were relevant to their own LGBTQ community and

Henry McPherson (right) and Sky Su: More Than One Thing research session, University of Huddersfield, 2020.

to put them into a setting in which they felt there hadn’t been a lot of scope for previously. Putting together an ensemble, they began to workshop with each other, and the creative output that followed were pieces that used a wide-range of media – music, text generation, theatrics, costume, lighting and video. This proved to be a successful method of working for Savage Parade and they were soon commissioned to work at an innovative LGBTQ+ music festival in Birmingham called FLUID, conceived and curated by Trevor Pitt. He had brought together contributors from right across the musical spectrum, including classical, R&B, electronic, visual based arts for two and a half days of performances that centred on queer voices in music. Examining the political and lived experience of the performers in this way did lead to some institutional resistance, and Henry and his collaborators did face questions about the relevance and validity of their performances. But they used this resistance to continue to fuel their work as they felt it was important to engage with and challenge audiences.

The Savage Parade collaboration continued to perform their work, only coming to an end due to simple geography, as all three of them were living in different countries, but the work Henry had embarked on with them and at the conservatoire gave him the confidence to grasp the next opportunity that came his way. He therefore applied for (and was appointed to) an Artists-inresidency programe at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada in 2018. The two weeks of focussed work with a group of amazing dancers and improvisers that followed really cemented the idea of following an improvisation-only pathway that in turn, lead to his PhD placement at the University of Huddersfield. Whilst at Huddersfield, he met up with a friend from Glasgow, Maria Sappho, who in turn introduced him to another performer, Brice Catherin. They recognised a shared interest and approach to creating work and thus the Noisebringers were born. Coming together as an improvising trio, they sidestep genre and media, are prepared to throw themselves at anything and follow the freeform and anarchic opportunities that arise. They work across music, film, radio broadcast, and even collective novel-writing, the desired outcome of the piece informing the medium used, and their work is fully collaborative – everything they release is done so under the Noisebringer banner. Henry cites their exhibition, ‘IS THE NEW PUNK…’, at Barbara Polla’s Galérie Analix Forever in Geneva in May 2021 as a collection that encapsulates the spirit of their work. Featuring pieces of their own work that included film, audio, live performance, sculpture and objects, they also collected work from over 15 other artists from around the world who sent both physical and digital pieces in to be displayed in addition to a live group improvisation broadcast featuring the Glasgow Improvisers orchestra with guests from North and South America, Europe, and Japan. Given their media-agnostic approach they are very open to whomever they work with and pieces are created often with very little prior discussion. They just play and see what emerges from that. In his experience, playing with other improvisers can create unique collaborative relationships – as you perform with other people you get a sense of both how they work and for the piece that’s being made in real-time.

But how does an exclusively collaborative group create work in the midst of a pandemic?

Henry (right) as one of Savage Parade, with Adam Hall and Inkeri Kallio, at the FLUID Festival, Minerva Works, Birmingham, 2017

With venues and travel shut down, Henry and his collaborators quickly realised that they couldn’t just replicate what they do normally in the online environment. Pre-lockdown their work was created with what was right there in the room with them – riding that creative knife edge. But with no possibility of being in the same room as others combined with audio delay plus all the other issues in-built with online video conferencing that so many of us have experienced in the last 18 months, they decided to embrace the absurd environment they found themselves in. Playing with other people now had an additional performer – Zoom. As a piece of software, it takes active decisions on things such as volume, controlling feedback, and what background noise to filter out. All great for running a meeting, but when used to create pieces of experimental collaborative art it changes the creative process.

So, the Noisebringers turned to creating hybrid content, mediated by Zoom as demonstrated by their work during a virtual residency with Ngallery in Athens. Working with artist Tim Tsang in Los Angeles, they set up a 5-hour open stream recording session, each of them in their own house. Over the course of the session, they recorded conversations, made music, and improvised, including Henry eating his lunch halfway through! They each then took the material recorded and produced their own films, thus ending up with four different pieces all derived from the same original recording. The films were then exhibited in Greece on four screens in the gallery and are soon to be re-exhibited in the online context. and what it means to perform for people in front of an audience – over the last two years he has been performing without ever seeing the people on the other side of it. And whilst he’s much happier with the idea of working with someone digitally rather than in person, collaboration is still at the heart of what he does. The experimental music community has always been a hugely international one and without the stepping stones of previous opportunities to work across the globe, Henry knows he wouldn’t be where he is now. However, one thing has struck him and that is how the community rallied around each other to promote work and provide opportunities.

As the pandemic lockdown continues to slowly recede (hopefully!), Henry will be looking to finish his PhD and follow an academic pathway. Using a practice-led approach will allow him to continue to create and perform, whether that be more work with the Noisebringers, working on improvisation for musicians and dancers in a nursery setting, composing music for others or curating the MASS – a monthly online publication of discursive art, articles, and opinion pieces addressing global issues that has already shared work by over 300 artists. But if there has been one thing that Henry’s work in the experimental music scene has shown it’s that you have to make things happen for yourself. The more you reach out, the more opportunities arise. You just need to make yourself available to take them when they do.

At work during an Artist-in-Residency place in Sao Paolo, Brazil.

Thus, Henry found a way to keep performing through the pandemic, a time of challenges but also of opportunities. These included working with visual artists in the UK via Royal Mail, media artists in Germany and now working alongside the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, a 25-year established group who usually play in person, but who have been meeting online every week since the pandemic began. Henry and the Noisebringers have been invited to perform as guests at the first post-pandemic GIOFest, an improvised festival run by the orchestra in Glasgow in November each year. The lockdown-enforced use of the screen meant that Henry has needed to quickly get very comfortable working with video and editing and these new skills mean that he is now even more open to using whatever the best or required media for the work is. Always open to the opportunity, he has incorporated this into his PhD work and is much more comfortable submitting digital work to festivals and galleries that he would not have done before the pandemic. This screen-based performance and creation has also raised a lot of questions for Henry about what ‘liveness’ is Henry McPherson: Open Out, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2019.

Maria Sappho & Henry McPherson: GEMSFest, The Pipe Factory, Glasgow, 2019.