Edges Ensemble & Music Thing Modular - Synth Séance [Live at Electric Spring 2026]

Описание: 00:00 - 01. Audience applause
00:26 - 02. Movement I
10:25 - 03. Movement II
20:12 - 04. Movement III
30:53 - 05. Audience applause

A binaural presentation of Jake Mehew's Synth Séance (2026), performed on the HISS soundsystem, as part of Electric Spring Festival 2026.

PERFORMANCE DESCRIPTION

Every radio broadcast we have ever made leaves the antenna and travels outward at the speed of light. It spreads, weakens, and eventually becomes indistinguishable from the universe’s radio noise floor, folded into the vast hiss of cosmic and galactic radiation. Synth Séance treats that vanishing point as an invitation to imagine. If the air is already full of messages, then perhaps the dead are not silent, only too faint to hear.

Edges Ensemble presents a reanimation and transformation of these electromagnetic emissions through synthesiser technology. The performance takes electronic voice phenomena recordings as its creative impetus, translating them into control voltages and triggers that circulate through a cybernetic network of interconnected satellite synthesisers built from Music Thing Modular Workshop Systems, giving rise to virtual, protean realities spatially actualised on the University of Huddersfield’s HISS audio system.

Agency is redistributed between performers, patches, and the electromagnetic ghosts embedded in the recordings. As a work of sonic fiction, Synth Séance stages a séance not to prove the paranormal, but to make room for it: to welcome electronic voice phenomena, to let stray transmissions return as presence, and to ask what it means to commune through circuitry. Listening becomes divination, a collective search for patterns and meaning in noise, feedback, and machines together.

WHO ARE EDGES ENSEMBLE?

Edges Ensemble is the University of Huddersfield’s experimental performance collective, bringing together student musicians, sound artists and composers to explore improvisation, live electronics and contemporary notation. Working across instruments, voices, objects and software, the ensemble develops new work through playful constraint, deep listening and collaborative authorship. Rehearsals operate as a laboratory for timbre, texture and spatial thinking, where scores may be graphic, text-based, or coded in real time. Its projects span acoustic and electronic practice, from quiet microsound to high-energy ensemble noise and multichannel diffusion work. Edges Ensemble champions curiosity, inclusivity and risk, prioritising process as much as product, and giving emerging performers space to test ideas in public. Based within the University’s Creative Arts community, the ensemble stages concerts, installations and site-responsive events across campus and beyond.

WHAT WAS THE MUSIC THING MODULAR SYNTHESISER WORKSHOP?

As part of Electric Spring 2026, the Music Thing Modular workshop (Led by artist Jake Mehew) introduced participants to the fundamentals of analogue modular synthesis through a structured and exploratory session. Attendees learned the basic principles of voltage control, signal flow and patching, before examining key modules within the modular synthesiser, including oscillators, filters, envelopes, VCAs and modulation sources, to understand how complex sonic textures develop from simple components. The workshop then moved into an exploration of feedback systems, considering both their technical operation and their creative potential. Participants engaged with cybernetic concepts in group improvisation, approaching performance as a responsive system of listening, adaptation and shared agency. The session concluded with collaborative electronic improvisations and experiments in spatial audio performance, enabling the group to shape sound collectively in real time and transform the space into an immersive sonic environment.

Following the workshop, participants were invited to join Jake Mehew and the Edges Ensemble in a live performance at Electric Spring 2026, bringing their newly developed techniques into a public concert setting and contributing to a collective exploration of modular sound in performance.

This work is kindly supported by Tom Whitwell of Music Thing Modular, who provided the ten Workshop Systems for the performance and workshop.

Music Thing Modular Website
https://www.musicthing.co.uk

Jake Mehew's Instagram
  / jake_mehew_music