In December 1877, a journalist writing in Scientific American noted there was a now ‘a startling possibility of recording voices of the dead’. He had just witnessed Edison recording sound on his new invention: the phonograph.

In this live demonstration, I’ll explore some of the stranger obsessions of the early adopters of audio recording, as I immortalise a voice from the audience by recording it on wax, using an original Edison Standard Phonograph.

Delving into the archives, I’ll also examine a little-known curiosity from the eighteenth century, one which may have been used to record short segments of sound 150 years before the phonograph.

This event will include some short, musical interludes incorporating a few of my inventions. As I use the theremin to conjure up ‘music from the aether’, I’ll reveal how the first ‘electric servants’ were also seen as tools for paranormal investigation.

At The Last Tuesday Society, 10 December 2010.

If you ever thought artists like Kraftwerk were the first to embrace the machine aesthetic in their dance and music, this curiosity might interest you.

This fascinating dance piece uses steps that directly mimic the sounds and actions of mill machines. Although these steps were danced a century ago by female cotton mill workers, they seem strangely ahead of their time, forerunners of today’s machine-inspired dance music. You can think of this dance as steam-powered Kraftwerk – or techno 80 years before Detroit.

We’ll be performing The Machinery live in the Central Library, Birmingham UK, 13:30 prompt on Saturday 18 September
, admission free
. For the British Science Festival 2010.

I’ll be showing off the Ealing Feeder, the latest version of my carillon (automatic bell-playing rig) at the Kinetica Art Fair, P3 Gallery, 35 Marylebone Road, London, 5-7 February 2010.

The words Ealing Feeder come from the control room of Battersea Power Station, which provided London with electricity during the boom years of the fossil fuel age…

As the sun sets over Battersea Power Station, Spacedog will be playing live in the turbine hall. Date tbc but fingers crossed for 1 June 2010.

Stay posted for more news of this hugely exciting event, including ticket details. For now I can tell you there will be music from Alex Paterson (The Orb), John Foxx and ourselves, an installation from Andy Back, projections from Ian Eames and Mike Coles and many other treats. Curated by Dennis Da Silva and Beverley Bennett, Art Hertz, the event is titled Electricity and Ghosts (after one of Foxx’ classic tracks).

See some photos of the interior of the power station…

My first test with Hugo, the 1930s vent doll who will be appearing in future Spacedog gigs. Here, you can hear him singing the Kurt Weill classic Alabama Song. Stay posted for further developments – and look out for Hugo in the Brighton Festival Fringe…

Here’s an Edison phonograph recording, freshly made at the London Dorkbot Christmas party, December 2009.

Dorkbot is a meeting for ‘people doing strange things with electricity’ so the phonograph is an odd guest as it records and playback sounds using no electricity at all. As you can see when I lift the lid (see video), this machine is entirely mechanical. You turn up a handle to wind up a spring. This unfurls over several minutes, supplying the Edison with energy. Sound recordings are made using nothing more than a heavy stylus and a horn…

I’ll be getting out the camel hair brush and putting my 1904 Edison Standard Phonograph through its paces at the Catalyst Club, Brighton, 10 December 2009. Hear some commercial wax cylinders from the early 1900s and witness a live recording of a voice from the audience, straight onto a blank cylinder of carnauba wax…

Yep, I did say clog dancing.

This dance piece uses a combination of live, solo clog dancing, video loops and audio which plays at overwhelming levels, revealing a danceform that was directly inspired by the machines of the industrial revolution. With performer Caroline Radcliffe.

Lancashire clog is a deeply unfashionable dance form, often misrepresented as a pastoral dance – a sub-genre of Morris dancing. If you’re put off by the faux nostalgia of the Sunday afternoon clog dancing brigade, see us take Lancashire clog back to its genuine roots, as we evoke the sights and sounds of the industrial cotton machinery that inspired it. I’ll stick my neck out and say Lancashire clog is a pre-electronic forerunner of the industrially-inspired music of Kraftwerk and the noise music of bands such as Coil.

Spacedog will be performing our latest set at Goldsmiths Great Hall, 16 October 2009. We’ll be performing torch songs, death ballads and eerie English folk songs on a host of instruments, including theremin, laptops, vocals and home-spun musical robots.
We’ll be joining Leafcutter John, the Finn Peters Quartet and Slub for this evening of beautiful musical [...]

Hear a selection of sound clips from 1995 to present.

A few concerns about audio tours, illustrated with some footage of the audio tour in use at Stonehenge.

Over the last few months, I’ve been collaborating with Punchdrunk, the marvellous encounter theatre company, to make a very unusual multimodal effect – one that mixes emerging ideas in perception with a one-on-one theatrical encounter.

I’ll be revealing more about the nature of this effect in a few months, when some formal studies are complete. However, I can reveal we’ve piloted the effect – and have had some encouraging feedback – and have already used it (tentatively) in the recent Punchdrunk show: It Felt Like a Kiss. This show is a documentary, the form of a promenade piece, was devised by Punchdrunk in collaboration with documentary maker Adam Curtis (featuring music from Damon Albarn). It Felt Like A Kiss was created in summer 2009 for the Manchester International Festival.

Read some reviews of Electroplasm, the latest Spacedog show, at the Brighton Festival Fringe. Sarah, Jenny, Clara 2.0 were performing with Colin Uttley (at Bom-Bane’s) and Richard Wiseman (at the Marlborough).

Why is some music spookier than others? Which tracks give you a shiver down the spine? Is it the music, the lyrics or the association with a creepy film or place that gives it that edge? Join our mini survey to find the ‘world’s spookiest music’ and hear a live performance of the top-rated spooky music in the Brighton Festival Fringe.

In a gracefully distressed Regency theatre on the edge of Kemp Town, Brighton, I’ll be teaming up with vocalist Jenny Angliss and psychologist Richard Wiseman for another eerie outing, in Electroplasm. 8-10 May 2009 (with a music preview at Bom-Bane’s on 6 May).

Don’t read this entry if you’re about to eat your dindins. I created this sound effect for Bad Vibes, an exhibit I made for acoustician Trevor Cox to test people’s endurance of the worst sounds in the world.

I’ve created some music for contortionist Delia DuSol, who will be bending her body into some extraordinary poses and squeezing herself into a tiny perspex box at Richard Wiseman’s first night of Inexplicable Acts, Thursday 12 Feb. This season of shows at the Wellcome Trust will explore the psychology and physiology of circus performers’ bodies, including the sword swallower, the juggler and the exceptionally flexible Delia.

This highly unusual, public experiment explored the strange psychological effects of infrasound – sensations that may explain why people feel a sense of awe during cathedral organ recitals or a sense of unease in seemingly haunted sites. Venue: Purcell Room, London, May 2002.

This is my Mk III robotic bell rig, designed to make it easier to take the bells to venues. I’ve already used the bells in my own compositions at the Gasworks Gallery, Vauxhall (a Resonance FM night, curated by Ed Baxter) and at the Freebutt, Brighton. Here, for Christmas 2008, they’re playing Troika (from Prokovief’s Lieutenant Kije).

In December 2006, Spacedog assembled a group of musicians in the reverb chamber of the UK National Physical Laboratory. This room has one of the longest reverberation times in Europe. Here are some videos of our extemporisations in this highly unusual musical space.

An arrangement of sounds from Croydon’s wonderful fruit and veg market. There has been a market in Surrey Street since the 13th century.

The theremin AV controller is a device I’ve created to scrub audio and video samples live, using the pitch and volume aerials of the theremin. Here’s a video of it in action, manipulating samples from the Hammer classic The Devil Rides Out.

Named in honour of the original theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore, Clara 2.0 is a robot doll who can play the theremin live. I call her the ‘polite robot thereminist’ as she listens to a line from another player and moves her dolly arm to bring her own theremin in perfect tune.

A mini, automatic puppet show in a shed, created on a shoestring budget for the South Bank Centre, summer 2007. The brief was to come up with something novel inside a garden shed that would celebrate the area and appeal to families.

Did you hear the one about the lady on the bus? Hear it on this soundtrack announcing the results of Laughlab – the scientific search for the ‘world’s funniest joke’.

A brief tutorial on how to play the saw, a European skiffle instrument with a haunting, ethereal sound.

The Mellotron