Concert at the Shaftesbury Theatre Doors 7.pm
Our Headline Act
Dr David Bessell studied classical orchestration and electronics at the Royal College of Music. He also has a career in popular music as a session musician and recording artist for DiN records, Groove Unlimited, Deviant Records. David is a founding member of synthsupergroup Node along with producers Flood, Ed Buller and Hollywood sound designer/composer Mel Wesson. In addition he ran music departments at the University of Bedford and Plymouth University. During that time he conducted research into Physical modelling and other novel forms of sound synthesis.
You can find a selection of recent releases here - Music | Dave Bessell http//davebessell.bandcamp.com
Ty Unwin is one of the U.K.’s most prolific composers for TV and film, scoring everything from Walking with Dinosaurs to various David Attenborough documentaries to films with Dame Judi Dench… basically lots of very old things.
His first brush with success was winning a BBC Song for Christmas contest in 1985, whilst a spotty teenager with hair, sighting everything that he has achieved since, starting there.
Clients include BBC, Channel Four, Channel Five, ITV, TLC, Discovery, Sky and Netflix. Basically, even if you didn’t want to, you’ve heard his music somewhere.
He’s also worked with many artists, playing, producing or arranging for Midge Ure, Howard Jones, New Model Army, Red Box and Dina Carroll.
Ty is a studio animal and rarely performs in public, simply because, as a perfectionist, he hates playing live. Literally detests it. So we are honoured that he accepted our invitation (i.e., forced him) to perform for us at Synth South West!
P.S. He will probably swear a lot on stage
Pro Synth Network viewers call Mike Metlay “Dr. Mike” as a nod to his long-abandoned career as a nuclear physicist. Followers of Mike’s music usually know him as “Mr. Spiral” because of RadioSpiral
(https://radiospiral.net), the online radio station and international music community he cofounded in 2016.
Mike’s been playing synths for 45 years, with over 30 years’ experience as a writer and editor in the music tech sector. Since 1990, his main musical passion has been assembling groups of people from around the world to do music stuff together – mainly because he thinks collecting synth players is way cooler than collecting synths. (Cheaper, too.)
https://mrspiral.bandcamp.com
Joining Mike for his SynthSouthWest performance is London-based electronic musician and multi-instrumentalist Paul Harriman aka EdisonRex. Paul’s biweekly 2-hour live electronic improvisations, Edison’s Ephemera, can be heard Saturdays at 11 PM GMT on RadioSpiral.
https://radiospiral.bandcamp.com
Opening the show
our very own Peter James-Stephen who is also the organiser of "Synth South West."
Peter started his musical journey back in 1985 and was a recording artist between 1988 and 1999 working with the Bands "Athena" and "The Final Demand" with a few solo outings in-between.
Giving it up to concentrate on his surveying and planning Career and running Athena Systems Uk.
In 2004 he collaborated with "EMU Systems Scotland" and designed the worlds first 2 unit high PC sampler system the "Vampire Rack" which utilised their ground breaking Emulator X software. https://www.peterjames-stephen.com/athena-systems-vampire-rack-emu-emulator-x
Peter was also part of the original team that restored to airworthy condition Vulcan XH558
she was returned to flight in 2007 and spent the next 8 years gracing our sky's at the UK air shows until finally being grounded in 2015.
With the help of the "Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust" he is telling the story of the Olympus engine development through the diaries of those involved.
he will be performing a medley from his current musical project "Breaking the Sound Barrier"