"This is the music of the spheres, Hackney Wick style. This is the anarchic spirit of the edgelands"

Iain Sinclair

"Stephen Cornford’s twirling bass and electric guitar sculptures have the exhilarating and dizzying feel of a fun ride. The one I used to love-and-hate as a kid was ‘les parasols’ (the umbrellas): it would swirl you around in the air in a circle at the speed of a TGV. Two of the three sculptures installed in the Elevator gallery space were spinning dangerously fast, so much so that a notice in the entrance hall warned the audience not to go too near and to keep children away from them. This created a kinetic/sound installation in which interactivity was a hit and miss. Cornford’s sound art piece could almost be located within the experimental form of danger music based on the concept that a piece of music can or will harm the performer or the audience. A crowd had formed around the bar and close to the entrance, staying well clear of the pieces and I couldn’t help giggling at the fearful faces of people who dared approaching them or dodged their way around them. The whole art piece actually came to life when two performers started drumming and generally banging on anything they could reach around their set to capture the sonic waves made by the spinning guitars and improvise with them. A transmitter, amplifier and speaker were attached to each instrument and it was left to the centrifugal force, vibrations and air flux to produce the whirling sounds, boosted at times by the artist unplugging and twiddling on his guitars knobs. Patrick Farmer and Rob Gawthrop’s assault on their drums and our ears made the ensemble work in near-perfect asynchronised harmony - no need to say, this half-man, half-machine quintet performance proved exponentially more entertaining than some of the yawn-triggering laptop orchestra acts I have seen around. The performers' gestures, crashing cymbals and spinning sculptures created a powerful visual as well as aural environment, and this tipped the balance between art and technology towards a more human dimension. Stephen Cornford’s impromptu band rocked."

Viviane Blanchard (read full article)

"Cornford's sound work tends to involve traditional instruments (piano, violin, electric guitar) being played in a non-traditional, often mechanical, almost always aleatoric, fashion, in order to bypass, as he says on his website, his own "untrained hands": "I had maybe a dozen piano lessons at primary school, but I hated them. That said I did used to love playing on my step-father’s piano, though never from a score, playing very much in the childlike sense of the word, just listening to the piano really. It’s been very important to me in my current musical practice to distance myself from the creation of sounds – usually using technology, so that my relationship with the music is first and foremost as a listener rather than a player." The present work, Three Piece, involves a similar hands-free instrumentalism, giving us three mobile sculptures, each made largely out of bicycle parts and discarded construction material (Cornford was initially trained as a sculptor and sees, inherent in this kind of bricolage, "a critique of the society that deems objects to no longer have a value and disposes of them.") along with an electric guitar or bass - choosing, at all times, the cheapest, most non-specific looking axes available on Ebay - and a loudspeaker. Each guitar spins in perpetual motion, both on its own axis, and around a central pivot, like a planet in orbit, and as it does so generates its own noise. The audience are invited to walk around the sculptures as they please, experiencing the change in sound from place to place across the room, something done by most with a certain apprehension, not to mention a sense of personal danger given that any moment the headstock of a Les Paul Special might come careering into the small of one's back. "My sculptures have tended to be slightly confrontational for years now, but this is the most explicitly confrontational thing I have ever done – it invades your space, it’s greedy, it’s dangerous. The work without a member of the audience isn’t really a work at all, it’s completed by your interaction with it, by your hearing and your movement. I didn’t set out to make something necessarily confrontational at all, I was more interested at the time of construction in the way that the audience’s movement constructs their listening experience, it was a reaction against the passive standing or seated reception of frontal stereo music, that has been my normal concert/gig going experience. I wanted to make a concert that you could walk among, so the listener decides what’s in the foreground of the mix." The title refers to the guitar-bass-drums set-up of a standard rock band, and this kind of deconstructive approach to the rock tradition clearly owes a certain debt to Christian Marclay. "I am drawn to the iconographies, both of the classical and rock tradition, particularly of the piano (as the site of serious composition) and the guitar (as a rite of passage of youthful exuberance amongst other things). And no matter how many times these iconographies have been meddled with or completely overturned they still hold an incredible amount of cultural power." The appearance of the sculptures themselves recalls the ad-hoc neo-dadaism of Robert Rauschenberg's combines, and the sound they produce, in its drifting sonorities and relentless guitar distortion, is reminiscent of drone-rockers Earth and Sunn O))). "I never had a sound in my head that I wanted it to make," claims Cornford, "But ultimately that is the point, to make something which is unpredictable, that has a life of its own, that is experimental in the literal sense of the word, something, as Cage said “of which the outcome is not known”. Along the way the resultant music has gone through phases of being both deeply frustrating and very pleasing. One day it’s subtle, full of detail and variation, the next it’s virtually flat. That's life."

R. William Barry (read full article)