Below are five recent bass pieces from 2026 and Automatic Music from 2015-2016, while early tape work About Love was recorded in 1983. Different techniques are used - the five from 2026 are solo bass guitar with electronics (and recorded audio clips) and is representative of the work of the last fifteen years or more. Sound is primarily generated from my Fender Jazz bass which is multi-tracked with audio processing controlled by foot pedals and iPhone motion-sensing.
The two I call Automatic Music are basically instrumental clips that are played and processed by random numbers. About Love is a very early piece based on a simple two-word tape fragment fed into dual tape recorder feedback technique. The last piece - This Little Lady, is a fun remix of a Gregory Isaacs song by the same name from the 1990 album Warning.
Bass Guitar & Electronics
Five pieces (Found and Lost; The Tablelands; Hypnogogia; Centipede and You Have to Find a Way) from summer of 2026 are solo bass guitar with audio clips utilizing extensive live, real-time digital audio processing. These are improvisations with no post studio effects processing or overdubs added. The sound has been developed using a unique setup (through Ableton / M4L) and adapted and improvised over the last fifteen years or so. The output is sent through four tube and transistor bass amplifiers which are also mic’d and recorded, as well as one stereo pair of amplifiers carrying the effects processing.
Though rooted in improvisation, industrial and experimental musics a primary influence seems more and more to be French Musique Concrete. That music often tries to strip traditional melody and harmony from the composition / performance, introducing external recorded audio and electronic instruments and effects as primary audio sources. On a good day I like to imagine that no human was involved in producing my sound and that the pieces evoke environments or dreamscapes.
Source audio is always a Fender Jazz bass with pre-recorded audio clips also triggered and layered into the live audio. Many of the audio clips were recorded during travels with a digital recorder and are an important rhythmic element and complement to the bass. The combined sound is heavily processed using various audio plug-ins as well as outboard digital processors such as Eventide hardware, a Chandler Tube Driver , tube pre-amps etc. Computer-based audio plug-in parameters are often controlled using iPhone XYZ axis motion detection so that the bass / clips / FX processing are all played “live” with arm movements captured by the mobile phone accelerometer. Volume and expression foot pedals also control the outboard digital processing. As many tracks utilize adjustable pitch control, the disparate tracks can be glued coherently.
The final result is a complex, swirling digital / analog sonic punch.
Automatic Music
These two pieces (Automatic Music 1 & 2) were conceived in 2014 and updated and recorded in 2016. They use instrumental clips and audio processing which are entirely played by random numbers. Pitch, rhythm, volume, audio processing, mixing etc is all "controlled" randomly but the result is not unlike some sophisticated free improv units I have seen over the years.
Other
About Love (1983) was made from a two-word tape fragment fed through a dual tape recording looping system similar to the one used by Steve Reich or Brian Eno and Robert Fripp in Frippertronics. The photo at the top of this page shows Jeff Noble with the tape recorder setup at the time.
This Little Lady (2016) is my own remix of Gregory Isaacs' song from the album Warning, already masterfully produced by King Tubby. The remix loops various segments of the song and adds only minimal processing. The remix has an offbeat loopy quality while respecting the heart of the original song.