Nigel Ayers (born 1957 in

Tideswell Tideswell is a village and civil parish in the Peak District of Derbyshire, England. It lies east of Buxton on the B6049, in a wide valley on a limestone plateau, at an altitude of above sea level, and is within the District of Derbyshire Da ...

Derbyshire Derbyshire ( ) is a ceremonial county in the East Midlands, England. It includes much of the Peak District National Park, the southern end of the Pennine range of hills and part of the National Forest. It borders Greater Manchester to the nor ...

) is an English multimedia artist.Fernando Cerqueira, '' Antibothis Occultural Anthology Vol.3 p.72'' (Thisco Portugal, 2010), His

sound art Sound art is an artistic activity in which sound is utilized as a primary medium or material. Like many genres of contemporary art, sound art may be interdisciplinary in nature, or be used in hybrid forms. According to Brandon LaBelle, sound art ...

has included numerous audio releases and live performances through his group

Nocturnal Emissions Nocturnal Emissions is Nigel Ayers's sound art project that has released numerous records and CDs in music styles ranging from electro-acoustic, musique concrète, hybridised beats, sound collage, post- industrial music, ambient and noise ...

. His

collaborations includes work with

Bourbonese Qualk Bourbonese Qualk are an experimental music group which existed from 1980 to 2003. The group were participants in the early 80s industrial & experimental music tape scene. Writing for CMJ, Martin Aston characterized Bourbonese Qualk as "post-pun ...

, C.C.C.C.,

Andrew Liles Andrew Liles (born 11 March 1969) is a British sound artist and multi-instrumentalist. He has a vast output of recordings that he has released since the mid-1980s, covering a variety of styles as experimental music, dark ambient music, progr ...

Lustmord Brian Williams is a Welsh industrial musician, sound designer and film score composer. He is often credited for creating the dark ambient genre with albums recorded under the name Lustmord. His experimental work has been described as "not tra ...

Randy Greif Randy Greif is a noise music composer who often incorporates electronic music and musique concrete collage with spoken word and field recordings. Early career Since the mid-1970s, Greif has composed electronic music, musique concrete and comput ...

, Robin Storey, Expose Your Eyes,

Stewart Home Kevin Llewellyn Callan (born 24 March 1962), better known as Stewart Home, is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, and activist. His novels include the non-narrative ''69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess'' (2002), an ...

Z'EV Z'EV (born Stefan Joel Weisser, February 8, 1951 – December 16, 2017) was an American poet, percussionist, and sound artist. After studying various world music traditions at CalArts, he began creating his own percussion sounds out of indust ...

, and

Zoviet France Zoviet France (also known as :$OVIET:FRANCE:, Soviet France, :Zoviet-France: and latterly usually written as :zoviet*france:) are a music group from Newcastle upon Tyne in north east England. While often dissonant and made of industrial textu ...

. In 1980 he founded the record label Sterile Records, releasing the first records by

John Balance Geoffrey Nigel Laurence Rushton (16 February 1962 – 13 November 2004), better known under the pseudonyms John Balance or the later variation Jhonn Balance, was an English musician, occultist, artist and poet. He was best known as a co-founde ...

Maurizio Bianchi Maurizio Bianchi (born 4 December 1955 in Pomponesco in the Province of Mantua) is an Italian pioneer of industrial music, originating from Milan. Biography 1979–1983 Bianchi was inspired by the music of Tangerine Dream, Conrad Schnitzler an ...

and

, among many others. In 1987 he formed the Earthly Delights (record label), specialising in audio works and big explosions that examined the technological landscape and the psychic effect of sound. In the early 1990s he performed live soundtracks for the

Butoh is a form of Japanese dance theatre that encompasses a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement. Following World War II, butoh arose in 1959 through collaborations between its two key founders ...

performances of Poppo & the Go Go Boys. His visual art has been exhibited in the

Tate Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...

, ICA, and worn by the

soccer Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of 11 players who primarily use their feet to propel the ball around a rectangular field called a pitch. The objective of the game is ...

legend

Diego Maradona Diego Armando Maradona (; 30 October 196025 November 2020) was an Argentine professional football player and manager. Widely regarded as one of the greatest players in the history of the sport, he was one of the two joint winners of the FI ...

Sound art

Ayers'

work is rooted in assemblage and

collage Collage (, from the french: coller, "to glue" or "to stick together";) is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. ...

. Years before digital sampling became commonplace, his recordings used thousands of edited "found" and specially recorded sound samples. His interest in the psychological effects of sound, and in particular the recombination of sound to affect perception of time and space is reflected in CD titles such as "Practical Time Travel" where sound functions as snapshots of memory forming new associations as it passes into a simulated dream world. He is also interested in eroding the concept of individualised artistic personality using digital technologies to enable multiple authorship. This is exemplified in the remixable sound sample libraries he has released as a sound developer in the commercially released sample libraries for Sony's

ACID Pro Acid Pro (often stylized ACID) is a professional digital audio workstation (DAW) software program currently developed by Magix Software. It was originally called Acid pH1 and published by Sonic Foundry, later by Sony Creative Software as Acid P ...

and Propellerhead's

Reason (software) Reason Studios (formerly known as Propellerhead Software) is a music software company, based in Stockholm, Sweden, and founded in 1994. It produces the studio emulation Reason. History Propellerhead Software was founded in 1994 by Ernst Nat ...

. In his

sound installations Sound art is an artistic activity in which sound is utilized as a primary medium or material. Like many genres of contemporary art, sound art may be interdisciplinary in nature, or be used in hybrid forms. According to Brandon LaBelle, sound a ...

, such as Soul Zodiac (2006) and The Planetarium Must Be Built (2007) he has explored the possibilities of digital remixes in both time and space, using everyday equipment such as multiple CD boomboxes.

Bibliography

*''Mind Invaders: A Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage And Semiotic Terrorism'' Stewart Home Ed. (Serpent's Tail London, 1997). *''International Who's Who in Popular Music'' (Routledge, 2007). *''Bodmin Moor Zodiac'' (2007). *''The Control You Gain. The Power You Rule.'' (2009). *''NETWORK NEWS'' (

, 2009). *''Lusitania'' ( Earthly Delights, 2010). * S. Alexander Reed ''Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music'' (Oxford University Press USA, 2013). *''Electronic Resistance'' (Amaya Productions, 2021).

References

Sample libraries

Myths of TechnologyOrganic ChemistryLoop Noir – Paranormal Sound Design

External links

Personal websiteEarthly Delights record labelVideo of The Planetarium Must be Built
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ayers, Nigel English artists Living people 1957 births English experimental musicians English industrial musicians People from Tideswell Soleilmoon artists