In-Depth Biography
Bill Thompson is a sound and video artist who has performed extensively throughout the UK and abroad. His work involves the combination of found objects, field recordings, repurposed live electronics, and digital media to create evolving structures for installations and live performance.
Before relocating to the UK in 2004 to pursue a PhD in Composition, Thompson was active performing, writing, and curating experimental music in the US for several years. Originally a jazz guitarist who had attended the prestigious jazz program at the University of North Texas at Denton, he eventually transferred to Texas State University in San Marcos where he earned his Bachelors and Masters degrees in Composition under Dr Russell Riepe. During his studies, Thompson wrote and performed on a wide range of instruments including works for string quartet, cell phones, found objects, radios, prepared guitar, laptop, DJ-CD players, tape players, and various synthesisers and table top electronics.
After graduating, Thompson immediately formed the gates ensemble which at that time was the only regularly performing electroacoustic ensemble in the Southwest with a focus on experimental music and improvisation. He co-founded the curatorial group ThomFariCraw, a modern music initiative dedicated to the creation and presentation of the highest caliber of modern experimental music, which hosted one of the only house concert series (the loft series) in Texas that focused on new experimental music. He helped found the Austin New Music Coop which has presented works by Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, Arnold Dreyblatt, Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew, Morton Feldman, John Cage, Earle Brown, as well as works by local composers. As a member of ANMC, he conducted and gave the Texas premier of Earl Brown’s Available Forms II. He also performed at and later co-curated the Austin Museum of Digital Art’s Performance Series which brought artists such as Richard Chartier and Phil Niblock to Austin for the first time. He hosted the first Phonography festival in Texas that played works from around the world, as well as performing at various festivals including Intersect 6, Toneburst, and the Austin Noise Festival. Additionally, he designed and edited the website e.m.i.t. (experimental music in Texas) that gave artists within the Texas area a common virtual meeting point to discuss performing, organizing, and attending new music events in the Texas area.
Since relocating to the UK, Thompson has been active as a performer, composer, and sound and video artist. He has written for acoustic, electro-acoustic, electronic, and fixed digital media, including sound installations, dance, and video. He has earned numerous awards and commissions including the PRS for New Music ATOM award, the GAVAA visual arts award, a Scottish Arts Council grant to support a residency at STEIM, a PRS for New Music Three Festival commission (Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Le Weekend, and Aberdeen SOUND festival), the Aberdeenshire Homecoming commission, a Dancelive 2010 commission, and the 2010 Aberdeen Visual Arts Award.
In addition to working as a solo artist, Thompson has collaborated with numerous well known artists and choreographers including Faust, Keith Rowe, EXAUDI, Ian Spink, Claire Pencack, Mark Wastell, Burkhard Beins, Rick Reed, Claire M Singer, and others, as well as sharing the bill with other notable artists such as John Butcher, Rhodri Davies, Toshi Nakamura, Billy Roisz, Wolf Eyes, Disinformation & Strange Attractor, murmur, and Lee Patterson. He is an avid supporter of new music, having hosted the first conference on sound art (SoundasArt) and the first Phonography festival in Aberdeen. Thompson also directs the Burning Harpsichord Series, a concert programme devoted to showcasing experimental music of the highest caliber.
As a performer, Thompson is also an active interpreter of works by other composers. He has performed works by John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolf, Pauline Oliveros, Jon Gibson, Terry Riley, John Zorn, and Edgar Varese to name but a few. His own works have also been performed by other artists such as The Red Note Ensemble, Thomas Helton, the Imbroglio String Quartet, and the Hope ensemble. Thompson’s work has aired on numerous radio programs including BBC Radio 3 Hear and Now, BBC Radio 4, Resonance FM, RRR, fieldworks, Commercial Suicide, and The Fog. He has been released on several labels including Mikroton, State Sanctioned Records, 7hings Records, Spectral House, Ecolirecords, Porkbones, Bremsstrahlung, Autumn Records, and/Oar, throat, as well as having work distributed by Deadline Records.
In addition to working as a composer and performer, Thompson is active as a sound and video artist and has had numerous installations exhibited across the UK and US. These include a solo exhibition, Cra/cked (2011), in Peacock Visual arts, as well as the Nexus project that was shown in several galleries across Scotland in 2007 and 2008, and other various installations for the SOUND festival of Aberdeen (at the Aberdeen Train Station), the University of Aberdeen (at the Marischall Museum), Peacock Visual Arts, and urbanNovember (at the Maritime Museum).
Thompson’s work encompasses many disciplines, including the use of live electronics and software of his own design. In 2008 he had a residency at STEIM in which he designed his own custom wired electronic instrument using hacked electronics. Additionally, he has also developed his own visual art software program called The Brakanator (after Stan Brakhage) for creating live, interactive video works that react to his performances. His performance set up is variable, but he often uses combinations of amplified found objects, laptop, custom software, DJ-CD players, shortwave radios, prepared guitar/harpsichord/autoharps, field recordings, found tapes, as well as various synthesisers and circuit bent or custom built electronic devices. He gives regular workshops and talks on circuit bending, improvisation, field recording, composition and arts marketing and promotion.
With regard to his work, Thompson is critically aware of the uniqueness of each performance situation. His work exploits the contingent moment, paying attention to the unique space and time of each presentation and explores the boundaries between improvisation, installation, found objects, and composition. He has a particular interest in the ways in which indeterminacy and perceptual ambiguity influence our perception of ‘now’, presence, time and space. With each technique, he attempts in some way to heighten this sense of the present, to make it somehow more important than the future or past in the reception of each performance or installation. Instead of attempting to create the ‘perfect’ object that somehow transcends time, to be ‘of all time’, Thompson attempts to create works that are specifically ‘of time’ and rooted within the moment and space of its creation and reception.
Bill Thompson is available for performances, lectures, and workshops concerning composition, improvisation, sound art, circuit bending, and aesthetics. For more information contact him at: billthompson@billthompson.org.
