Profile
Mark Slater is a composer,
producer and musicologist with particular interests in popular and
experimental musics, and the possible links that might exist
between them. Improvisation and the accidental play a large part in
shaping the direction of the music he makes and studies. This
interest was developed during the completion of his doctoral
portfolio, completed in 2004, which centred on the role and status
of improvisation as part of the composition-performance cycle
(taking cues from British and American experimentalists of the
1940s onwards). His current compositional activity (often more akin
to production) combines, in various quantities, the timbral
aesthetics of jazz and orchestral music, the rhythmic momentum of
dance idioms and an ideology of restriction and accident that has
its roots in acousmatics and glitch.
Current research projects focus
on how the elusive process of musical creativity, particularly as
mediated by increasingly mobile music technologies, can be captured
and understood. Each project strives to track and offer insight
into the lifespan of creative collaborations from social,
compositional and technological perspectives. Current music
projects include Middlewood Sessions (exploring the rich potential
of 27 jazz and orchestral musicians) and Ports (exploring the rich
potential of being limited to just the sounds one vocalist can
make). Music from both of these projects has been broadcast and
released internationally.