Bug Compass is a freelance sonic artist and musician, who has lectured in Sonic Arts, Music and Music Technology at the University of Kent, University of Greenwich, Canterbury Christchurch University and Canterbury College. His work as a musician and producer has been released on both vinyl and digital formats, and has been featured in several radio broacasts, theatre and dance productions.
The sound art of Bug Compass focuses on making music from the broken; either traditional musical elements are realised using broken instruments or objects whose original function no longer works (a guitar with one string, a rotting piano, a harmonium with a stuck key or squeaky pedal) where through careful editing these anomalies or errors reveal their own musicality; similarly through the use of self programmed software, generally accepted musical idioms and forms become broken and distorted. These ideas collide in a world beyond digital music, where both music is processed digitally and where the digital is processed musically.
Bug Compass has created and exhibited several sound installations including: Twister, using the children's game Twister, electronics and homemade software to edit and rearrange music in realtime; the Sisyphus Tunnel, a tunnel lined with pairs of speakers, whose audio loops interact and interfere acoustically (and psychoacoustically), and the Mayan Calendar, using algorithms from the Mayan Calender in homemade software to repeat and gradually evolve multichannel reiterations of a soundfile. The Mayan Calendar software has also been used by the artist in remixes of Lamb's Stronger and Slovo's The One. As an installation the Mayan Calendar is presented in its raw form, where the calendar is allowed to play for the length of the exhibit, day and night – no one point is sonically the same other than when all the calendars realign.
In his spare time Bug Compass makes his own acoustic and electronic instruments, makes field recordings, creates computer software for manipulating existing sounds, plays keyboards in live bands and as a session musician, and creates illicit remixes of pop music under the name Bingo Starr!