‘Here’s a green blob. What does it sound like?’: the kids’ orchestra making mind-expanding noise

It’s Wednesday afternoon, and the scene in a room on the campus of Falmouth university looks like after-school clubs the country over: a handful of teens, some enveloped in hoodies, some eating crisps and sweets; a couple of tutors. There the similarity ends. The desks are piled with an array of electronic music-making equipment: oscillators, modular synthesisers, a visibly homemade “white noise machine”, pens with contact microphones attached to them, an old four-track Portastudio connected to a series of effects pedals, a DJ turntable playing sound-effects records. Intermittent squeaks, whooshes and honks emerge as the teenagers start fiddling with them. A selection of microphones hang from a beam: swinging over small amplifiers on the floor, they produce squeals of feedback that shift in and out of phase, an idea borrowed from Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music, a 1968 piece subsequently covered by both Sonic Youth and Aphex Twin, who hails from just a few miles away.

This is a rehearsal by the Cornwall Youth Noise Orchestra, the brainchild of Matt Ashdown and Liz Howell of Moogie Wonderland, which began as a club night and now bills itself as “a participatory arts organisation”. Ashdown is also guitarist in “improvisational noise-rock trio” Mildred Maude, while Howell is descended from electronic music royalty: her dad is Peter Howell, a mainstay of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop throughout the 1970s.

Ashdown describes the orchestra as an attempt to “create opportunities for young people to make music straight away, without barriers, whether that’s having to have an instrument, or cost of lessons or learning differences”. It is, presumably, the only extra-curricular kids’ club in Britain to involve discussion of the oeuvre of US electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani – whose work ranges from pioneering experiments with the Buchla synthesiser to making the distinctive “swoosh” sound on the Starland Vocal Band’s deathless 1976 hit Afternoon Delight – and almost certainly the only extra-curricular kids’ club in Britain to have been inspired by a gig featuring Damo Suzuki, the former Can frontman, who these days prefers to perform completely improvised shows with musicians local to whatever venue he’s playing.

“We put a gig on with him and we built these noise stations for people to play and invited the audience on stage to play with him,” says Ashdown, “and there was this 11-year-old girl who came on stage and stayed there. I think that was the spark that made us think: let’s do a noise orchestra at some point.”

So they did, securing funding – first from the Arts Council, then from the charity Youth Music – and partnering with Falmouth Art gallery. Their endorsement, Howell says, “added weight to what we were doing, to say: we’re not making this up, we’re not completely random” – a conclusion you might reasonably draw if someone announced they were planning on giving children white noise machines to improvise with and encouraging them to make feedback with microphones. They recruited members through “loads and loads of taster sessions”, drawing a surprising number of takers from the ranks of what Howell calls “school-refusing young people” – former pupils who felt unable to return to school after the Covid lockdowns. With their ranks burgeoning, homeschooling groups are keen to find “new things for young people to be doing”.

The initial iteration of Youth Noise Orchestra comprised of primary school-age children. Ashdown and Howell were impressed by their ability to pick up abstract concepts associated with improvising. “If you say, ‘Here’s a green blob, what does it sound like?’, they just go ‘OK!’ and get on with it,” says Howell. “Whereas if you try and do that with adults, they’ll go back and forth, asking why the blob is green, trying to work out the meaning of the green blob.” I was once told something similar by the organisers of an avant garde music festival that offered kids’ activities between the musique concrète, sound poetry and lectures by free-jazz improv legend Evan Parker: children have fewer assumptions and prejudices about the leftfield and the avant garde than adults, and don’t panic in the absence of harmony or standard time signatures.

If Ashdown and Howell’s experience is anything to go by, younger children are remarkably keen to make electronic music that exists on what you might call the more Merzbow end of the spectrum, a state of affairs compounded by the fact that the orchestra’s initial equipment tended to what Ashdown calls “noisier machines”. You can hear the results on a live recording of their 2021 gig at Falmouth’s National Maritime museum: the closing track, Doodle, sounds remarkably like something that might have emerged from the 80s post-industrial scene, albeit topped off with the voice of a small child whispering about the pleasures of scribbling.

“Loud, all the time,” nods Howell. “We’d done a costume-making session beforehand, we got them hyped backstage. They went into performance mode, they were all going nuts. We were there shaking in the corner, wearing earplugs. We actually had to try and control the level of noise a bit: ‘OK, perhaps think about softer sounds here’.”

Nevertheless, the gig was a success. “There was a lovely atmosphere, a very intergenerational audience: people bringing their toddlers, grandparents,” says Ashdown. “And then people who were visiting from London, who liked experimental music and had looked up what was on that weekend. Afterwards, they were like: ‘Does this normally happen in Falmouth?’”

The current, teenage version of the orchestra seems less inclined to pummel any potential audience into submission. Hunched over their equipment, they performing a drifiting, ambient, occasionally atonal improvisation inspired by a series of photographs of nearby Gyllyngvase Beach, decorated with electric dulcimers and the scratch of the contact-mic pens. The sound they make is so full that I assume they’re performing to a backing tape, but I’m swiftly corrected: it is all completely live. (The Portastudio is there only for one member to occasionally parachute tape loops into the mix.) There’s something really impressive about how completely engaged they seem and how intuitively they interact with only minimal guidance.

Ashdown and Howells say there’s a serious purpose to the orchestra, beyond hopefully inculcating a love of avant garde music: they run courses in making your own synthesiser to build skills in electronics, and work with students from the university’s music tech and graphic design courses to demonstrate to doubtful teens that further education has something to offer; they also have plans to record and release an album in conjunction with students on the music industry course. “We’re really interested in working out what’s right for the young people engaging with us,” says Howells. “If someone shows an interest in production, they can stay at the mixing desk, learn how to do that, we can hopefully link them up with someone else that can help them further. That we’re doing this in a university shows them they’re welcome in this space – it’s really hard for universities to speak to young people from different marginalised groups.”

For now, there are more immediately pressing matters at hand, namely the question of whether pendulum microphone feedback will add anything to the piece the students are working on. As the rehearsal draws to a close, Ashdown briefly fills them in on the history of the idea. There is frank discussion of its merits or otherwise: Steve Reich and Sonic Youth might have done it, but the consensus is that the noise doesn’t fit the sonic picture they’re trying to create, so pendulum microphone feedback is abandoned. Then parents start to arrive to take them home, and the Cornwall Youth Noise Orchestra slope back into ordinary adolescent life, leaving the avant garde behind.