Over the past eight years Simon Whetham has developed a practice of working with sound recordings as a raw material for composition. These are often environmental sounds he has captured employing a variety of methods and techniques, in order to obtain discrete or obscured sonic phenomena. In removing sound from it's source, and often amplifying it significantly, it becomes much more abstract – familiar, yet otherworldly. More recently, when presenting work in a performance or installation, for him the space and the objects within become instruments to be played. Simon has a large number of works published through many specialist organisations, including Touch Music, Cronica, Dragon's Eye, Monochrome Vision and Entr'acte; has performed extensively internationally; collaborated with artists from musicians to performance artists, painters to video artists, dancers to poets; has run listening and field recording workshops in UK, Estonia, Colombia, Chile and Australia; and received a large number of commissions and awards for projects and installations – notably for his own project 'Active Crossover'. Supported Arts Council England and PRS for Music Foundation, the project comprises sound installation, performance, collaboration and workshops. 'Active Crossover' has toured six cities in the UK, and also been hosted in Estonia, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Australia, with future residencies in Germany and Norway. A further development of Simon's practice is the participation in the arts education project RED Artes Visuales de Medellín in Colombia, where he ran workshop sessions for 7 different groups of schoolchildren aged between 8 and 18 years old, each week for 9 weeks, exploring listening exercises; recording techniques; microphone construction; interventions; and instrument and kinetic sculpture building.
