Tectonics 2025 Artist Profile
Lauren Sarah Hayes
Lauren Sarah Hayes is a Scottish improviser, sound artist, and scholar who is recognised for her embodied approach to computer music. Her music is a mix of experimental pop/live electronics/techno/noise/free improvisation and has been described as ‘voracious’ and ‘exhilarating’. As a live sound sculptor, she manipulates, remixes, and bends voice, drum machines, analogue synths and self-built software. She has toured extensively across Europe and North America, including as part of her tenure with the New 大象传媒 Radiophonic Workshop. Her work has been released on Superpang, Hard Return, Pan Y Rosas Discos, LOL Editions, Werra Foxma, Sunwarped, and Harmonic Ooze Records.
Exploring instability, ephemerality, and unpredictability, this performance is the latest in a series of improvisations formed out of playful and tactile explorations of my most recent hybrid analogue-digital live electronics instrument, which comprises self-built software, voice processing, analogue synths, drum machines, and repurposed controllers. An excessive number of components, of which the space, audience, and performer are all part, mutually affect each other through a network of sound analysis, digital signal processes, and potential interactions which may, or may not, be brought into existence. By fostering an openness to opportunities for action, improvisation is conceived as a dynamical system, an embodied machine-intelligence, a sensuous and sensorial way of orienting to the world.
