Back in March 2020 lockdown, with all gigs cancelled for the forseeable future and production projects on indefinite hold, like many I divided my time between youtube, doing some work from home and jamming in the studio. I did learn some new skills, worked on new compositional approaches and listened to loads of stuff I’d been putting off for ages. I did a few online gigs which was fun, except for when in the heat of the moment a USB cable came out of its socket and Ableton crashed on me, fortunately leaving the hardware synths running, which just about saved the day. Also in this first lockdown, in the course of March through to June, I estimate I got through around 270-300 packets of crisps, but thats another story.
Around this time some interesting online events started to appear. The film and tv composer Michael Price launched his Composer coffee break, which brought together some interesting guests, and a well known railway engineer started a weekly livestream around engineering in railways which became immensely popular.
So myself and my partner decided to start synthnatter. We wanted to make it quite different from already existing live chats such as sonic state; we wanted something far more inclusive of gender, genre of music and age groups. With this we already thought of the British electronic music scene, the experimental electronic music scene based around Lincoln and Nottingham, which we know from gigging experience, analogue modulars, self build DIY, and the new emerging form of live coding.
Our first guest was Leah Kardos, who has possibly the only stylophone orchestra in the world, based at Kingston University, lately we’ve included Ian Boddy- DIN label boss and well known exponent of the British electronic music scene, Godcloud- finger drummer extrodinaire and multi instrumentalist.
Synthnatter happens on youtube on Saturdays starting at 7pm uk time, we advertise a few days beforehand on twitter. We roughly go every fortnight but we cant always keep a regular slot due to other commitments
If you are interested in either being on it or seeing the next episode subscribe to my youtube channel for future notifications
Synthnatter playlist
Stuart Russell 