Jim Denley - Vents (2025)

Vents is seemingly a musical wind trio - humans playing with flutes, airdrums, bubbles… Although, in each set-up, material has its own vitality.

Jim's lungs and lips cut air across edges, generating tones – primordial fluting. He stops the end of his tubes to generate novel tones and to allow for pressure explosions and key flutters, mixing voice with this expression.

The 'airdrums' are an instrument invented by Dale consisting of a latex membrane made from a large balloon that is stretched over the shell of drum. It is part wind instrument, part percussion and is played by blowing lightly (and occasionally singing) into a tube which rests on the membrane, causing it to vibrate and reverberate. It creates bass and sub-bass frequencies as well as various overtones. It is very sensitive and even slight changes in the position of the tube or changes in air pressure can alter the sound radically.

Peter performs with dry microporous ceramic tiles and stones immersed in tubs of water, orbeez (small, colorful, gel-like beads made of a special type of polymer that can absorb water and expand to many times their original size) and hot plates. Hydrophones and a directional mic amplify an extraordinary plenitude of polyphonic musicality where micro-dissipative structures—billowing bubbles—birth clicks, whistles, wheezes, cries, tones, long glissandi, and polyrhythmic sequences. Material here is pressure-system relations, musical structures venting from matter-energy.