interview with Marty Byrne

Who are you? Whats your mission? Tell me about your voice experiments, how came you into doing this and what kind of feedback have you been receiving??
I am Marty Byrne, from Belfast, N. Ireland. I make music for theatre and short films and work as a sound and lights technician. I've been writing and singing my own songs and playing in bands since I was 14. 

My mission is to keep making, performing and working with music and sound for as long as my ears will let me. I have always struggled to find one "style" or genre that fits me, so I work in a variety of styles, which helps for the varied "commercial" music I make (for theatre and film). I also love collaboration with others. 

When I first figured out how to use recording equipment I made a lot of messy, experimental, "conceptual" music. One of the first vocal pieces I made, on my first computer (age 16 or 17) was a piece featuring a lot of sporadic digital vocal edits, distortion and feedback. 

However, between age 17 until about age 26 (1997 until 2006) I almost completely moved away from making "experimental" music. Singing in rock / metal / pop bands. It was only when I went to college in Belfast to study Music Technology at Queen's University, that I returned to improvisation / experimentation / extended techniques, when I took the Performance Module classes under Paul Stapleton. Around this time I was also given some vocal lessons from Caroline Pugh and I joined the QUB Ensemble for Improvisation, under Steve Davis and Paul Stapleton. During this period I performed more as a vocalist using improvisation, effects, digital processing (Max/MSP patches & Kaoss Pad etc...) in the QUB Ensemble and on my own. 

I stopped pursuing performing or recording vocal stuff as much, when I left University, when I busied myself making more commercial music and working on my Song A Day For A Year and Song A Week For A Year projects in 2011 and 2012.

In 2014 I went back to Queen's University to do my Masters in Sonic Art. During this time I performed, again in the QUB Ensemble and got into performing solo again. In 2015 I won the award for Audio Artist in the "Performative Sound Art Contest" at Radical dB, Zaragoza, Spain. 

Then things went quiet again, while I worked in a cover band and as a technician for a cabaret club, between 2015 and now. 

In 2018, the big influence, to get back into pursuing improvised vocal performance has been visiting Berlin. I've been 3 times since March 2018 (it'll be my 4th time in November!). I have seen so many exciting improv and noise gigs in places like WestGermany, Loophole and Sowieso. Also, joining and performing in Belfast's Hive Choir (who work with improvisation, game pieces and so on) has spurred me onto getting involved in this area again.