Sound has always been part of my work. It’s a thread running through everything else. Circuit bending, sound curation and design, sound art and engineering, music and performance.
It started early. My great-grandfather was a military drum maker who won the Irish Championships. His drums are on display in the Limerick Town Hall Museum. My father, led our family Ceilidh band, and I started on Bodhran as a child. I busked jigs and reels at folk festivals until I’d saved enough for my first drum kit. Rhythm, in that world, was a community function. Something you did together, not at people.
In the 80’s, I found other styles of music and started playing other instruments, like trumpet, as it is one handed and I had seriously injured my left hand. I was also introduced to drum machines and DJing.
Breaking Instruments to Understand Them
In the early 1990s I was working in disability arts as part of my youth and community work. One of the first projects of what is now The Creative & Cultural Organisation, which I co-founded in 1993. The question we were asking was: how do you give someone access to music if conventional instruments are physically out of reach?
Part of the answer was an evolving technology called Soundbeam, an ultrasonic beam system that translated any body movement into MIDI signals and notes, chords, and sequences. There was also an opportunity to attach objects that could be hit to trigger sounds. I demonstrated Soundbeam for Hull Music Service and worked with the technology in community settings.
This got me into circuit bending, modifying existing electronics to produce sounds they weren’t designed to make. I was doing this before the practice had a name, as I had a disability of my own after an accident in 1979 that severely impaired the use of my left hand. I was already a gigging musician, so I had to modify equipment for my own use.
The clearest demonstration I gave of this technology was at a disability arts conference at Albemarle Music Centre in Hull. In my lecture, I brought a children’s musical play mat, the kind with pressure-sensitive pads that play notes when a child steps on them. In front of the room, I dismantled it. Showed the two wires that make contact when a child’s weight closes the foam gap. That’s a trigger. Nothing more complicated than that. Then I desoldered the wires from the toy’s own sound module, fitted jack plugs, and patched them into an 80s synthesiser sound module running through a PA. And played the play mat as an instrument.
The point wasn’t a trick. The point was: once you understand what a trigger is, anything that makes a connection can become an instrument. The gap between a children’s toy and a professional synthesiser is a length of wire and a bit of knowledge that should belong to everyone, and especially to people who’ve been told conventional instruments aren’t for them. That was one of many workshops and projects in the 90s.
The session years:
From the late 90s my music went in multiple directions at once. Session musician, endorsed by JHS, Dream Cymbals, and Regal Tip. Featured in Gear Magazine, Music Week, and The New Statesman. Drum Teacher of the Year. Chair of the World Drumming Network. I played in West Africa with Roots Manding, a Gambian band. I collaborated with Benjamin Zephaniah on a dub album and a headline gig in Slovenia. I played chart-topping country, electro hip hop, and drummed with Back to Bass, and legendary world dance fusion group Celtarabia.
Geoff Nicholls wrote in his book Banging On: “Alan has developed the ability to play at wrist-breaking speeds.” After watching me play a Drum’n’Bass gig.
John Peel profiled me on Channel 4. I received a Universal Zulu Nation Wisdom Award for my services to Hip Hop, and an Outstanding Contribution to Music Award.
The circuit-bent electric percussion I built for disability arts work didn’t stay in community settings. I integrated it into my acoustic drum kit, triggers, pads, and modified electronics, wired into the existing hardware, and took it on the road.
In 1997 I performed on the Avalon Stage at Glastonbury with that integrated kit. A full acoustic drum kit with circuit-bent electric percussion built in. The festival sound engineers were not entirely comfortable with it, but luckily went along with it, and it sounded great.
Hull Sea Dragon Gamelan
A gamelan is a percussion orchestra from Indonesia. Tuned bronze gongs, metallophones, and drums played together, often in large ensembles. Tonally unlike almost anything in Western music. I visited Indonesia and came back inspired.
I was invited to lead a project called Music Works, run in partnership with Albemarle Music Centre, Hull. The centre commissioned a gamelan to be made and shipped here, so not surprisingly, I dived straight into that project. We named it the Hull Sea Dragon. While waiting for it to be shipped, we travelled as a group to Manchester Camarata to learn to play properly. We performed publicly in several locations and ran community workshops open to anyone. I also built a gamelan inspired sculpture from beach-combed recourses, for a city centre children’s centre. It was outdoors, in the shape of a head, with interesting connected things inside. It had many things for the children to hit and they could turn the red nose to set off a cam system that rang bells and tipped pebble-filled plastic bottles on a crocodile wheel. I’ll post photos below.
A desire to learn music from other cultures has been a constant throughout my practice, leading me to work on fair-trade music projects and play/learn music in many countries. Integrating rhythms into my own performances with bands like Endoflevelbaddie, and of course, my DJing sets, sponsored by Denon and Akai.
Sound in the Exhibition Space
For 30 years, across 120 exhibitions in 34 disused retail spaces, I curated sound alongside visual work. The sound was chosen and commissioned with the same intention as the visual work. One of the clearest examples is the I Am Impact exhibition by South African climate artist, photographer and body painter Khandiz Joni. I curated it at HIP Gallery during Humber Eco Fest. The photographs addressed climate change. The production was sustainable: we printed the work on hemp paper, hung it in reused frames, in a pop-up gallery in a disused shop unit.
A volunteer sound artist from the Creative & Cultural community team, used our studio, (itself inside another disused shop, equipped with upcycled gear) to compose music responding directly to Joni’s photographs. What resulted was an immersive audio-visual installation: the climate subject matter, the sustainable production method, the community-built infrastructure, and the sound and image working in dialogue.
The collaboration was possible because the studio and gallery existed. They existed because of 30 years of building infrastructure from discarded resources, without waiting for external funding or institutional permission. There were also many times when sound was the main focus with visuals as the accompaniment.
Many exhibitions ended the same way: I DJed, turning gallery events into full community evenings, with art, music, food, and people together. And many bands played in the galleries.
BBC, Leeds Festival, BBC Introducing
Between 2002 and 2023 I worked as a BBC Radio DJ, presenter, producer, music photographer and journalist, presenting the unsigned music stage at Leeds Festival for 17 years, co-founding what became BBC Introducing, and hosting over 2,000 live sessions. First plays for artists including Yungblud, Pulled Apart By Horses, and even Elbow, Florence & The Machine and Ed Sheeran played live for us.
That broadcasting career is documented separately on my BBC Broadcasting Page. What matters here is that it ran alongside and in parallel with the community practice. The disused shops, the exhibitions, recording studios and the sound curation were the background to it for over two decades. The BBC work was never the whole story. It was one frequency of a much broader signal, and the money I was paid to do the BBC work, was used to fund my community arts work.
Loosetriggers
In 2020 I retired from gigging. Arthritis has changed what was physically possible. I stayed as Chair of the World Drumming Network, but the performance career as a drummer is over. The knowledge, love of sound and solarpunk rebelliousness is not.
The practice is now called Loosetriggers, a name I made electronic music under when I didn’t want people to know it was me. It uses Sonic Pi (an open-source live coding environment originally developed for music education) to write and perform generative music in real time.
The sound draws on field recordings that I have been gathering for years, from the Humber estuary to Berlin and many places in between. All processed, layered, and extended through a portable, solar-charged battery-powered rig that can operate off-grid. The aesthetic is place-based. The Humber region and its Yorkshire coast are often the reference point: its erosion rates, its tidal rhythms, its big sky, wind farms, and the particular quality of light on industry.
The circuit bending of 1992 and the software coding of today are the same practice. The Hull Sea Dragon and the hirajoshi scale in Sonic Pi are the same instinct. The gallery sound design and Hydra visuals are the same model. Sound and image in dialogue, built with what’s available, the moss growing between the pavers of the cities. The multi-decade thread runs forward. I recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of Hull for Sustainability & Creative Practice. It has inspired me to continue with this work.
Where the practice is heading:
Following a session with spatial audio practitioner Nikki Sheth in May 2026, (facilitated by the Make Happen Institute), the work is developing toward 8-channel spatial audio installations. The technical direction involves LOM microphones, Zoom H5 recording, a variable-speed cassette recorder, and a hydrophone, enabling simultaneous capture above and below the water surface. I’m also using the Rawfield Generator, a custom synthesis instrument I coded for gallery sound environments. I am developing this work more as I move towards achieving my MA in Creative Practice.
Loosetriggers is on Instagram at https://instagram.com/loosetriggers
Alan Raw 