Balloon by Oliver Leith

Balloon was originally commissioned by the London Sinfonietta as an acoustic piece, and first performed at the Southbank centre’s Sound Unbound festival in 2019.

“ This is an arrangement for synthesisers of many tunings. I called it Balloon because I had this image of thrashing a balloon with a baseball bat or something, rather than breaking or bursting it just sort of floats off - unhurt, even if you absolutely pelted it.”

Slide “ is old and one of my first purely electronic pieces and really was me doing a hack job with computers. On my aged software you could make parameters and automation dance around by using a mouse and track pad at the same time, that doesn’t work anymore because my computer tries to be sensible so I’m back to shifting tiny notes all the time which is about as slow as pencilling in acoustic music. It felt like quite an analogue way to play with notes so that’s a shame.“ (Oliver Leith)

Tracklist

1.	Balloon I	4:18

2.	Balloon II	4:26

3.	Balloon III	4:41

4.	Slide	3:34

Credits

released October 23, 2020

Composed and performed by Oliver Leith
Photograph by Oliver Leith
Design Chris Bigg

License