John Wall

With Consctructions I-IV the composer's own recordings of musicians took precedence over fragments sampled from CDs and the composer showed a preference for improvising musicians over musicians who specialise in interpreting written work. According to Marley: "He wanted to retain [free improvisation’s] key features – the feeling of spontanaeity, of unpredictability, and the music's sheer raw intensity. He wanted to tweak each moment until it sang; even if that took countless hours to achieve."

At the age of 40 Wall acquired a Casio FZ-1 – a mono sampler with very little memory – and used this in conjunction with an 8-track reel-to-reel tape recorder to make his first plunderphoninc works, which he released as Fear of Gravity on his own Utterpsalm imprint. Fear of Gravity uses long, often identifiable samples from other people's works as well as looping and repetition – all features which would quickly disappear from his work.

The release of Fractuur two years later, Wall starts to incorporate his own recordings of musicians – both improvisers and classical musicians who use extended technique – into the fabric of the work alongside samples from CDs. He also starts to process the material electronically and include the sounds of malfunctioning audio equipment, or "glitches". According to one reviewer:

Wall returned in 2011 with a document of his collaboration with spoken word artist Alex Rodgers. Richard Pinnell interviewed the pairing for The Wire magazine and wrote in a separate review: "While Wall’s anger can be heard in the music, Rodgers’ spoken word parts are equally acerbic. He sounds constantly on edge, his voice slurs in places, growls in others and has a gruff bite to it that is only amplified by the cheap dictaphones used to record many of his parts. His words move between a bitterly spat-out stream of angry obscenity-ridden disgust and a carefully worked out and scripted sense of surrealism all wrapped up in a Beckettian verbal sensibility."

A number of attempts have been made to transcribe John Wall's works for live performers. Most recently, in 2009 Maarten Altena's MAE ensemble commissioned a transcription of John Wall's "Fractuur" which was performed (alongside works from fellow electronic composers, John Oswald and Francisco López in a programme entitled "Organised Sound" at the Paradiso in Amsterdam.

John Wall is credited as editing John Edwards and Mark Sanders Nisus Duets (Emanem Records, 2002) CD and as producing the final edit for harpist Rhodri Davies' Over Shadows (Confront, 2006). He recorded the poetry series on the Stem label featuring Leslie Scalapino, Maggie O'Sullivan, Allen Fisher and Peter Manson. He also served as recording engineer for John Edwards solo album Volume (PSI, 2008).

John Wall has presented his work as tape playbacks at various events including at BBC Radio 3's Mixing It and London Musicians Collective (LMC)'s "New Aura" concert series at South Bank Centre in 1997 and Sonic Arts Network's "Cut & Splice" at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2006. Both of these were broadcast by BBC Radio 3.

In 1997 Wall was challenged by the LMC to make a live realisation of his work which combined both tape playback and live performers. "Untitled #4" was commissioned by LMC and Goethe Institut and performed at the ICA in London in 1997. The featured musicians were Jörg Widmann (clarinet), Peter Sheppard Skærved (violin) and John Edwards (double bass) and an excerpt from this performance was issued by LMC. A number of other live realisations of his works followed including at Instant Chavires in Paris in 2002.

The purchase of a computer in 1994 (an Atari running Cubase) led to the release of Alterstill in 1995. Again Alterstill drew on material sampled from CDs by artists across a range of contrasting genres but critics were impressed with "the sheer ambition of the project" and Wall has said that the CD is "the first thing that represents what I was capable of doing artistically."

John Wall (born 1950) is an English autodidact electronic composer, whose contribution to the field is widely noted by critics of new music. His work has moved from early plunderphonic compositions – where he brought together unlikely combinations of musical genres to create fantastical new works – to large scale works composed of thousands of tiny fragments which create the impression of virtual orchestras. Critics have remarked on "his extraordinary feeling for musical narrative" which is achieved through a working method that has been described as "phenomenally painstaking". According to one critic, Wall's "releases sound like the most finely crafted audio sculptures, somewhere between the contemporary composition of Lachenmann and the experiments of early laptop musicians of the mid 90s."