Nick Parkin
Composer, musician, sound designer, performer
and artist, Nick Parkin, studied the Art Foundation
course in the 1970s and then BA (Hons) Fine
Art/Community Arts & Performance at Bradford
College of Art from 1980 to 1983.
“I really liked the Grove Building where the Art School
was then. I liked the atmosphere and smell of paint.
I remember playing my flute in the stairwell for the
reverberation in there…. I’m sure it’s influenced
some of my sound compositions. Albert Hunt fired
my interest in theatre, and helped with some video of
masked dance that I was working on at some point.”
Nick’s music career began in the early 1980’s when
he worked as a multi-instrumentalist for major dance
and theatre companies. Since 1996 he has released
over 10 cds of highly acclaimed ambient music and
has collaborated on both live improvisations and
albums with many artists. His sound has featured
on radio drama and TV and he has played in live
concerts all over Europe including WOMAD, Reading
and several touring concerts in Italy.
He appeared on The Slate/BBC Wales as a musician
performer working site-specifically in a local quarry in
North Wales in 1993 and held 2 sound residencies
in Portland Quarry in Dorset. Nick won a First Prize
in the prestigious Bourges Electroacoustic Music
Awards 2001 for Magmas, which was subsequently
broadcast on international radio stations, then
developed into a film screened at the Royal Festival
Hall in 2002. Last year Nick was Musical Director
and Composer for one of the Royal Festival Hall
re-opening events Spaces Between, a large-scale
site specific performance using all 5 levels of the
building. Other recent collaborations have been with
London College of Fashion Costume MA, composing
sound for live shows at the Royal Academy of Art,
and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Nick also trained as a performer, studied Butoh
in Paris and the UK with Mutsutaka Ishi and Eiko
and Koma; Noh theatre with Akira Matsue; actor
training with Yoshi Oida and Paupers Carnival. For
10 years he created landscape based works, touring
Europe extensively. He also performed with Public
Dreamers touring with work based on the poems of
Ted Hughes; and performed for Theatre of the Heart,
Paupers Carnival and Welfare State International. He
completed an MA in Electroacoustic Composition at
the University of East Anglia in 1999.
Nick has continued to create paintings, photographs,
performances and objects which revolve around his
passion for landscape and environment. He currently
teaches environmental and site-specific performance
research for BA and MA drama students at
Goldsmiths College as a visiting tutor, and continues
his freelance music composition and live playing for
dance and theatre companies.
Photograph supplied by Nick Parkin