Theatre composition & Sound Design
Credits [live theatre] The Marriage of Kim K [musical] (leo&hyde: Edinburgh Fringe, Grimeborn, 2017); GUY [Musical] (leo&hyde, The Bunker, Kings Head Theatre, 2018); Beneath These Tarmac Cracks [play] (Joshua Val Martin & Ellie Scanlan: 2019); The Marriage of Kim K [musical] (leo&hyde: Lowry, 2019); GUY [musical] (leo&hyde: UK Tour, 2020); Godspell [musical] (Cr8tract Productions: Ye Olde Rose & Crown Theatre, 2021); A Christmas Carol: Haunted Service [musical] (Goblin Theatre: Old Royal Navy College, 2021); Cherry Jezebel [play] (Liverpool Everyman, 2022), Masquerade [play] (Epstein Theatre, 2022); The Coffeeshop Musical [musical] (leo&hyde: The Other Palace + Tour, 2023); The Vanishing [immersive experience] (Muncaster Castle, 2023).
Cherry Jezebel @ Liverpool Everyman (2022)
Director: James Baker | Writer: Jonathan Larkin
★★★★★ - Liverpool ECHO
★★★★★ - North West End
★★★★ - The Stage
★★★★ - The Guardian
A gritty, comic, LGBTQIA+ play in the main house of the Liverpool Everyman for which I was composer and sound designer. The job was a combination of creating the hyperrealistic ambient sound of a club, club toilet, and apartment, with memory/dream sequences with a large compositional element. The design included created extended DJ sets, remixing and sampling existing music, recording and editing realistic SFX, composing abstract transitional acousmatic elements, and designing/programming the onstage sound practicals.
Beneath These Tarmac Cracks (2019)
A play by Bruntwood Commendation Prize winner Joshua Val Martin, and Ellie Scanlan, commissioned for Not Quite Light festival.
An immersive theatre piece with music and projection that tells the story of a formidable Salford care home resident, May, born in 1913, whose 'reverse dementia' provokes vivid memories of her entire life. When a young PhD student in history seeks to exploit May’s condition to her own advantage, questions of the truthfulness of memory and our attitudes towards the ageing are thrown into relief.
Here I use a mixture of real archival recordings, samples, composed music using synths and live instruments, my own found sound recordings, and recordings of the actors to evoke the physical and mental spaces within the play. I designed and operated the show.
A Christmas Carol in the Painted Hall (2021)
Director: Andy Barry | Music: Erskine & Dollard
A child-friendly, site-specific actor-muso production at the Painted Hall in the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, a UNESQO World Heritage Site.
The work was predominately designing sound infrastructure from scratch to work in the round, in an incredibly reverberant space, with many practical limitations due to the heritage status of the building (including derigging daily for heritage visitors).
I also live mixed and operated the show, which included with the 5 miked roaming performers and up to 9 acoustic and digital instruments in total.
Note: sound is taken from live camera recording so quality may be impacted
Masquerade @ Epstein Theatre (2022)
Director: James Baker | Writer: Laura Lees
★★★★1/2 - Reviews Hub
★★★★ - The Stage
A coming-of-age play set in the heart of Liverpool’s real gay scene, The Masquerade.
The show hinges on its bold audio-visual transitions to shift tone, location, time, and performance style. While the ‘playlist’ of existing songs helps shape this 80s ‘period piece’, playing with the integration of that into the diegetic and non-diegetic design keeps the music alive and plays with the dream-like quality of bitter-sweet nostalgic remembrance, and homage to classic cinema in the piece: the mash-up of Thatcher’s ‘right to be gay’ speech with Sylvester’s ‘You Make Me Feel’; music transitioning from interstitial to coming out of walkman’s, record players, supermarket speakers with a sound quality authentic to the time; moments of pure emotive musical underscore against slow silent action.
The Marriage of KIM K (2019)
A mash-up musical theatre piece fusing Mozart and original electronic music by Stephen Hyde, with lyrics by Leo Mercer. The show tells the stories of 3 couples: 2 Kardashians, 2 Marriage of Figaro characters and 2 'normal people’ who just want to watch the other 4 on TV.
★★★★★ - North West End
★★★★ - Express
Sound is fundamental in separating out the different worlds and spaces within this show; it really plays with the idea of experiencing media through technologies and showing this onstage. Here is a mixture of music recorded by myself and Sam Gee (composed by Mozart and Stephen Hyde), public sample libraries, and sounds I recorded myself.
I designed and operated the show, which took place at The Lowry (Studio), EnableUS, Cast (Studio).
“The sound design (in GUY) is exemplary”
GUY: A New Musical (2018 & 2020)
A gay love-story musical about body image, online dating, and learning to love yourself. The show is set between the real world and the online world of Grindr.
★★★★★ - Theatre Box
★★★★ - British Theatre
★★★★ - West End Wilma
Sound is key is separating the real and the digital worlds in this show. Here is a mixture of music by Stephen Hyde (with vocal recordings and audio transformations by me), public sample libraries, found sounds, and sounds I recorded myself.
All voice recordings are recorded, mixed and mastered by me.
I designed, operated and mixed the live show.
Notable tour venues were: Birmingham Old Rep, The Turbine, New Wimbledon (Studio), Waterside Arts Centre, Alnwick Playhouse, Queen’s Hall Hexham.
The Vanishing @ Muncaster Castle (2023)
An immersive site-specific poltergeist experience with 4 separate rooms, taking place with overlapping groups several times a night in Muncaster castle.
The job was a combination of designing the hidden speaker and operating system, creating a tense ambience within the spaces, and composing several ‘poltergeist moments’ and mock archive recordings to advance the plot. One particular room had a 5-channel surround sound experience where the poltergeist moments happened.
Atmosphere, authenticity and tone-setting were imperitave.
“Hats off to sound designer Daniel Mawson for letting me hear every word”
Sound Installations / Digital / Corporate
These pieces were written to be played out stereo speaker systems as part of a concert or festival event within a programme of other work. I love to translate real stories from archives into something evocative and understandable; as much as possible I want to use sounds from the environments I’m trying to evoke, and really tune into the sounds spoken voices create.
They Were People First (2023)
A projection-mapped AV installation on the Judges Lodgings in Lancaster for the Light Up Lancaster Festival. It celebrates the work of Lela Harris, an artist whose portraits explored the forgotten lives of enslaved people in Lancaster during the 1700s, captured by the Facing The Past project.
I used snippets of an interview we did with Lela and found the melodies in her voice, composing around them, and working with 2 singers to create musical responses to Lela’s 6 portraits. The vocalists also responded to the composition and histories in a generative improvisational and collaborative space in the recording studio.
It’s a mixture of reverential choral, verbatim, neo-classical minimalism, electro-acoustic and contemporary pop to bring to lives the key elements of the portraits Lela and the team wanted to show. ‘Thomas’ show the most direct verbatim melodising, while ‘Afamefuna’ blends minimalism and contemporary pop.
From Trinity to the Crescent (2018)
The audio for the electroacoustic sound installation for Not Quite Light Festival 2018. The piece explores contrasting stories about Salford and its culture, told through the voices of local women from oral history recordings, ambient recordings and recordings of objects found on the streets of Salford, as well as sampled and synthesised music.
To be performed live alongside reflections on the city of Salford by Not Quite Light, and projections of Salford streets at dawn/dusk.
Image by notquitelight.com, taken on site of ambient recordings
Red Arrow Partner Finance (2021)
Sound design, arranging, re-composing, mixing and ADR for a corporate sales ad for social media and presentational use, contracted by IN Productions. Song written by Dylan Allcock.
Scroll [Digital] (2021)
Sound design and composition for a collection of poems sub-commissioned by poet, leoe. The video is a set of 12 poems that are a response to Jewish Artefacts, commissioned by the University of Manchester Centre for Jewish Studies. Each poem is a tweet-style response to a different object that is presented in reverse chronology of the objects origin.
The creative brief was free: to bring the poems to life by mixing the poetry reading with a soundworld that compliments the content and/or context of the poems.
The readings of the poems were recorded by the performers (Ben Raymond and Rebecca McAuley) in isolation and edited/mixed by me.
Video by Sam Gee
Audio Mixing
Double Life EP (2021)
The audio recording, audio production, mixing and mastering were done by me. Music and Lyrics by leo&hyde.
Double Life Music Video (2020)
Featuring LGBTQIA+ performers from the West End, TV and more alongside young people from Lancashire who formed part of a virtual choir. Double Life is the opening song from Guy: A New Musical by leo&hyde. The music video was developed alongside workshops with LGBTQIA+ young people to connect them in an isolating time.
The project management, vocal mixing and mastering was done by me
A Christmas Carol: ThE Haunted Service (2020)
A new musical theatre podcast for kids from Goblin Theatre. This podcast was recorded in a community centre throughout an R&D workshop week, with the intent of putting it on as a live show. It features 1 singer, 5 actor-musicians, and 6 members of the youth company.
Created by Matt Borgatti, Mary Erskine, and Will Dollard with the cast in association with Cornerstone Arts Centre Didcot.
Recording, mixing, mastering, and sound design by me.
Wu Nemt Men a Bisel Baash
A COVID-19 Isolation klezmer pub jam session / lockdown video played by the Klezmorim of Manchester, to raise money for the Old Abbey Taphouse.
Each player recorded in isolation to a baseline arrangement I had created. The submissions were edited and mixed by me into a pub-jam-style. Video edit by Jack Fearn.
Flatbush Waltz
A COVID-19 lockdown video in which individual instrumentalists and recorded themselves using a mixture of line-in, ambient and close mic-ing. Video edit by Sophie Sully.
I also play Clarinet in this arrangement.
MusICAL THEATRE COMPOSITION
Galileo - An A Cappella Musical
Co-writer for the musical, Galileo. A musical for a cappella voices.
The song ‘This Isn’t Magic’ won the ‘Voice, Vision, and Potential’ award at the Stiles and Drewe songwriting prize in 2022. George Stiles said the piece is 'bold and original’.
We’ve had workshops to develop the piece and are working with Write4Art to develop the piece further dramaturgically.
For more information about our R&D, check out this link
“bold and original”
Other Composition
A selection of compositions in the following forms: electronic/acousmatic (Pop!, Ignis Fatuus), instrumental (Traces of the Old Flame) and mixed media composition (Doyna, ego).
The mixed media compositions were performed and recorded live using MAXMSP software, which I programmed.