Andrew Stones is a multi-disciplinary artist, based in the north of England. His work is informed by debates around ecology and human overreach (generally) and Englishness (specifically). His sound and musical works share features with musique concrète, electro-acoustic composition, classical minimalism, and various folk and popular music forms.
Stones's compositions draw on the natural playing-out of physical phenomena in time, and the musicality of all kinds of materials in motion, often matching a singular image or idea (a wave, a helicopter, the traverse of an interior or a terrain) with a structural rule (to use only metal objects, or a particular set of numbers).
Stones's sound palette includes field recordings and self-created musical instruments. His working method combines the physical and the digital, expressive and mechanically-actuated playing, the musically-familiar (piano, harmonium, struck/bowed strings) and the strange (feathers, machines, voices from history). Avant-garde experimentation, tech-led music, pre-industrial and ritual, devotional music, have all influenced Stones's work.
Andrew Stones became associated with the European video art scene in the 1980s, gravitating towards mixed-media installation, often with multi-channel audio. He exhibits solo, in the partnership Frances Hegarty & Andrew Stones, and in other public and collaborative settings. From the mid-2010s onwards, his focus on standalone sound and musical works intensified.
Please see the on-site catalogue for detailed information on individual Andrew Stones releases.
SPOTIFY
APPLE MUSIC (UK)
AMAZON MUSIC (UK)
BANDCAMP
SOUNDCLOUD
BRIGHTER.ORG - artist's hub
Mister Salmon is an identity adopted by Andrew Stones for the album Mister Salmon... in Yorkshirama (2010), a semi-autobiographical work exploring the paradoxes of growing up in the north of England in the 1970s and 80s.
'Mister’ is a title suited to a bossy, self-determining kind of man; 'Salmon' evokes a creature fatally tied by biology to its home-place (limiting the scope of any self-determination).
'Mister Salmon' remains as a performative device for Stones's music where it is closest to avant-folk and pop. Works released under this name frequently adapt the structures and emotional directness of pop, and the poetic grammar of folk, but are not made to fit in with any particular genre or tradition.
Significant as background are: UK punk-rock and post-punk electronica, UK art-school culture, outsider art, and 1970s ‘krautrock’ – all practical movements with a DIY “self-creation” ethos, repurposing established forms for new ends, subsisting between the popular and the esoteric.
Please see the on-site catalogue for detailed information on individual Mister Salmon releases.
SPOTIFY
APPLE MUSIC (UK)
AMAZON MUSIC (UK)
YOU TUBE CHANNEL
BANDCAMP
SOUNDCLOUD
MISTERSALMON.COM - official artist's site
TWITTER (hardly ever)
FACEBOOK (not very often)
Email: management[at]salmonsongs[dot]com