An award-winning musician, writer and robotic artist, Sarah Angliss taps into her obsessions with scientific oddities, obsolete machines, faded variety acts and the darkest European folk tales to create highly original, unsettling and sometimes strangely comic work.  She’s particularly known for her curious science songs, her skills on the theremin, keyboard and musical saw and the ensemble of ‘uncanny’ performing robots she’s created to accompany her live on stage.

Sarah Angliss (photo Tamsin Chapman)

Sarah is the founder of Spacedog, the only live band on the circuit to give equal billing to its human and robot performers. Spacedog’s highly original act has been embraced by audiences in diverse venues – from folk clubs and esoteric electronica festivals to Steampunk nights, maker faires and science museums (see reviews). Their live show may be a technical marvel but it’s far more than a geek act. In May 2011, their show Televisor was awarded Best Music Event of Brighton Festival and Fringe. Sarah’s work has been helped by NESTA Dreamtime funding and public engagement grants from the Wellcome Trust. In 2007, her digital performance Repeat Repeat, in collaboration with performer Caroline Radcliffe, won a Quake Dance Festival Award (you can find out more about this in Sarah’s talk for TEDx Brighton).

Hard to pigeonhole as an engineer, musician or kinetic artist, Sarah’s actually a little of all three. In fact, she’s been combing these interests since she was a kid in the 1970s. In the long summer holidays, Sarah built mini cable cars across the garden and put together soundtracks, on a portable Phillips cassette recorder, about futuristic trips to the Moon. Sarah’s first degree in engineering (electroacoustics) was followed by a masters in evolutionary and adaptive systems and an Associateship of the Royal College of Music. On graduating as an engineer, Sarah had a brief spell in the building industry, where she assisted the chief acoustician in a busy London engineering company,  There, she fell for the peculiar charms of vintage electronics, when she was asked to work on an ancient, hybrid thermal-modelling computer. She later found her way to the Science Museum, London, where she was encouraged to combine her interests in the history of technology, interactive design and live performance. In 1995, Sarah opted to leave the Science Museum and work independently, focusing on performance, writing and the sonic arts.

Alongside her many solo projects, Sarah occasionally collaborates with other engineers and artists. Recent collaborators include the National Physical Laboratory, Punchdrunk Theatre Company, psychologist Richard Wiseman, performer and theatre historian Caroline Radcliffe, sculptor and automatist Tim Hunkin, hip hop artist Professor Elemental, vocalist Jenny Angliss and Ensemblebash percussionist Stephen Hiscock. Regularly featured in the national press, her solo and collaborative work exploring infrasonic music, early sound recording, Category 4 diseases, cyborgs, extreme reverb, the uncanny valley, genetic privacy, evolutionary music, the Baird televisor, dogs in space, hurdy gurdies, talking budgies, Swinging London and a host of other topics has been seen and heard at venues throughout the UK. The Reverb Jam (2007) and Infrasonic (aka Soundless Music, 2002) are two projects that continue to attract regular enquiries from journalists, scientists, musicians and others. Infrasonic culminated in an experiment during a concert in the Purcell Room, London, an endeavour which helped to put the science of extreme bass sound on the map.

Infrasonic led to a further collaboration with Punchdrunk Theatre Company, with whom Sarah deployed an original (and yet to be disclosed) special effect in It Felt Like a Kiss. This immersive documentary was made in collaboration with Adam Curtis for The Manchester International Festival.

Sarah is in demand as a live musician and as a speaker at hack events, music and science festivals, skeptics’ nights, radio shows, podcasts and salons. She’s recently spoken at TEDx Brighton, the Last Tuesday Society, the Science Museum, BEAM festival of electronic music, the Catalyst Club, Brighton and Dorkbot London. She’s also been called in occasionally by BBC Radio 4 and the World Service to share her expertise on the phonograph and other early music machines. In September 2011 she appeared on the 10th birthday edition of Click where she performed live to a worldwide audience and spoke about the future of technology. She’ll be appearing at the Fortean Times Unconvention in November 2011 and QED Con in March 2012. Her talk on birds learning anthroprogenic tunes was snapped up the BBC Radio 4 who commissioned her to write and present the documentary The Bird Fancyer’s Delight, broadcast June 2011 (producer Neil McCarthy).

Despite their informality, Sarah’s talks are packed with her own archival finds, some of which have also found their way into academic works. Alongside her TEDx talk on the topic, for example, Sarah’s recently completed a peer-reviewed chapter on early attitudes to drum machines and samplers. This will be appearing in a book published by the Smithsonian Institution in partnership with the Science Museum in early 2012.

Always busy, Sarah has a Spacedog album in the pipeline (launching at the end of November 2011). She’s also writing a popular science book on one of her favourite topics – stay tuned for news!

Relaxing in the semi-anechoic chamber at the National Physical Laboratory (photo: Gavin Morris)