Jim's own bio...

I was raised with my father's collection of largely classical music, although he did make a couple of more progressive purchases - the first being Vangelis's "Heaven And Hell" in 1983 which indelibly captivated my eight-year-old mind to the point that it's still one of my favourite albums today, the production is outstanding.  The second was Tangerine Dream's Virgin double compilation "Dream Sequence" four years later around the time of my 13th birthday - at that time this was the most amazing music I'd ever heard and I played those two cassettes incessantly.  From that point I bought all the TD I could find (my favourite period becoming "Zeit" through to "Ricochet") and branched out along a predictable Jarre/Vangelis synth music path until in 1990 Pink Floyd (an introduction by a friend) formed what was for me a branch between synth music and rock.  The 1990s was a time of musical discovery from all sorts of angles, from mainstream pop-rock such as U2 through to the second wave of the so-called "ambient" music and a little techno - then via "Mixing It" and then Ultima Thule I discovered all sorts of exciting music that didn't quite fit into any straitjacket of genre.

This all informed (but only rarely directly influenced) my own musical exploration which began "officially" in November 1990 with my first cassette recordings from the song memory of a simple Yamaha keyboard, in fact the same one I used as a MIDI controller throughout the first phase of Endgame.  Other than some minimal organ tuition (with the basics of sight-reading) from my grandfather in the mid 1980s I'm an entirely self-taught musician and these early recordings were clumsy and naive - I could just about bear to play this material to close friends through gritted teeth if they were interested but I'd never dream of releasing anything from this period!  Also in my A Level period in the early 90s a music teacher allowed me to use the school keyboards and Tascam 4-track for a couple of hours on some Friday evenings which allowed me to experiment a little further, though still within pretty much the same melodic framework.  From 1995 onwards I had my own 4-track with which I made some simple home recordings, later that year buying a second-hand Commodore Amiga 500 with which I was able to sequence/programme compositions with OctaMED "tracker" software.  In spring 1997 I joined my first band, a six-piece outfit called Bluish which could be described as indie rock-tinged folk.  We lasted about six months, then the year after all but one of us reconvened and expanded into the eight-piece Ochra-H which was more folk-tinged indie rock!  Sadly this incarnation only managed to play two gigs (one at Leicester's Abbey Park festival) before drummer Mark got itchy feet and left and from that and numerous other reasons the rehearsals stopped and the band dissolved.

I continued along the OctaMED lines for about three years until I realised I was straitjacketing myself, making music that was too linear and consequently too often predictable, boring even.  I had some good recordings from this period (which I'm in the gradual process of remastering/overhauling for eventual release) but I wanted to move out of this rut.  When I have too much of something musically-speaking I tend to find myself wanting the opposite and, inspired by Alan and Steve's recordings as Alto Stratus which were completely unfettered by any conventional musical structure, I decided to set about trying to work the same way.  I'd done some more abstract things in the past but this was my first go at something more large scale and "serious".  It was March 1998 and I decided to reuse a processed feedback technique I'd used in a short piece a couple of months earlier, recording about ten minutes of this.  This was to become "Cold Cortex", the first movement on what became my debut CD release "Synapse".  Half an hour of ring-modulated guitar improvisation on top of this and suddenly I had the bare framework of the first half of the album, to which I added processed vocals, crystalline synth textures and didgeridoo.  I'd begun working in a much more intuitive frame of mind - I'd realised that during my "programmed" phase of composition I was no longer able to feel the music properly while making it, whereas here it was quite the opposite, direct-to-tape improvisation.  Like Bernhard Günter who independently used the same word, I quickly came to call it "comprovisation" as there were still elements of preconception involved.  The album grows from near-silence to an almost frightening ferocity and I still wonder where some of that came from!

A fortnight after recording what became "Synapse" I was invited to jam with (and then join) Shapeshifter, the musical foil for Maureen Anderson's poetry, which was exciting for me.  Although I'd had some great jams with Bluish this was another level for me, amazingly free and (when it worked) almost ecstatic. I was ostensibly a percussionist on djembe, although I couldn't resist introducing gliss guitar and later atmospheric keyboard into the throng as well.  I routinely recorded things on a little portable tape recorder but then in January 1999, just as Shapeshifter was at the height of its cosmic creativity, I started bringing my 4-track along to rehearsals, which captured some amazing material (released on the CDs "Easier To Feel" and later "Looking Glass Ties").  Such a glowing period wasn't to last however, and the addition of a new drummer tipped things increasingly towards a kind of naff punk music and by early June the magic had evaporated.  Though we were all to remain friends, Alan and I couldn't bear the new direction and wanted out! 
Alan and I talked about a post-Shapeshifter improv outfit and my first attempt was a mid-June night of atmospheric improvisation with friend Steve Bell and his then-girlfriend Jane Hodgson, recorded on my 4-track at their country retreat of the time in Waltham-on-the-Wolds, northeast Leicestershire.  Subsequently released on Auricle under the project name Hemamorphite, the album "Awaiting Lewin" was titled as Jane was at the time pregnant with her and Steve's son Lewin, who happened to be born later that year on 21st October - my 25th birthday.  A dark mysterious blend of synths, guitar, singing bowl, vocals, tapes and radio, musically the album sat at a natural stylistic halfway point between early-'99 Shapeshifter and another improv outfit which was to become an ongoing project: Endgame, formed on 28th July, consisting of the Freeman brothers and myself.

For the first 18 months Endgame was astonishingly prolific.  With only a handful of sessions missed due to illness and holidays, we committed 90 minutes of improvised material to cassette every Wednesday!  While not all of it worked and some even fell flat, much of it was successful to some degree, occasionally brilliant.  We found ourselves exploring territory none of us would ever have envisaged, simply by reacting to one another and some of it was quite awesome.  By early 2001 I was feeling somewhat burnt out from not only recording but also spending at least one evening per week making mixdowns from the 4-track masters, and requested to slow down our output from weekly sessions to fortnightlies!

The things I was trying out in Endgame taught me a lot about sound manipulation and my next solo project was to be something I'd conceived a few years earlier but hadn't the know-how or equipment to realise: an album of music made entirely with found objects and techniques of sound processing and feedback manipulation rather than conventional instruments.  This became the electroacoustic album "Oneiromancer" which was followed by "Heart Of Glass" which kind of united the techniques and approaches I'd used for the first two albums preceding it.  These three albums are what I'd consider my most "difficult" work, very dark and uncompromising and I'm not sure if I'd be able to make music like this again or even if I'd feel particularly inclined to!  It's still music I'm proud of though.  By this time Endgame had begun playing a few live gigs a year, introducing our brand of off-the-cuff weirdness to those brave enough to come and listen.  Endgame fan Dave Powell joined in on one or two improvs on his amplified hurdy-gurdy, from which a new side-project Extremities was born.

My next album project "Sloth" was no less dark in atmosphere but much less confrontational, preferring to ooze and simmer on an even keel rather than burst out of the speakers.  It was conceived as a meditative album but while I received good feedback from a couple of friends in the context of this subject, I feel it works better as a dark "ambient" album rather than a specialist aid to meditation.  It was also the album that heralded my transition in 2004 from 4-track cassette to digital audio workstation.  Also I'd reached saturation point with Endgame by this stage and requested that we put the project on ice for a while as I'd felt things were beginning to stagnate somewhat, although recordings from this period showed us continuing to explore new territories.  For what became a couple of years Endgame was a very occasional live project at Chris Conway's Improv Electronic events at Leicester's Musician pub.  Here we both shared bills with his own improv band The Planet Scanners and (at the end of the night) cross-pollenated with them to become the extraordinary hybrid The Scanner Game, from which two Auricle releases ("Musici" and "Courteous") emerged.  Also during this period I worked on my next solo album project "Quicksilver" which was conceived around a particular sonic aesthetic, also bringing some slightly more conventional composition back into the soundscaping.  I also began a mail/email collaborative project with Nigel Harris (formerly of Freeman project Zircon & The Burning Brains) as The Two Thirds, so far producing two very different album releases.

After "Quicksilver" I spent most of the following three years living with friends in New South Wales, Australia, where I still occasionally worked on music via laptop and headphones.  Here I produced some semi-ambient pieces for an as-yet-unreleased album project and also digitally reconstructed and mastered a non-Auricle album of late 1998 works entitled "The Fair Gardener" inspired by Alan and Steve's album as Biomechanoid, I'd produced fourteen pieces which were my sonic responses to paintings by the surrealist Max Ernst.  It's quite a curiosity and by far my most eclectic album, taking in everything from poignant melody to ambient soundscaping to bizarre scuttling to eccentric rhythmic pieces.  While back in the UK for a while in late 2006 I also reconstructed and remastered some late 1998/early 1999 recordings, gathered together on one Auricle CD as "Substance & Ascension".  At the same period Endgame was reignited and with two significant changes: we switched from 4-track cassette to digital recordings and my new sound medium of choice was sample manipulation/displacement on my laptop, which brought some bizarre new textures to Endgame as well as Extremities which was also rejuvenated with Dave Powell's addition of flute, glockenspiel and other instruments.  Endgame continues to this day in both studio and live settings, albeit just a few times a year which has proved more manageable!

Since coming back to the UK in September 2008 I have befriended and collaborated with an expanding number of musicians to form new projects which seem to have in part emerged from what was once Improv Electronic: now held at Quad Studios and titled Quadelectronic, a monthly gathering of musicians and sonic experimenters takes place and I've also become the project's archivist, handling the recording and mastering of whatever happens for posterity!  Derby percussionist and soundscaper Julian Broadhurst and I combined to form Tetlow & Broadhurst which pushed me into more classically avant-garde territory.  Cellist/bassist Dave Dhonau, vocalist/flautist Ola Szmidt and guitarist/experimenter Glenn Boulter formed the eclectic Aurelie offshoot Focal Gaol.  Vocalist Victoria Bourne (who has also collaborated with Endgame) and her partner, virtuoso guitarist Chris Harper drafted me on cajón (and latterly Dave Dhonau on acoustic bass) into their flamenco-flavoured songs group Harper Bourne.  Chris Conway suggested that he and I form a duo to explore the musical forms we're both interested in, notably minimalist keyboard patterns and ambient soundscapes, and to this end we formed Memory Wire, recording and releasing our debut "Ascend" in spring 2010.  Memory Wire also augmented Quadelectronic friends Christina Wigmore and James Lynch to form side project Bridge.  On top of this I also play cajón in Maureen Anderson's post-Shapeshifter band Multimorph and occasionally work on my own semi-electroacoustic compositions, one of which I "diffused" at an electroacoustic event in Leicester's St Andrew's Church in January 2010.  Musically I keep busy one way or another!

Jim Tetlow (24 November 2010)