I’m interested in musical improvisation, particularly ways that I can use digital means of making and manipulating sound fluidly across time, timbre and space using physical gesture. My PhD from Edinburgh University in 2007 investigated AI and music, in particular how we can look at shared improvisation as a dialogue, in order to allow intelligent agents to become partners in improvisation. Now I do most of my musicking with humans. My longest running music project is the laptop trio Raw Green Rust. We experiment with algorithms that modulate improvisational dynamics, exploring blurred agencies, creative failures and finding beat-like structures in soups of resampled glitches. We’ve played at Sonorities, Convergence, Hear and Now (Radio 3) among others, we have an album out on Superpang. Taking the interactive agencies further, we have won a Centre for Data, Culture and Society Research Prize for Jules Rawlinson’s Antagonistic Sextet. I’m working with ideas about how human and machine agencies intermix, how digital interventions can shape both micro and macro approaches to playing and how the trascendent internal space of improvising practice can survive the the screens and cables of computational approaches.

I’ve also played a lot as part of Edimpro, Edinburgh’s free improvising orchestra, and have an ongoing duet with Firas Khnaisser - albums below.

Latest Releases

Duo with Pete Furniss at Golsmiths, University of London, in 2023 - wild clarinet, processing and granular jazzy laptop:

Moody oozing electronics in a beatless deconstructed dub techno vein:

Solo album - kotamo and electronics, spacious and listenable:

Raw Green Rust at Wavetable, 2022 being glitchy and raucous

Videos

Improvisation with Pete Furniss at Goldsmiths, University of London, 2023

Raw Green Rust performing Antagonistic Sextet with post-talk for Edinburgh Futures Institute “Love Machine” season 2023:

Solo at Kunstverein Gallery, Baden

Raw Green Rust

Raw Green Rust (formerly TR-I/O-FON) has been playing as an improvising laptop trio since 2008, serving up humorous abstract glitch-dub from promiscuous audio processing. We’ve played at Sonorities, Convergence, Hear and Now (Radio 3) among others, we have an album out on Superpang. We have won a Centre for Data, Culture and Society Research Prize for Jules Rawlinson’s Antagonistic Sextet.

You can read about our approach in Its Psychedelic Baby Magazine, and there’s a talk at xCoAx about what we do and how we do it

Wavetable gig from 2022 mixed

Our first album is out on Superpang:

Dave Murray-Rust

This is my improvised music, solo and with others

Duo with Pete Furniss at Golsmiths, University of London, in 2023 - wild clarinet, processing and granular jazzy laptop:

Moody oozing electronics; solo improvisations edited down:

Mixing in a kotamo with the electronic processing for something dense and contemplative:

Duet with Firas Khnaisser - lots of crunchy guitar, mangled samples and clouds of distorted drums:

Duet with Firas Khnaisser on the very lovely but sadly wrapped up TQN-aut label (check out their other releases). It’s all improvisation between us, done remotely in lockdown and then processed and edited down.

A journey through the hidden recesses of the mind - ambient techno explorations of bass and joy, stitched together from improvised playing into a seamless trajectory of noise and beats and glitches:

Tense, unsettling electronics and vocals, edited together from a series of live performances and studio improvisations between me and Josie Davis in the summer of 2009.

mo-seph

mo-seph is my previous solo project of composed work

Sparkling, wiggling, crunchy time signatures and dirty basses:

A continuous piece of music, sliding from one imaginary landscape to another.

The breadth of styles and influences absorbed is spectacular… Download both, get ‘em on your mp3 player and set course for the middle of nowhere… real fucking wow music.” Liam Arnold, Team Little Rock / Shallow Rave on Growth and Form and The Other Place

Edimpro

Edimpro is an ongoing improvisers orchestra loosely based at the University of Edinburgh. We put out three albums while I was there, all on the Reid Label:

Concerts