Sylvia Hallett is a British multi-instrumentalist, improviser, and composer who moves between violin, bowed bicycle wheel, saw, hurdy-gurdy, electronics, and found objects. Hello Spiral (aka Joe Baldwin) is a fellow British sound artist and improviser who calls his practice “putting practical meat on abstract bones”.
Slow Spinning is the first-ever free improvised meeting of Hallett and Hello Spiral. Hallett plays bowed bicycle wheel, violin, and singing saw, and Hello Spiral plays organically tuned guitar, oscillators, harmonica, whistle, and electronic milk frother. The album was recorded at 28 Lawrence Road in London in April 2026, and offers a thirty-minute piece.
Hello Spiral says he arrived “very drunk” for this performance, and at one point his hair became entangled with his electric guitar, which was playing itself via a spinning dynamo with a rope attached; he had to forcibly tear a large chunk of his hair to detach himself from the guitar. This testimony sheds light on the enigmatic, hallucinatory, and often unsettling, drone-like spirit of this sonic experience, incorporating otherworldly yet fragile multiphonics, fractured percussive sounds, and colourful noises as organic elements that sound as if tempting old ghosts to join this experiment.
Here the video of the concert at Unit 4b f, 28 Lawrence Road, in London, that gave rise to Slow Spinning.
Sylvia Hallett & Hello Spiral – Slow Spinning (scatterArchive, 2026)
