michael wintle-brown
modular synth artist
Michael Wintle-Brown is a modular synth artist, exploring our inner thoughts, emotions and how we react to external and internal stimulus, through experimental, ambient, noise, and drone musical pieces. Expressing how we react to nature, art and even personal trauma with the aim to build connections and empathy through sonic paintings and a shared listening experience.
Hailing from Gloucester, with it’s close proximity to Bristol, Michael has aways been influenced by Bristol’s more rebellious, radical and experimental bass culture and music scene, especially the work of Roly Porter and Emptyset. He now lives within earshot of the sea on the remote West coast of Scotland. Having a life long passion for music as a DJ, a stint working in a record shop, managing Cheltenham Music Library and working as a mix engineer, it was suffering a stroke at the age of 43 in 2020 that inspired Michael to delve deeper and explore the effect that music and sound has on our mind, body, emotions, and nueroplasicity. This led to a qualification in sound therapy and a passion for music psychology.
Michael’s process concentrates on creating drones and experimental noise pieces with Modular synth and live sampled sound, reacting to texture and our emotive and somatic responses to it.
His latest album, Hemianopia tells the story of Michael’s experience as a stroke survivor, told through ambient drones, noise and distortion. It’s the journey of brain disruption and failure, hallucinations and loss of self. But also acceptance, reconnections and hope. By expressing the inexpressible through sound, Michael hopes that it can help others that have lived through trauma to process their experience and start to heal, whilst allowing those who support them to gain an insight into emotions that may be difficult to express with words.
His next project entitled Liquid Compass, explores how we react when we view art and how art can act as a prompt for our emotions and can influence action and process emotion. It is a collaboration with artist, architect, and writer Tamsin Cunningham, also located on the West coast of Scotland. Tamsin’s paintings are mediations on water, it’s flow, drift, float, current, storm, torrent, wave and ripple, whilst Michael’s ambient drones reflect and provoke reaction to Tamsin’s visual art.
