A composer, performer and sound historian, Sarah Angliss taps into her obsessions with scientific oddities, obsolete machines, faded variety acts and the darkest European folk tales to create her work.
Sarah’s music mixes her own software patches (using Max/MSP, Supercollider, PRAAT and other tools) with her samples, field recordings and live performance on theremin, saw, recorder, waterphone, keyboard,  handbells and other instruments. On stage, she’s often accompanied by musical automata – machines she’s been devising and building since 2005 as she’s been seeking a more theatrical alternative to the laptop, sampler and loop pedal.

Many of Sarah’s performances and machines are inspired by her discoveries in the archives. Centre stage is Hugo, a roboticised 1930s ventriloquist’s dummy with whom Sarah invites the audience to experience the reputed ‘uncanny valley’. Sarah’s Ealing Feeder is a polyphonic robotic carillon, inspired by a control panel in Battersea Power Station. It’s ornamented with an eerie electric lullaby which Sarah discovered in the archives of the Electrical Association for Women, 1930. Regularly featured in Sarah’s live act, The Ealing Feeder was first exhibited at Kinetica, London, February 2010.