ABOUT
https://sheisrevolting.bandcamp.com/
https://soundcloud.com/sheisrevolting
contact: stephhorak@gmail.com
Steph Horak is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist focusing on systems for voice, sound and image. She was mainly active between the years of 2002 and 2020 and is currently on hiatus teaching ancient crafts and agriculture, archaeology and prehistory from a dedicated farm site in Leicestershire. She is co-founder of The Prehistoric Workshop with her partner where she specialises in ancient crops, flax processing and ancient reproductions of textiles and pottery. A more detailed music biography follows.
Aged 18 I moved to London from Leicestershire to study a degree in Commercial Music at Westminster University at a time when digital music and the internet were having an unpredictable influence on traditional music forms. I was told by multiple lecturers that I needed to limit my sound to be successful. A lot of my more successful colleagues seemed to focus on image, PR, social media and networking rather than developing experimental and authentic styles. Being a deeply philosophical person who still believed in the power of music beyond commerce, I decided there and then that I would try to produce myself, and only make “honest” music that interested me. The results of this decade+ of early experimentation are laid out on the soundcloud page under the name SheIsRevolting. Little to no commercial success came of this. During this time I made some excellent alternative pop with one of the most talented musician/producers I have ever met Stu Ramsay Haxton.
I spent my 20’s playing in bands in London, some cooler than others (!) and continued developing my production skills.
https://myspace.com/thedeepbelow/music/songs
https://soundcloud.com/fealreal
Folk collective The Glassband
The most enjoyable of these collaborations was a complete improvisation punk band with Bryn Ballard and Jeremy Guth. I realised that I wasn’t interested in playing repeated repertoire, but more in discovering happy accidents from a totally unknown place, and began focusing mainly on improvisation from this point on.
During my degree, the most interesting module was Innovation and New Music taught by Steve Beresford. This appealed to my instincts towards trying to break into contemporary classical music despite being untrained. Upon graduation I became label and ensemble administrator for Lontano/Lorelt under the direction of Odaline de La Martinez, the first female conductor at the BBC Proms and a prominent feminist composer. I was invited back to my degree course as a guest lecturer on the Innovation and New Music module years later. I was Junior Product Manager of Warner Classics by the age of 23. I became label administrator and event producer for Gabriel Prokofiev’s label Nonclassical in 2009, where I met John Richards of Dirty Electronics, and so began an interest in DIY electronics and hardware hacking. I worked with Dirty Electronics for several years, assisting on workshops and participating in releases on Mute Records.
I realised the trap of having formal jobs, not having enough time to focus on my practice so I took casual jobs, living hand-to-mouth to facilitate a more dedicated approach. In 2011 I began studying for a Masters degree in Computational Arts at Goldsmiths University of London. I found a lot of my contemporaries came from a fine art background and were far too concerned with class and hierarchy, so I doubled down on my punk approach, but often felt like an outsider. I learnt how to programme, and developed installations that although they always involved sound, were a departure from my music. These video installations can be found here and here. In the second year of study I designed a software system that emulated a chaotic 3-channel loopstation in MaxMSP, which became my main instrument for live performance and studio production. I also developed systems for generating videos, and worked mainly on audio-visual installation and performance from then on.
Upon graduation I was employed by the Computing Department at Goldsmiths for the research group EAVI (Embodied Audio Visual Interaction) under the direction of Atau Tanaka where I produced the NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) academic music conference, contemporary/computational art exhibitions, and project managed the design and build of a fabrication lab (HatchLab) facility, and 360 degree audio visual space for the department. During my employment at Goldsmiths I co-produced a series of DIY electronics workshops for girls and assisted in the production of conferences for Women On Sound/Women In Sound with Linda O’Keefe and Liz Dobson. I helped establish the Goldsmiths/London branch of Women In Sound with Lisa Busby and Patricia Alessandrini before leaving Goldsmiths in 2016. During this time I also produced International exhibitions for computational artists at Pompidou Centre Paris, Tate Modern London, Ars Electronica Linz, Mutek Mexico, TED-X Brussels, to name a few. My documentation photography of artworks has been published in the NY Times, BBC, and in various books about computational art.
I began a long collaboration with Algorithmic artist Renick Bell at the end of 2016 which resulted in several international gigs and releases on Conditional Records. My set-up had developed to include hacked hardware alongside my MaxPatch. It was interesting injecting live voice into the largely digital beats-driven scene of Algorave. All of our music was improvised which suited both of us. In 2016 I released a cassette on Fractal Meat Cuts called threehundredandsixtysix where I sang and recorded a note a day for a year (it was a leap year) to see if my body held a resonant bias, and then made a piece of music each month with all the notes included. They can all be heard here: https://soundcloud.com/threehundredandsixtysix
Other collaborators during this time were my ex-lecturer Steve Beresford and Gino Robair (the fruits of which were released in 2022, Tom Richards of The Oramics Machine fame, Saxophonist Colin Webster, and Liz Helman (https://soundcloud.com/hhhq). I also produced a live music soundtrack to a theatre production called I Hear The Fire by Sparkle and Dark. I was an invited lead artist at Sonorities Festival Belfast in 2018 collaborating with HadI Bastani, Miguel Ortiz and Anna Wiseman, and again in 2020 for a specially-devised audio-visual piece for Sonic Arts Research Centre Belfast.
By 2017, I had moved back to Leicester following a severe bout of long-term gas poisoning from a rented flat in London. It took me several years to recover. I managed to make some of my best solo music and videos during that time (https://sheisrevolting.bandcamp.com/album/now-songs) (videos https://www.youtube.com/@sheisrevolting/videos), and played quite a few concerts but the nature of the improvisation meant that so many variables were out of control (including the quality of the live sound engineer’s mix!), which resulted in some terrible gigs at some of my favourite festivals and events. I had some international gigs also and the stress of travel, combined with my illness meant that music was no longer enjoyable. I tried to alter my approach and worked on a static and repeatable set of songs that floated between chaos and organisation, culminating in a great gig at R10 in Leicester at the end of 2019. Watch it here: https://youtu.be/zxf-XOlIVio?si=89ttdgC33tmMVdtk
It is during this time of recovery in 2019 that I received the Oram Award for Innovative approaches to electronic music, which honoured my stubborn and niche efforts over the last 2 decades.
During covid, I began fieldwalking and participating in Community Archaeology events. I reconsidered my trajectory and now run a Prehistoric Education Community Interest Company with my partner from a dedicated farm site In Leicestershire. Music is certainly not over for me, but I still stay true to only producing things that interest me and that are honest, which means for the time being, that is to follow this path to ecology, heritage, and education.
A near-complete list of my solo concerts is available here: https://stephhorak.wordpress.com/gigs/
And my music videos and some performances here: https://stephhorak.wordpress.com/other/
All the sonic experiments: https://soundcloud.com/sheisrevolting
© Steph Horak: All content on this website is the property of artist.