Kris Halpin: Making music by gesture alone. Genius new creativity.
This is a chat with Kris Halpin, who also trades as Dyskinetic. It's about making music solely by gesture and movement. An extraordinary new way to create, using Imogen Heap's magical Mi.Mu gloves. Disabled himself, Kris explains this with disarming frankness. The gloves are extraordinary things, and there's a sample in this podcast. But there's a key factor that informs Kris and his work: his disability. It led Kris to his involvement with the gloves, as he sensibly pointed out to their makers that these could a fantastic tool for musicians with disabilities, and they promptly took him on to help with their research. In this podcast, Kris deals with his disability – a very serious disability, which absolutely won't go away - with jaw-dropping openness, and I am hugely grateful. But there's an awful lot more. Kris has a very clear eye on his situation, and it turned out to be a jaw-dropping conversation. There's a sample of Kris's work in the podcast, and if you want to explore more about the gloves and the people involved, visit the detailed companion blog post: 'A Life in Music: Kris Halpin', which you can find here on the Radio To Go Blog. A footnote: the intro and outro flourishes I'm using in this series of Lives in Music podcast come from Vo Fletcher who is featured in this series, along with Loz Kingsley, here. I asked him for a bit of live impro, and this was the result. The Lives in Music Podcast These are interviews with local musicians, looking at how music has shaped them throughout their lives. Series 3 also looks hard at how lockdown has had an impact. There are some lovely stories. To see who's in the list, here's a link to see every episode. I am hugely grateful to Kris for his openness and completely level-headed take on his situation. I've put a lot of links into the companion podcast. Photo: Josefa Torres