Michael Edwards

bit parky

Programme Note

bit parky is a fixed-media immersive audio (20-channel) piece from 2026. It's a purely digital work cobbled together from various algorithms I developed with my slippery chicken algorithmic composition software. I made it for presentation at an annual Philharmonie Essen & Folkwang University of the Arts collaboration called Park Sounds. This is a week-long celebration of electronic music presented at the Stadtgarten in Essen.

The title is a play on words. In Northern English, bit parky means the weather's rather cold. This is usually an understatement. Park Sounds is sometimes cold, sometimes warm, but this piece offers exclusively audio bits and bytes, and music made from these is anecdotally considered cold, in the analogue audio world. (Hah hah.)

I've attached this piece to a new pseudonym I registered for a laugh with the GEMA, the German performing rights society: eddie the igel. This is also a play on words. Some people may remember the other Michael Edwards, Eddie the Eagle, the 1980s British ski-jumper whom everyone saw as a bit of a joke back then. Eddie or Eddy was, in addition, the preferred name of my dad, who despite being hilarious most of the time could sometimes be more than a little prickly, like a hedgehog, or Igel in German (pronounced almost exactly the same as the English word eagle).