(OUR PRACTICE)
Curating communal listening installations at the highest technical level
Loss><Gain are spatial audio experience creators with a bold mission: to redefine how we as humans think about and listen to music, its place in our lives and its power to move us. Through curating communal listening installations at the highest technical level, and working in true 360° immersive sound, Loss><Gain aim to collaborate with fellow forward-thinking artists - Sigur Rós, Steve Reich/Colin Currie Group, Speakers Corner Quartet, Anna Meredith, Gazelle Twin, Hannah Peel, Duval Timothy, Soumik Datta, Public Service Broadcasting, Jon Hopkins, Max Richter - spending weeks, sometimes months, painstakingly constructing artists' compositions into new 4-dimensional (3-plus time) forms, allowing their music to be liberated in space as never before, and those listening to ‘hear’ as never before.
(FOUNDERS)
David Sheppard
CO-FOUNDER
David Sheppard is a designer, performer, creator and engineer of sound. He has worked for many years at the cutting-edge of music performance and how sound can be enhanced, shaped and transformed for creatives and audiences across all kinds of music both as an artist and as partner in Sound Intermedia, the UK's leading contemporary classical sound design team. At home as much in the opera house as the rock venue, his collaborations have taken him to a French disused submarine base, Californian beaches, ancient villages in China, and up in helicopters over Paris and Birmingham. Reich, Bjork, the National. Sigur Rós, Mira Calix, Kaija Saariaho and John Adams. These and more have provided challenges and opportunities to explore the use of technology and sound for the realisation of exceptional music. Spatial audio has featured throughout his career, with multichannel works from the likes of Stockhausen kickstarting experiments and realisations with bespoke site-specific systems and industry tools, such as the current world of object-based mixing. David feels that spatial audio has now reached a moment where it is the perfect format for performing with electronic sound, whether from microphones or digital machines, allowing music to speak aurally and physically in a thrilling new way....
John Best
CO-FOUNDER
John Best is a music industry multi-hyphenate - journalist, film producer, indie label boss, festival organiser - perhaps best known for helming the career of Icelandic band Sigur Rós for the first 20 years of this century, and before that founding era-defining 90s independent PR company Savage & Best and launching the careers of Pulp, Suede, The Verve, The Cranberries, Elastica, as well as representing Pixies, the Blue Nile, Cocteau Twins, Mary Margaret O'Hara and many more. While managing Sigur Rós - and particularly the band’s ambient side project Liminal - he became interested in the subtler emotional impact of immersive audio, and the huge untapped potential of the form as a way of delivering experiences of genuine emotional heft. When not thinking about the subtleties of sound and how to harness and optimise audience perception and reaction, John still likes to pull together the odd arts festivals, currently harnessing the pagan-adjacent music, art, film and ideas forum NeoAncients in his hometown of Stroud.
