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Raymond Asgeir Lee is an English sound artist, kinetic artist, composer, musician, performer and academic. He was born in Stoke Newington, London on November 13th 1960. His father Richard Clive Lee (1910-1991) was a commercial sculptor (Exhibited Royal Academy) and his mother Ragnheidur Lee (1923-2007) was from the East Coast of Iceland.

Early Years:
He grew up in Lostwithiel, Cornwall, before moving to Colchester and attending St.Helena School. From 1980-83 he studied at Trent Polytechnic gaining a BA(Hons) in Creative Arts, where he specialised in music, visual art and performance.

Career:
In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s Lee worked as a composer and performer with Motionhouse Dance Theatre, writing and performing (with his long term colleague Harry Dawes) the scores for three touring productions: The Ticking Man, Speed and Light and Arcadio. In 1993, with Harry Dawes, he set up the music theatre company Lee and Dawes. Between 1994 and 1998 Lee and Dawes created four performance projects: The Modulation 1994, In the Ether 1996 (winner of a Barclays New Stages Award for experimental theatre), Loud and Clear 1997 and Loop 1998. During this time they toured extensively in the UK, performing at venues including Midlands Arts Centre, Warwick Arts Centre and The Royal Court Theatre, for example. In 1996 they presented their work at a conference celebrating the centenary of Leon Theremin’s (inventor of the Theremin electronic instrument) birth at the Theremin Center in Moscow.

In 1994 Lee made ‘Swing’, a large scale kinetic sound performance for the disused winding house of Snibston Colliery, Leicestershire, as part of an event hosted by the artists ‘Fine Rats International’. In 1999 ‘Swing’ was presented at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and was described as ‘a fascinating counterpoint of sound and light, its 16 human controlled loudspeaker cones suspended from the ceiling producing constantly shifting patterns that held the attention’ by The Independent newspaper.

In 2000 Lee received a Year of the Artist Award and made a work called ‘The Theremin Lesson’ for the disused top floor of Masson Mill, Derbyshire. In this piece he used a Moog Ethervox MIDI Theremin to control analogue noise machines.

Out of this work emerged his best known work to date, ‘Siren’, which consists of up to thirty metal tripods up to three meters tall. Motorised arms propel small loudspeakers emitting tuned musical drones. ‘Siren’ takes it name from a play on the dual meaning of the word which suggests the Sirens of mythology as well as air raid sirens. The work was first presented at RAF Upper Heyford, in a former F1-11 fighter jet hanger in 2004 co-presented by Oxford Contemporary Music. Since then the work has been toured internationally with the support of the British Council. In 2007 it was presented at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz as well as at Futuresonic, Manchester. In 2008 it toured to venues including LEV Festival in Spain; Kontejner, Zagreb, Croatia; The International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, USA; the Gaudeamus Music Center in Amsterdam; The Royal Opera House, London. In 2009 it toured the world with performances at Here Arts Center, New York as part of the Under the Radar Festival; the PUSH Festival in Vancouver, Canada; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; Wexner Arts Center, Columbus; The Auckland Festival, New Zealand; 10 days on the Island Festival, Tasmania; The Melbourne International Festival, Melbourne; Sleepless Night Festival in Miami and Womadelaide, Adelaide, Australia. ‘Siren’ has been described as “a remarkable work that possesses sculptural, performative, and musical dimensions.” by Graham Coulter-Smith of ArtIntelligence.net, and “An amazing spectacle” by Ivan Hewitt writing in The Daily Telegraph.

Other work:
In 2007 Lee created ‘Force Field’ which was premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. ‘Force Field’ received an Honorary Mention at the 2008 Prix Ars Electronica for Digital Music. His sound installation ‘Swarm’ was presented in 2008 in the atrium of Guadeamus Music Center, Amsterdam and at FACT, The Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool. He has presented kinetic sculpture both at the Kinetica Museum, London and for touring exhibitions of kinetic art curated by Kinetica.

Academic:
From 1993-2001 he was a Lecturer in Music at Nottingham Trent University. From 2001 to present he has worked at Oxford Brookes University, lecturing in art and music. He is also an assistant Dean for the School Of Arts and Humanities.

Artistic Practice:
Ray Lee's work investigates his fascination with the hidden world of electro-magnetic radiation and in particular how sound can be used as evidence of invisible phenomena. He is interested in the way that science and philosophy represent the universe, and his work questions the orthodoxies that emerge, and submerge, according to the currently fashionable trends. He creates spinning, whirling, and pendulous sound installations and performances that explore “circles of ether,” the invisible forces that surround us.