Manoli Moriaty is a music maker, performer, and scholar. Much of his work investigates the processes and interactions that emerge in collaborative practice. He regularly collaborates with dancers, actors, and visual artists, with creative outcomes representing the dialogue between the interdependent media, cultures, methodologies, and aesthetics that comprise each partnership. His practice draws influence from sound art, noise improvisation, post-acousmatic music, and rave culture, while his research employs methodologies from the fields of Human-Computer interaction, ethnomusicology, and Practice as Research.
Migrating from my hometown of Athens, Greece to the United Kingdom in the late 90’s, I was lucky enough to catch the rave movement’s swan song. For the best part of the following decade, I played Jungle and Techno music at clubs, squats, and festivals across the North West, and travelled with sound systems as far as Eastern Europe. Following a diagnosis of chronic tinnitus, and the good fortune of studying composition and music technology with Stephen Davismoon, Joe Duddell, Nicola Spellman, Craig Vear, and Alan Williams, 2010 saw me migrating again, this time into sonic-arts.
For the past ten years, I have engaged with numerous milieus pertinent to music, performance, and research. Personal highlights and milestones include presenting and performing work at New Instruments for Musical Expression, ICMC/SMC, Supersonic Festival, FOCUS Wales Festival, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Surge Glasgow, Electric Nights Athens, the Beijing New Dance Festival, Shanghai’s West Bund Centre, the Manchester Science Festival, and the Ionian Academy’s Audiovisual Arts Festival. I had the pleasure of collaborating with Nicola Ellis during her Return to Ritherdon placement, performed with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and the Echo Echo Dance Company, and composed live scores for Jim Cartwright‘s Burning Bright and Teresia Björk‘s Vi-We-Nous. I received commissions and funding by Arts Council England, the British Science Association, Sound & Music, and IdeasTap, and held residencies with the NOVARS Research Centre, the Manchester International Festival, the Great Exhibition of the North, and Medea Electronique. As the principal curator and producer of the Metanast collective, I organised a series of concerts aiming to showcase artistic practices traditionally associated with academia in the context of nightlife clubbing, with the series hosting over 100 artists from more than 30 countries.
I have written journal articles and contributed book chapters published by Taylor and Francis, Springer, Routledge, and Cambridge University Press. I am a member of the Theatre and Performance Research Association, the Irish Sound Science and Technology Association, and the Hellenic Electroacoustic Music Composers Association. I have delivered guest lectures and workshops at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, the Chinese Academy of Arts, Leeds Beckett University, Liverpool Hope, CAST at Doncaster, and Wrexham Glyndwr University. In 2019, I completed a Practice Research PhD examining polydisciplinary collaboration in performance practice, under the supervision of Joanne Scott, Stephen Davismoon, and Stephen Kilpatrick. My doctoral research was made possible through the Pathway to Excellence Scholarship by the University of Salford, where between 2015-2019 I was also a lecturer at the School of Arts & Media, teaching undergraduate and postgraduate modules on music technology & performance, theatre practice, and multimedia performance. In September 2020, I was appointed Lecturer in Music Production at the School of Creative and Performing Arts of Liverpool Hope University.