Lia Mice

An artist working in sound and electricity, Lia Mice really likes “exploring sound” and is “kind of addicted to it.” Keen to working on many, many projects at once, she’s just finished her latest album The Sampler As A Time Machine, due out in November on Optimo Music. “It’s a studio album about time travel. I created it through a series of studio experiments where I used the sampler to interpret various ideas of time travel that I came across in science and science fiction,” explains Mice. The artist is currently working on a PhD in Media and Arts Technology with a focus in instrument design. “The instruments I am designing are about the way we perform music.” Mice has created an instrument from a hacked chandelier, called The ChandeLIA, which synchronizes gesture and sound. She meanwhile created an instrument from an electric violin called The One-Handed Violin, forwarding a movement toward accessibility and inclusion in instrument design. The One-Handed Violin was a collaboration with the One-Handed Musical Instrument Trust, a UK- based charity pioneering the development of accessible instruments. Currently living and work in London, Mice splits her time between composing and producing in the recording studio and working at Queen Mary University, where she researches and designs instruments. “Finding the balance between the ideas and the sound and the engineering elements of each of my projects and bringing them together into a coherent whole,” is one consistent challenge of her creative practice. With her European album release scheduled for November, Mice is working on an audio-visual live set to perform while on tour. She’s developing live versions of the tracks on her album using samplers and some of her new instruments. They Said They Saw (Iqono) has been creating some of the visuals for her live sets. Other than that, Lia’s going to “Keep exploring the mysteries of the sonic universe.”