Sean Archibald (born 1988), also known as Sevish, is a British

electronic music Electronic music broadly is a group of music genres that employ electronic musical instruments, circuitry-based music technology and software, or general-purpose electronics (such as personal computers) in its creation. It includes both music ...

composer from

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

. Described by Aaron Krister Johnson as "a well-known creative force in the world of online microtonal music", he is most known for his compositions which combine aspects of

electronic dance music Electronic dance music (EDM), also referred to as dance music or club music, is a broad range of percussive electronic music genres originally made for nightclubs, raves, and List of electronic dance music festivals, festivals. It is generally ...

with

microtonality Microtonality is the use in music of microtones — intervals smaller than a semitone, also called "microintervals". It may also be extended to include any music using intervals not found in the customary Western tuning of twelve equal interv ...

. As a child, Archibald was inspired by music in video games such as ''

Chrono Trigger is a 1995 role-playing video game by Square. It was originally released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System as the first entry in the ''Chrono'' series. The game's development team included three designers that Square dubbed the "Dr ...

'', ''

Streets of Rage ''Streets of Rage'' (titled ''Bare Knuckle'' in Japan) is a series of side-scrolling beat 'em up video games. It centers on the efforts of several ex-police vigilantes trying to rid the fictional American metropolis of Wood Oak City of a crime ...

'', and ''

Sonic the Hedgehog is a video game series and media franchise created by the Japanese developers Yuji Naka, Naoto Ohshima, and Hirokazu Yasuhara for Sega. The franchise follows Sonic the Hedgehog (character), Sonic, an anthropomorphic blue hedgehog who battle ...

''. He would then go on to discover microtonality as a teenager by listening to

gamelan Gamelan (; ; , ; ) is the traditional musical ensemble, ensemble music of the Javanese people, Javanese, Sundanese people, Sundanese, and Balinese people, Balinese peoples of Indonesia, made up predominantly of percussion instrument, per ...

music and

Aphex Twin Richard David James (born 18 August 1971), known professionally as Aphex Twin, is a British musician, composer and DJ active in electronic music since 1988. His idiosyncratic work has drawn on many styles, including techno, ambient music, ambi ...

. At age 16 he began officially releasing music online and released his first solo album at age 20. He first gained notoriety in the microtonal music scene with his 2010 release ''Golden Hour''. Sevish's 2011 xenharmonic dance album, ''Subversio'', created in collaboration with Tony Dubshot and Jacky Ligon, was described by

Andrew Hugill Andrew Hugill (born 1957) is a British composer, writer and academic. He is both a professor of music and a professor of creative computing. He directs the Creative Computing programme at University of Leicester. Biography Andrew Hugill studi ...

as " dub meets microtonal tunings". Since most instruments in the

West West is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from east and is the direction in which the Sun sets on the Earth. Etymology The word "west" is a Germanic word passed into some Romance langu ...

are built to play the 12-tone equal tempered scale, Archibald turned to less common instruments and methods of composing microtonal music. He now uses an AXiS-49 hexagonal MIDI controller to play his microtonal music, along with various

DAWs Daws may refer to: *Daws (name) *Daws Heath, woodland in Essex, England *Daws Road, Adelaide, Australia *Banu Daws, one of the tribes of Arabia during Muhammad's era See also * * Daw (disambiguation) * Dawes (disambiguation) * RAF Daws Hill, a ...

such as

Ableton Live Ableton Live is a digital audio workstation for macOS and Windows developed by the German company Ableton. In contrast to many other software sequencers, Live is designed to be an instrument for live performances as well as a tool for compos ...

Bitwig Studio Bitwig Studio is a proprietary digital audio workstation developed by Bitwig GmbH. Bitwig is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Bitwig is designed to be an instrument for live performances as well as a tool for composing, recording, arr ...

(on a

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

system), and

Max/MSP Max, also known as Max/MSP/Jitter, is a visual programming language for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software company Cycling '74. Over its more than thirty-year history, it has been used by composers, pe ...

. The tuning systems he uses to create his music include 22-EDO, 15-EDO, 10-EDO, 13 limit just intonation, the Bohlen-Pierce scale,

Pelog Pelog (, , ) is one of the essential tuning systems used in gamelan instruments that has a heptatonic scale. The other, older, scale commonly used is called ''slendro''. ''Pelog'' has seven notes, but many gamelan ensembles only have keys for ...

tuning, and many others. Adam Hart of the

University of Salford The University of Salford is a Public university, public research university in Salford, Greater Manchester, Salford, Greater Manchester, England, west of Manchester city centre. The Royal Technical Institute, Salford, which opened in 1896, be ...

said that his compositions "do not indicate a desire to move away from the archetypes of established EDM genres, but rather to explore alternative tunings through familiar stylistic approaches". Archibald has expressed a desire to make microtonality more widely consumed by the public, creating multiple side projects to achieve this goal. He is the creator and host of Now&Xen, a podcast about microtonal music. In 2010 he founded his own record label, split-notes, which is focused on promoting music which uses microtonal scales, alternative tuning systems, and xenharmonics.

Discography

Solo Work *''Sevish EP'' (2005) *''Crowded Images'' (2008) *''Exposure EP'' (2009) * ''Golden Hour'' (2010) *''Human Astronomy'' (2010) *''Sean but not Heard'' (2012) *''day:dot EP'' (2013) *''Rhythm and Xen'' (2015) *''MK-SUPERDUPER'' (2016) *''Harmony Hacker'' (2017) *''Horixens'' (2019) *''Odds and Ends'' (2020) *''Bubble'' (2021) *''Formless Shadows'' (2021) *''Morphable'' (2022) *''Murmurations'' (2023) *''Big Sway'' (2023) *''One With the Fractal'' (2025) Collaborations *''Crack My Pitch Up'' with 9 other artists (2010) *''Subversio'' with Tony Dubshot and Jacky Ligon (2011) *''2MM2'' (''2 Minute Masterpieces 2'') with 15 other artists (2013)Net050Various - 2MM2 : Faturenet Collective : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive" /> *''23'' with Tony Dubshot and Jacky Ligon (2014) *''Next Xen'' with 18 other artists (2016) *''3 Remixes'' with Acreil, Brendan Byrnes, and ZIA (2019) *''STAFFcirc vol. 7 - Terra Octava'' with 16 other artists (2021) *''Maglonia - Remix'' with M F TroniX (2022)

References

External links

*
''split-notes'' website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sevish Living people Microtonal composers 1988 births Experimental composers British composers