Nick Pynn

Nick Pynn (born 17 November 1962) is a British musician and composer noted for his use of bass pedals and live looping with electroacoustic stringed instruments. He has been described as an ‘avant folk’ artist, whose early interests were in world folk and experimental music.

Having made many of the instruments he still uses, Nick Pynn started his musical career in the mid-80s with the Leigh-on-Sea 'soil music' barn-dance band, The Famous Potatoes. He played fiddle, banjo, mandolin, mandocello and viola on their albums, The Sound of the Ground, It Was Good for My Old Mother, and Born in a Barn. Pynn joined Steve Harley in 1990 on acoustic guitar and fiddle, taking the lead guitar role in 1996. The 'Stripped to the Bare Bones' tour of 1998 with Pynn accompanying Harley on mandocello, dulcimer, acoustic guitar and violin was released on CD :Stripped to the Bare Bones from the Jazz Café, London, and the two-man show received a 5 star review at the Edinburgh Festival. The success of these led to Harley and Pynn playing over a hundred dates in 1998, performing under the explanatory tour-title "Stripped to the Bare Bones". Pynn’s debut solo CD on the Roundhill label In Mirrored Sky (1995) is a collection of autumnal pieces, and features bass player Herbie Flowers and Adrian Oxaal of James on cello. Flowers introduced Pynn to Richard Durrant, which led to the joint album Nick and Dick (1997). In 2000 Nick joined the new acoustic version of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Pynn contributes most of the instrumentation and arrangements on the 2007 release The Voice of Love In August 2001, Pynn went to Edinburgh with The Life and Death Orchestra for a Festival production of poetry, written by survivors of the Holocaust put to music. During the second half of the month, he joined American Perrier Award winning comedian Rich Hall in his band, Otis Lee Crenshaw and The Black Liars. Pynn also met Jane Bom-Bane, and together they wrote and produced Rotator, a CD of palindromic (forwards and backwards) songs for 2002, and the Fringe show 'Year of the Palindrome'. Further collaborations followed with comedians Boothby Graffoe, Jo Neary, Simon Munnery, Kevin Eldon, Omid Djalili and Stewart Lee. Pynn premiered a solo show in 2003 called 'Music from Hotels Rooms, Forests and Submarines', using wine glasses, playing cards and live sampling in addition to his various stringed instruments. In May 2004 Pynn's third solo album Afterplanesman was released, the reissue of which made it into The Sunday Times 100 Best Albums of 2008. In the following year at the Edinburgh Festival, Pynn won a 'Spirit of the Fringe Award' for his music.

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