Bulbs of Held

Manchester indie-dance duo Bulbs of Held combine the talents of sound designer / mixologist Paul Bardsley, and guitarist / vocalist Chris Plack. Bardsley and Plack have worked with sound for all their adult lives, but from strikingly different perspectives. Bardsley spent much of the last decade disc jockeying in London, Berlin, Manchester, Teeside and Ibiza, as well as working in audio post-production studios as a sound designer following a sound and media degree, further to this Bardsley now works as an Audiology Technician. Plack rocked out in Brighton indie guitar bands Elysium and Readers Wives during the 90s and 00s, before settling down to a successful academic career in hearing science. Indeed, Plack is one of the world’s leading psychoacousticians, and is currently Professor of Audiology at the University of Manchester. It was in Manchester that a chance meeting between the two led to an exchange of tracks and a cunning plan. Their name comes from a type of chemical connection between nerve cells in the auditory brain, and appropriately their sound is a cerebral fusion of indie, electronica, disco, trip-hop and folk. Their love of psychoacoustics and the infinite possibilities of auditory perception inspire their music, which is designed to reach the hair cells that other bands cannot reach. bulbsofheld@gmail.com