Jay Auborn is a British musician, producer and sound artist. His work fuses acoustic and electronic sound worlds, combining experimental sound practises with conventional composition.
Conceptual frameworks will often feature at the core of his work. 2017’s Race To Zero explores the effect of acoustic spaces, physical and digital, on composition. The album presents a tapestry of layered improvisations recorded in a multitude of spaces, receiving glowing reviews from A Closer Listen (“a superb example of detailed musical engineering”), Mary Anne Hobbs, BBC Radio 6 Music (“Just Beautiful”), and Clash (“A fascinating album that continually surprises with its neo-classical meets electronic template”) amongst others.
In 2023, Auborn partnered with regular collaborator John Matthias to release Ghost Notes via Cognitive Shift Recordings. The album was released as a Limited Edition Dinked Edition and was celebrated as an “impressive, compelling and slightly terrifying experiment” by Loud & Quiet.
Auborn’s music for film can be heard in features such as 2015’s Focus starring Will Smith, and in the Tribecca-selected indie film Poorboy, starring Micheal Shannon. Soundtrack releases include In The Cloud for Sony, with The Quietus regarding it as “a complex and fractured sound, flirting with gorgeous string melodies and piano, juxtaposing them with harsher electronic beats”. The score for Stanley Donwood and Mat Consume film Broadmead the Movie was released on Welfare State Records to coincide with a concert and screening at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery in 2019.
In 2020 Auborn created the spatial soundtrack for the Ancient Mariner Big Read, a retelling of Samuel Colridge’s gothic horror featuring contributions from Iggy Pop, Tilda Swinton and Beth Gibbons. Philip Hoare said about the soundtrack: “The unique soundscape is a visceral, storm-tossed, sublime experiment in how a pure soundtrack can not only reflect and compliment the spoken word, but parallel its power”.
Auborn lives in Bristol where, alongside his music projects, he is creative director of dBs Pro; an award-winning creative audio company.