Photo by Laura Mateescu
Biography
Job Title: Lecturer in Classical Percussion
Courses Taught: BA (Hons) Music (Classical)
Specialisms: Contemporary percussion performance, orchestral percussion, multidisciplinary and experimental music
Dr Colin Frank is a contemporary percussionist, free improviser, installation artist, and multimedia composer. He is a founding member of Brutalust and Drift Ensemble, and has worked notably with the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Noisebringers, TAK Ensemble, AndPlay, Gods Entertainment, and the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble.
He is a specialist in new music, and has performed both nationally and internationally, including at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK), the CTM festival (DE), the Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (DE), Electric Springs (UK), Beast Feast (UK), SoundThought (UK), and the Percussion Arts Society’s Quebec Days (CA), amongst others.
His band Brutalust has released music on Crow Verses Crow, Verz, and Accidental; he has performed on Another Timbre records; and his solo album of performances on outdoor objects was released on Impulsive Habitat, with a track receiving the Hildegard Westerkamp award for soundscape composition from JTTP.
Dr Frank has increasingly been creating immersive sound installations that incorporate new technologies and audience interactivity. He has exhibited at New Adventures in Sound Art, Le Vivier’s Semaine du Neuf festival, Analix Forever, Salem Art Works, and Dai Hall. In 2025, he is developing Syzygy, an interactive installation using mixed-reality and VR headsets, which received research and development funding from Immersive Arts.
Dr Frank received his PhD in music from the University of Huddersfield. His dissertation, titled ‘Making With Agential Objects: An Autoethnographic Account of Fluidity in Artistic Practice’, considered how unconventional instruments and objects influence his creative process. He has published in several academic journals, including Organised Sound, Filigrane, the Comparative Media Arts journal, and Pulse, and he was editor of issue 7 of the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM) journal. He teaches percussion at the Leeds Conservatoire, and has taught improvisation and experimental music at the University of Huddersfield.
