Bell on the ball

Sound designer and artist Conor Kelly flies from one subject to another like a grasshopper. He hops from, say, a solo installation in Poland to gigging with his band, designing sound for Cois Ceim, experimental film, and working with theatre groups like Druid and Rough Magic, while also holding down jobs at London's Institute of Contemporary Art, and Kent Institute of Education - and that' s just for starters.

Kelly, who is based in London, is back in Dublin for a few days to design sound in his fifth collaboration with Cois Ceim, Dish of the Day. At one point he pulls his ubiquitous palm-top computer from his breast pocket and scrolls through notes from yesterday's rehearsal. "You should get one of these," he advises. "You can work on the plane," (which is what he regularly does) "they're brilliant".

"Different projects add energy to what we do," says Kelly, who, along with his English partner Sam Park, constitutes the elusive Bell Helicopter. "I need to go into other arenas and solve other kinds of issues, and deal with other kinds of things. Theatre and dance are exciting for us because of their differences."

He attributes his problem-solving ability to his architect father. When he applied to follow in his father's professional footsteps, however, his aptitude test revealed him to be "vocationally immature" - a label he relishes.

Having recently collaborated with Rough Magic, Bell Helicopter is poised to provide sound solutions for Barabbas's co-production with the Abbey, Brilliant Days Blue, next year. This is indicative of a growing awareness among theatre practitioners of sound's subliminal power on the emotions. Kelly, who considers Beckett "the greatest sound artist this century", explains that "not only is it a difficult creative process, it is also a difficult technical process, where you are trying to respect the actors' voices and the kind of space that they are shouting or calling from. Sometimes the more beautiful and more creative solutions end up being scrapped simply for technical reasons."

Collaborative projects can originate in long conversations with the director or choreographer, as is the case with Cois Ceim, whose devising process "lends itself very welll to our own natural process. Dance has a fantastic plasticity to it. You can move and change, and the dynamics shift from day to day, until at some point the music and the choreography starts to merge."

Bell Helicopter hovered more imperceptibly over Druid's production of Martin McDonagh's Leenane Trilogy: "The fact that we only had a dog barking and the noise of a cooker, in three plays, that took an entire day to watch, is to me a bit of a triumph," he boasts. Functioning as a post-production tool was both "intensely frustrating, and very interesting. It can be very brutal, and we like that," he states, matter of factly. "The solution to a project could be the tiniest thing in the world. Like the drip of a tap."

From the Leenane Trilogy, Kelly takes a mental leap and lands in the 12th-century capital of Poland, Poznan, the site of his recent solo exhibition. The link is his Leenane recording of "simple low-level ambience of wind moving in space, like inner wind" which emanated from six overhead speakers in one arm of the Lshaped gallery. In his incarnation as solo artist, the solution he found to unlocking that gallery space was inspired by dance and theatre. In the gallery's other arm a whirring projector threw the image of an 11-year-old boy pressing his stoic face into a furious wind (generated by two invisible film wind machines). Could he be holding his own against the invisible blades of a mysterious surveillance helicopter, winding down after landing, I wonder? No. Bell Helicopter, Kelly assures me means "nothing". It has "no significance at all . . . "

Intriguingly, neither Kelly nor Park will allow his photograph to appear in theatre programmes.

Self-effacing? Vague? "Why should you have to comb your hair to do sound-work?", is his answer.

It must have seemed like fate when Park and Kelly discovered each other 11 years ago, both playing with four-track tape recorders, recording real noises and playing with wiring the same kind of tape recorders the wrong way. "Avoiding the music industry," became their first mission statement.

In leaving Dublin for London in the mid 1980s, Kelly left behind a recording contract with his band Max, then winner of the Stag Hot Press Signed Band Award. Playing guitar and composing quirky lyrics with cryptic narratives of accidental possibilities, he was part of the psychedelic revival, alongside bands like Echo and the Bunnymen. But even performing on The Late Late Show could not quell his fascination with "inquiries into making noise", and idiosyncratic questions like "what are you looking at when you are listening to your favourite record? Your gaze is somehow unlocked". Boyzone, he was not. But boyish? "Obsessed" by the guitar, from the age of nine, and "frustrated at not being technically brilliant", he would "plug it in through Mum and Dad's telly. I'd take the speaker out and use the pre-amp and put the guitar through it, wire that through another telly, and have both sets of television speakers on the go and then use the needle of the record player, you know?" Er, not really. "I could make it look or sound more interesting than it is," he explains. "It's a form of invention by default."

This is probably the kind of dialogue he has with his students on the BA and MA time-based media courses in the Kent Institute of Art and Design. "I talk a lot," he says. "I sometimes give seminars about work I particularly like, but it is not `teaching'. I love the new inquiries, and the new sets of relationship they set up."

His own art education began upon his arrival in London when he serendipitously found a job packing catalogues in the cinematheque of London's Institute of Contemporary Art. "The ICA essentially was my university," he says. Working there opened possibilities; "to explore, to be loose, and to see where it might take you instead of having a careerist attitude." This chance-based approach has allowed Bell Helicopter to drift into experimental film, and to make odd contributions to Channel Four's After Image off-beat art series. In yet another arena The Arts Council of England have just commissioned an experimental CD project of recordings with writers, including J.G. Ballard and Ian Sinclair.

And then there is Bell Helicopter, the band, who play their regular quirky London venue, The Red Eye, on June 23rd. "Plundering" their own history, "using film images, material from theatre projects", in installation-type gigs the duo play Hank Williams songs to the vertiginously spatial sound of a pool game. They are at last considering signing a record deal, with the appropriately named Happy Accident label. "Vocationally immature" never sounded so good.

Dish of the Day opens at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin tomorrow night