Conflux Coldwell
Michael C Coldwell is an artist and musician from Leeds UK, releasing ambient electronica and eerie noise under the alias Conflux Coldwell (or CC) since 2013. This moniker brings together his various experimental audio and visual works; exploring hauntology, technology, memory and obsolescence, through field recording, the sampling of old media and abuse of broken and vintage equipment. By day, he works as a photographer and media lecturer at the University of Leeds, UK.
Coldwell is also part of the Urban Exploration collective, and has a long history in improvised electronic music dating back to 2005, when he started DJing and performing live electro and dub, collaborating with many artists and releasing music under several different aliases over the years. In 2017 Coldwell released AM on Crooked Acres Records - an album made entirely using shortwave radio. The work received critical support from Electronic Sound magazine, A Closer Listen, Analogue Trash, and The Wire, who described it as “everything hauntology could and should be in 2017.”
Coldwell's obsession with the haunted and the forgotten extends to his exploratory photography and filmmaking, where he often documents abandoned and overlooked landscapes in photo books, videos and installations. These different strands all come together on The Phantomatic Coast, which also serves as an atmospheric soundtrack to his recent landscape film Views from Sunk Island (2021). This short documentary examines the disappearing coast of Yorkshire, the threat of climate change and coastal erosion to the area, and the strange war remains gradually vanishing beneath the sea.
