A Million Things
Composer, Musician and Sound Designer.
A Million Things aka Thomas 'Soup' Campbell is an Australian Composer, Musician, Sound Designer, Interactive Sculpture Artist, Record Producer and Sound Engineer.
Thomas has collaborated with companies including Melbourne Recital Centre, Back To Back Theatre and A Blanck Canvas.
He has performed at venues and festivals including Meredith Music Festival (Vic), The Big Day Out (Vic), Antilliaanse (NL), Fusion Festival (DE), Incubate (NL), The Forum (Mel) and The Palais Theatre (Mel)
As a sound engineer Thomas has toured internationally on multiple occasions. Thomas has delivered events at venues including Margarete Court Arena, Melbourne Recital Centre, Max Watts and Sugar Mountain Festival.
Currently Thomas is exploring building new and intuitive systems for interactive music performance such as light, movement and capacitive sensing devices that integrate with music, light and vision softerware platforms such as Ableton Live and Resolume Arena.
Outcomes include, sound responses, visual projections, LED light responses and animatronic movement.
Projects
Lunar New Year-Composition + Sound Design
A Jet-ski water dragon puppet presentataion by A Blanck Canvas.
Giant Water Dragon puppets performed choreagraphed movements to a musical score on the Yarra river in front of Crown Casino.
The musical score was played through the Crown southbank outdoor sound system.
Melodius - Artist, Composition
Presented at Melbourne Recital Centre's Music Play festival.
3 days of interactive musical stairs. Participants trigger a musical keyboard on the MRC grand stair case. The laser trigger system is a bespoke electronics system integrated with digital music software designed and built by a million things
World Expo Falcon-Composition + Sound Design
A work by A Blanck Canvas Presented for David Atkins Enterprises, Featured at World Expo In Dubai.
The falcon is 4 metres tall with a wing span of 10 metres.
Lil Robots - Composition
Presented by A Blanck Canvas for Glen Eira City Council
Robots are here to stay, but their limited creativity might leave them stuck in a repetitive loop. Watch these adorable lil' bots interact, bump, redirect, and start anew in a post-apocalyptic world. Get ready for a cyberpunk spectacle, complete with dazzling lights and mechanical melodies.
Enter a dystopian future as we wonder what happens when robots run out of jobs? Experience the creepy, the cute, and everything in between!
Radial by Back To Back Theatre - Composition + Sound Design
RADIAL is a collaborative film-making process resulting in a portrait of a community in motion.
Filmed using a circular camera track, RADIAL is an accessible model for working with either community or professional performers, created via a process of live improvisation. RADIAL can capture a continuous sequence of action or dance, involving up to 30 participants at once, combined with intimate depictions of single individuals in space.
https://backtobacktheatre.com/project/radial/
The Golden Guardian - Composition + Sound Design
The Golden Guardian is an iteration of the Guardian a creature reminiscent of a giant lion. The Guardian is approximately 10 metres long and 4 metres high and was originally built for the popular White Night Melbourne festival in 2019.
I
The Guardian - Sound Design
The Guardian is an imposing creature reminiscent of a giant lion. The Guardian is approximately 10 metres long and 4 metres high and was originally built for the popular White Night Melbourne festival in 2019.
Giant, crystal-like shards cover the creature’s head and body which glow and change colour as it moves through its environment. It’s graceful mane flows around its statuesque face. Like a creature from a dream,
The Fractured Ensemble - Artist + Sound Designer
Southbank Boulevard - Melbourne Recital Centre
The Fractured Ensemble represents hope, providing an opportunity for public engagement in the revival of music in Melbourne. The centrepiece of this illuminated sonic atmosphere is a large pyre of redundant musical instruments, intricately lit with thousands of colour changing lights.
Participants can discover interactive foot pedals , when activated light emanates from the tactile sensors up into the sculpture detailing individual instrument forms, the instruments glow, pulse and chase in dynamic sequences complimented by a synchronised sound design and musical score.
Light Creatures - Sound Design
Light Creatures at Adelaide Zoo as part of Illuminate Adelaide, brought to you with SA Power Networks, is where enormous animatronic Giant Pandas roll playfully across the Central Lawns, where a gigantic dreamtime skink sits high from atop the hill, where giraffes are so tall their heads graze the stars and an underwater wonderland wriggles and writhes with jellyfish and sways with vivid, colour-changing coral.
The Messenger- Sound Design
The Messenger is a giant humanoid puppet, built and performed for White Night Melbourne festival . More than five meters high and with wings that span six meters, The Messenger is an awe-inspiring, futuristic archangel that transcends nationality and religion to spread its message of love and compassion, highlighting that our similarities are more important than our differences.
Atrium - Artist + Sound Design
Atrium is an experiential, interactive art installation. The work invites participants to explore an intimate connection between light and sound by somatically engaging with the sculpture. Atrium has a unique arrangement of plants that when touched create dynamic feedback.
Atrium's focus is floating, evoking cloud like imageary that embodies the transient and spiritual connection between the imagination and our tactile reality.
Light Chimes - Sound Design
The Light Chimes are a flexible, large-scale interactive music installation with an adaptable design to suit any location. The Chimes are played through bespoke touch boards of 10 notes arranged as a map of the chimes. Touching a chime on the touch board produces an instant light and sound response in the installation. The Light Chimes can be played by crowds to produce a sonic cloud of notes (like wind chimes), or played by a musician.
The Garden of the Galapagos - Sound Design in collaboration with Spoonbill
The Garden of the Galapagos is an outdoor theatre piece originally funded by a collaboration including Barcham Projects and Graeme Base with assistance from the Melbourne Zoo. It is a puppet show based on award-winning children’s book, “The Waterhole” written and illustrated by one of the world’s leading creators of picture books; Graeme Base.
Metamorphosis - Sound Design
Metamorphosis is a large-scale interactive sound, light, and sculpture installation. Activated by touch, each cocoon is pitched to a specific note and has a suite of unique sound effects. Your interaction triggers a colour change in the cocoon, and helps generate a live, harmonic soundscape.
Minor Disturbance - Sound Design
Inspired by the Great Barrier Reef, Minor Disturbance blends the beauty & sonic surprises of our oceans with the plastic pollution that threatens them.
Combining 5 x 3.7m tall sculptures with 40 illuminated, musical chimes the work is an immersive & educational environment. Interactive light & sound showcases a dizzying array of rare underwater recordings made by lead artist Beth McMahon’s father – a retired acoustic physicist.
Bloom - Sound Design
Bloom is an immersive installation of large inflatable gunmuts and gunmut flowers. Designed for presentation during the day as well as at night, Bloom is a relaxing, tacticle and playful landscape for all ages. Crawl inside a gumnut or nestle into the flower spikes and listen to the medatitive soundscape featuring native bush sounds.
Zero Point - Music Composition
Zero Point is a 6 part Animation series produced for ABC Iview.
A young Indigenous superhero working for the Government uncovers a vast conspiracy behind the Australian post-human program and its connection with the mysterious death of his father. After thwarting a terrorist threat at an Australia Day celebration, Kyle (Zero-Point) begins to uncover evidence of a government conspiracy regarding a classified post-human program and the origin of super-powers in Australia. Then, while confronting the ultra-nationalist post-human terrorist known as Samson, Kyle discovers more about the mysterious death of his father, the original Zero-Point.
Morphology - Sound Design
Sculpting with neon wires. Morphology is a tactile, interactive public art activation designed for community members with all abilities.
A rainbow of interactive neon wire sculptures that morph throughout the night, the Morphology sculptures change with each new interaction, only your imagination is the limit. Designed to be touched, and adaptable to different indoor or outdoor spaces, each glow wire can be twisted, bent, and shaped into unique images.
The Cassowaries - Composition
The Cassowaries were featured in Elictric Kingdom a project by A Blanck Canvas for City of Melbourne at Birrarung Marr
Electric Kingdom in Melbourne spanned eight nights in September 2023 and attracted tens of thousands of visitors who experienced A Blanck Canvas’ eight magnificent giant illuminated animal installations, world-class roving performers, and stunning lighting displays.
Audiences enjoyed the walk-through event centred around a collection of giant, illuminated animal installations. Electric Kingdom (EK) “scales up” nature to gigantic proportions, allowing audiences to view and appreciate animals from a new perspective.
Journey - Lighting Design + Projections + Sculptural Artist
Presented by Macedon Ranges Shire Council for Autumn Festival Journey included interactive sculpture, visual projections and imaginatively augmented locally recorded soundscapes.The work was presented over 6 weeks in collaboraion with Kirri Buchler and Tashara Roberts.
The Guardian - Composition + Sound Design
The Guardian is an imposing creature reminiscent of a giant lion. The Guardian is approximately 10 metres long and 4 metres high and was originally built for the popular White Night Melbourne festival in 2019.
Giant, crystal-like shards cover the creature’s head and body which glow and change colour as it moves through its environment. It’s graceful mane flows around its statuesque face. Like a creature from a dream,
Entity by Back To Back Theatre - Composition + Sound Design
Taking the form of an intimate installation this fifteen-minute side show performance is an amalgam of séance, party trick, alien encounter and horror movie. ENTITY is a sweet spot double act between human and ‘the other’.
An experience for just a handful of audience members at a time, ENTITY is a hypnotic engagement with an autonomous life form in a constant state of change.
https://backtobacktheatre.com/project/entity/
The Fractured Ensemble - Artist + Composition + Sound Designer
Southbank Boulevard - Melbourne Recital Centre
The Fractured Ensemble represents hope, providing an opportunity for public engagement in the revival of music in Melbourne. The centrepiece of this illuminated sonic atmosphere is a large pyre of redundant musical instruments, intricately lit with thousands of colour changing lights.
Participants can discover interactive foot pedals , when activated light emanates from the tactile sensors up into the sculpture detailing individual instrument forms, the instruments glow, pulse and chase in dynamic sequences complimented by a synchronised sound design and musical score.
Light Creatures - Composition + Sound Design
Light Creatures at Adelaide Zoo as part of Illuminate Adelaide, brought to you with SA Power Networks, is where enormous animatronic Giant Pandas roll playfully across the Central Lawns, where a gigantic dreamtime skink sits high from atop the hill, where giraffes are so tall their heads graze the stars and an underwater wonderland wriggles and writhes with jellyfish and sways with vivid, colour-changing coral.
Light Chimes - Composition + Sound Design
The Light Chimes are a flexible, large-scale interactive music installation with an adaptable design to suit any location. The Chimes are played through bespoke touch boards of 10 notes arranged as a map of the chimes. Touching a chime on the touch board produces an instant light and sound response in the installation. The Light Chimes can be played by crowds to produce a sonic cloud of notes (like wind chimes), or played by a musician.
The Messenger- Composition + Sound Design
The Messenger is a giant humanoid puppet, built and performed for White Night Melbourne festival . More than five meters high and with wings that span six meters, The Messenger is an awe-inspiring, futuristic archangel that transcends nationality and religion to spread its message of love and compassion, highlighting that our similarities are more important than our differences.
Atrium - Sculpture Artist + Composition + Sound Design
Atrium is an experiential, interactive art installation. The work invites participants to explore an intimate connection between light and sound by somatically engaging with the sculpture. Atrium has a unique arrangement of plants that when touched create dynamic feedback.
Atrium's focus is floating, evoking cloud like imageary that embodies the transient and spiritual connection between the imagination and our tactile reality.
The Garden of the Galapagos - Composition + Sound Design in collaboration with Spoonbill
The Garden of the Galapagos is an outdoor theatre piece originally funded by a collaboration including Barcham Projects and Graeme Base with assistance from the Melbourne Zoo. It is a puppet show based on award-winning children’s book, “The Waterhole” written and illustrated by one of the world’s leading creators of picture books; Graeme Base.
Metamorphosis - Composition + Sound Design
Metamorphosis is a large-scale interactive sound, light, and sculpture installation. Activated by touch, each cocoon is pitched to a specific note and has a suite of unique sound effects. Your interaction triggers a colour change in the cocoon, and helps generate a live, harmonic soundscape.
Minor Disturbance - Composition + Sound Design
Inspired by the Great Barrier Reef, Minor Disturbance blends the beauty & sonic surprises of our oceans with the plastic pollution that threatens them.
Combining 5 x 3.7m tall sculptures with 40 illuminated, musical chimes the work is an immersive & educational environment. Interactive light & sound showcases a dizzying array of rare underwater recordings made by lead artist Beth McMahon’s father – a retired acoustic physicist.
Bloom - Composition + Sound Design
Bloom is an immersive installation of large inflatable gunmuts and gunmut flowers. Designed for presentation during the day as well as at night, Bloom is a relaxing, tacticle and playful landscape for all ages. Crawl inside a gumnut or nestle into the flower spikes and listen to the medatitive soundscape featuring native bush sounds.
Morphology - Composition + Sound Design
Sculpting with neon wires. Morphology is a tactile, interactive public art activation designed for community members with all abilities.
A rainbow of interactive neon wire sculptures that morph throughout the night, the Morphology sculptures change with each new interaction, only your imagination is the limit. Designed to be touched, and adaptable to different indoor or outdoor spaces, each glow wire can be twisted, bent, and shaped into unique images.
Zero Point - Composition
Zero Point is a 6 part Animation series produced for ABC Iview.
A young Indigenous superhero working for the Government uncovers a vast conspiracy behind the Australian post-human program and its connection with the mysterious death of his father. After thwarting a terrorist threat at an Australia Day celebration, Kyle (Zero-Point) begins to uncover evidence of a government conspiracy regarding a classified post-human program and the origin of super-powers in Australia. Then, while confronting the ultra-nationalist post-human terrorist known as Samson, Kyle discovers more about the mysterious death of his father, the original Zero-Point.
Music
Production
Dicography
Title: Baby Don't Leave Me
Artist: A Million Things
Info: Single
https://amillionthingsmusic.bandcamp.com/track/baby-dont-leave-me
Title: Don't Say Goodbye
Artist: A Million Things
Info: Single
https://amillionthingsmusic.bandcamp.com/track/dont-say-goodbye
Title: Dreamer
Artist: A Million Things
Info: Single
https://amillionthingsmusic.bandcamp.com/track/dreamer
Title: I Can't Stand This
Artist: A Million Things
Info: 2 track EP
https://amillionthingsmusic.bandcamp.com/album/i-cant-stand-this
Title: Don't Leave Me This Way
Artist: A Million Things
Info: Single
https://amillionthingsmusic.bandcamp.com/track/dont-leave-me-this-way
Title: I Did You Wrong
Artist: A Million Things
Info: 3 track EP
https://amillionthingsmusic.bandcamp.com/album/i-did-you-wrong
Title: Itchy Techtonics
Artist: Editor
Info: 3 Track EP
https://soupmix.bandcamp.com/album/itchy-techtonics
Title: Inter-Terrestrial
Artist: Editor
Info: 2 Track EP
https://soupmix.bandcamp.com/album/inter-terrestrial
Title: Tropical Bass Station
Artist: Cumbia Cosmonauts
Info: Full Length Album
https://thecumbiacosmonauts.bandcamp.com/album/tropical-bass-station
Title: Tribale Amazonico
Artist: Cumbia Cosmonauts
Info: Full Length Album
https://thecumbiacosmonauts.bandcamp.com/album/tribal-amazonico-ep
Title: Dream State
Artist: A Million Things
Info: Single
https://amillionthingsmusic.bandcamp.com/track/dream-state
Title: Someday I'm Going To Be Happy
Artist: A Million Things
Info: 3 track EP
https://amillionthingsmusic.bandcamp.com/track/someday-im-going-to-be-happy
Title: MISO
Artist: MISO
Info: Full Length Album
https://listentomiso.bandcamp.com/releases
Title: Cumbia Sampuesana EP
Artist: Cumbia Cosmonauts
Info: 2 track EP
https://thecumbiacosmonauts.bandcamp.com/album/cumbia-sampuesana-ep
Title: Interview Techniques
Artist: Editor
Info: Full Length Album
https://omeletterecords.com/release/interview_techniques_0
Title: Vostok EP
Artist: Cumbia Cosmonauts
Info: 4 Track EP
https://thecumbiacosmonauts.bandcamp.com/album/vostok-1-ep
Title: 500% Cumbia
EP Artist: Cumbia Cosmonauts
Info: 7 Track EP
https://thecumbiacosmonauts.bandcamp.com/album/500-cumbia-mixtape-2
Title: ‘Secrets’ Remix
Artist: Electric Opera
Info: Remix Single
http://soundcloud.com/electricopera
Title: ‘Cumbia Theme’ Remix
Artist: Congo Tardis No. 1
Info: Remix Single
https://soundcloud.com/cumbiacosmonauts/cumbia-theme-cumbia-cosmonauts
Title: ‘Hearts Don’t Bend’ Remix
Artist: Ronit Info:
Remix Single
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej3X_ZLu3oQ
Performance
National and International performances include:
Antillianse Festival, Belgium
Creation of Peace, Russia
Incubate, Netherlands
Winterthurer Music Festival, Switzerland
Meredith Music Festival, VIC
Big Day Out, VIC
Woodford Folk Festival, QLD
Melbourne International Arts Festival, VIC
MONA FOMA, TAS
Australasian World Music Expo, VIC
The Falls Festival, VIC
Wide Open Spaces, Alice Springs NT
Folk Rhythm and Life, Wangarrata.
Melbourne Music Week,
Darwin Festival, NT.
Rainbow Serpent Festival, VIC.
Adelaide Festival, SA.
Solar Eclipse Festival, QLD
Melbourne Fringe Festival, VIC
Australian Writers Festival, Darwin NT
The Hills Are Alive Festival, VIC
St Kilda Festival, VIC
Shine On Festival, VIC
Sprung Hip Hop Festival, QLD
Melbourne Fringe Festival, VIC
Spiegel Tent, Melbourne, VIC
Bellingen Global Carnival, QLD
Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, VIC
Pete’s Ridge, NSW
The Forum, VIC
Federation Square, VIC
The Metro, Sydney
The HIFI Bar, VIC
International supports include:
The Gotan Project, FRANCE – The Forum, Melbourne
Thievery Corporation, USA – The Enmore Theatre Sydney and The Palace, Melbourne
Dj Krush, JAPAN - The Esplanade de Hotel, Melbourne
Lyrics Born, USA – The Esplanade Hotel, Melbourne
Omar Souleyman, SYRIA - The Northcote Social Club, Melbourne
Munchi and Dj Rupture, GERMANY - Incubate Festival, Netherlands
Makossa&Megablast, GERMANY - Club Planetarium, Vienna
DubFX, Australia – The HIFI Bar, Brisbane and Melbourne
Elzi, USA – The Esplanade Hotel, Melbourne
Shabaz Palace, USA – Alhambra, Brisbane
Ill Gates, USA – Roxanne Parlour, Melbourne
Proppa Tingz, USA – Manifest Festival, Queensland
Heyoka, USA - Miss Libertines, Melbourne
Melbourne Pitch Black, NZ – Corner Hotel, Melbourne
Kora, NZ – Corner Hotel, Melbourne
Sola Rosa, NZ – The Evelyn Hotel, Melbourne
Sound Engineering
Thomas is a Sound Engineer at many venues including Melbourne Recital Centre, Back To Back Theatre, and The North Melbourne Meat Market
Festival and Venues mixing have included
Margarete Court Arena - VIC
Sugar Mountain - VIC
Rainbow Serpent Festival - VIC
St Kilda Festival - VIC
Federation Square - VIC
Thebarton Theatre - SA
The Pleasure Garden - VIC
The HiFi Bar -VIC
Howler - VIC