The People at Astralsound
Astralsound is owned and managed by Tony Lloyd who founded the business in 2001.
Tony is an audiophile, and an experienced performer (acoustic & electric rhythm & lead guitars, lead & backing vocals and harmonica, as well as a one-man-band). He has been a member of the Musician's Union since 1981. For a musician with a background in electronics and his own PA system, the PA Hire business was a natural career development, and he began hiring systems and equipment to Cardiff bands in 1991.
In a career in the music industry spanning forty years he has worked with and mixed a large number and wide variety of acts and performance styles. In South Wales he was the sound-engineer for most live music productions at St Donats Arts Centre from 1999 until a cutback in their live events programme in 2005, and for Taplas promotions at the Cardiff Norwegian Church Arts Centre in Cardiff from 1997 until he moved to Gloucestershire in 2000.
Since moving to Gloucestershire he has engineered performances in many primary local venues and events, including the Bacon Theatre, The Centaur, Cheltenham Town Hall, Gloucester Guildhall, the Corn Hall in Cirencester, the Subscription Rooms in Stroud, and all the Painswick Blues events during its four-years at the Painswick Centre.
He also has considerable experience of festivals and similar events, including Art Couture Painswick, Beyond The Border (where he was senior engineer in 2003 & 2004), Chalford Feast, Cheltenham Folk Festival, Cheltenham Literature Festival, the Hawkwood Seed Festival, Nailsworth Festival, Oakstock, and Stroud Festival.
Keen on keeping his understanding up-to-date, he has attended many trade shows and seminars in the last twenty years, including d&b audiotechnik workshops covering Electroacoustics, Line Arrays, Remote Networking (using d&b R1 remote control software), and their Product Workshop.
Nikhil (‘Niks’) Patel started working for Astralsound in April 2014, and managed our production on the Painswick Centre stage at Art Couture Painswick in July that year. A keen and able multi-instrument musician (his proficiencies include guitar, sitar and didjeridu), he played his first gig at the age of eleven. He has been involved in event production ever since then, and is now an experienced and very capable sound engineer.
With his considerable recording experience at Ragged Moon, Niks is taking an active interest in the development of our recording business. Constantly involved in a wide variety of musical projects, he also likes to keep up with technology and other developments in the music industry: he too has attended the the d&b Audiotechnik Electroacoustics and Product Workshops, and is a member of the Music Managers Forum.
Other regular crew members include technicians Dan Giles and James Styler, as well as other occasional freelance technicians and engineers.
Dan
On sabbatical in
the Cameron Highlands.
This section of the website also includes
What some of our clients and contacts have said about us in recent years.
Any news about what we have been doing that isn't covered on our Facebook or Twitter pages.
A diary of public events we will be involved with over the next few months.
The various venues, festivals and other places we have worked (and, in many cases, still work).
The bands, performers and miscellaneous hirers we have engineered for or hired to in recent years.
Some photos* of us - and various performers - that some of our friends have taken and allowed us to use.
*Note that the photographs page may load slowly, particularly on low-bandwidth connections.