'Still Point' article in FACT

Still Point at St. John's Smith Square, June 2016. Photograph: Alice the Camera

"The success of the performance at St John’s Smith Square is palpable, and Feshareki and Bulley’s achievement is huge, but whether ‘Still Point’ becomes canonical is anyone’s guess. The material is certainly there – the duo have been meticulous in their documentation, collating notation, Oram’s and Davies’ writing and orchestral instruction onto a single score – but it remains singular, without clear successors. The muffled, hypnagogic records of Indignant Senility or The Caretaker might be the closest in actual sound, but certainly not in spirit. Both have incorporated repurposed and anaesthetised classical passages in their music – Wagner for the former, myriad Romantic piano pieces for the latter – but these are used for textural and nostalgic effect. Oram’s score, on the other hand, was entirely original, and her specific manipulations tied into a loftier artistic ethos.

But the mere recognition of the piece feels just as crucial. Oram must have felt intense frustration in 1949, knowing that she had produced a radical work. It predated both the concrète proto-sampling of Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (of whom Oram was vaguely aware at the time) and the purer electronics of Stockhausen and the Cologne School (of whom she was not) in its use of sampling, recording and electronic manipulation. In Britain, where Benjamin Britten and Vaughan Williams represented the apex of experimentation, Oram’s leaps of ambition were especially unprecedented."

The full article can be read here

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Safe Mode #1

An excerpt from a recording session I did recently for Sam Rivere's Safe Mode features here on a poetry mixtape curated by Harry Burke. It will also be played as part of an exhibition at Salts, Basel in Switzerland.

Tom Richards' Mini-Oramics on BBC World at One

Tom Richards' Mini-Oramics project was featured on BBC Radio 4's World at One yesterday, with Jo Thomas and I discussing our experiences of composing with it.

You can hear the piece in full here

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'The Original Turntablist' - Daphne Oram by Shiva Feshareki

Daphne Oram, courtesy of Oram Trust and Fred Wood

"I then noticed a small, hand written piece of paper written by Oram which stated “Still Point: For Double Orchestra, Microphones and Three pre-recorded 78 RPM discs (1949)” and I was stunned to realise this piece was for turntables and orchestra! It is likely that had it been performed in 1949, it would have transformed the development of electroacoustic music as we know it today.

At the moment, it is a stand-alone piece, that doesn’t fit into any known medium of the time. For me, it was particularly stunning, as my compositional practice is centred around concert music for turntables and orchestra, and I have always seen the turntable as a classical instrument. All of a sudden, the way I had developed my turntabling practice for the past decade, made sense to me. It all felt very surreal and destined."

Read the full article here

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Jones/Bulley Music Hackspace talk

Tonight, Daniel Jones and I will be talking about our recent collaborative work and a future project at Music Hackspace, Limewharf, Vyner Street, London.

More details here.

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