Performance – Longplayer Live at the Roundhouse

I’m hugely looking forward to performing as part of Longplayer Live at the Roundhouse, London on 5 April 2025. The performance of 1000 minutes of Longplayer’s score is 0720–midnight and celebrates the 25th birthday of Longplayer.

You can find tickets and further information here, and a lot more about Longplayer itself here.

“Spend one unique day with Longplayer, live at the Roundhouse.

A 1000-year-long piece of music, Longplayer has been playing continuously since the first moments of this millennium and is composed to continue until the final moments of the next.

On 5th April 2025, Longplayer will return to the Roundhouse for a performance of the 1000-minute section of its score, as written for that particular time and date, from 7.20am to midnight.

Longplayer’s duration means that, given the unknowability of the future, its score was written so as to be independent of any one technology. For most of its life it has been performed by computers, while its caretakers, the Longplayer Trust, explore alternatives which have included the use of the human voice, vinyl records, code, a beam of light and, as first heard at the Roundhouse in 2009, live performance by musicians.

Akin to what Longplayer’s composer, Jem Finer, calls a ‘vast, Bronze Age synthesiser’, Longplayer Live is performed on a large orchestral instrument comprised of 234 singing bowls, arranged in six concentric rings and played by shifts of six to twelve people at any one time, reading from a graphic score.

Audiences can spend as long as they wish listening and watching, and are invited to move around or find a space to rest, with the possibility to leave and return to the venue throughout the performance’s duration.

Longplayer hopes to enrich intergenerational conversations about how we can imagine the future. For this 25th anniversary performance, 18 young people from the Roundhouse’s creative community will join the orchestra of musicians and artists: a meeting of present and future custodians who will shape Longplayer’s next 25 years.

Longplayer Live is generously supported by the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust and Urban Space Management. Thanks is also due to Universal Works for their generosity in supporting, designing and making the performers’ clothing.”

Longplayer Live. Photograph: © Jem Finer

Longplayer Live. Photograph: © Bruce Atherton and Jana Chiellino

Event – 'Still the Hours' at Hampton Court Palace

Very pleased to announce that tickets are now on sale for Still the Hours, a new piece I’ve been working on over the last six months with the excellent writer and director Claire Doherty. It’s an extraordinary and beautifully wrought piece, that encompasses an in depth exploration of binaural sound recording techniques, spatial site-specific sound and promenade art.

The piece runs from 19 March to Sunday 30 March 2025 and takes place after dark at Hampton Court Palace, London.

Tickets are very limited, and available here.

Still The Hours is an audio-led journey through Hampton Court Palace after hours. Conceived from the stories of women who lived or worked in the palace from 1541 to 1925, the promenade experience blends binaural audio with site-specific spatial sound across the palace’s rooms.

Produced in the centenary year of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Still The Hours is inspired by the novel’s exploration of time as both linear and circular. It is said that though the palace’s astronomical clock has functioned to mark the passage of time over 500 years, on certain occasions the clock has paused or stuttered, as if within the palace gates, time is unreliable.

Featuring the voices of Kathryn Hunter (Black Doves, Harry Potter, Poor Things), Miranda Richardson (Good Omens, The Hours), and Ayesha Dharker (The Father), alongside an ensemble cast of established and emerging actors, students from the Rose Youth Theatre and staff at Hampton Court Palace, Still The Hours listens in to women’s lives at the palace, their struggles for survival, their triumphs and losses over five centuries.

Event – 'Evolver' UK premiere at Oxford University

Evolver the collective virtual reality experience by Marshmallow Laser Feast, which I directed the sound and created the sound design for is premiering in the UK at Oxford University in October 2024. The piece is an ambisonic sound composition and features music from Meredith Monk, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Howard Skempton and Jonny Greenwood as well as a voiceover by Cate Blanchett written by the poet Daisy Lafarge.

Evolver drops audiences deep inside the landscape of the body, following the flow of oxygen through our branching ecosystem, to a single ‘breathing’ cell. Through this transcendental narrative, it becomes clear that breath not only sparks life, but also connects us to the natural world through the cycle of respiration.”

For tickets and visiting information for the Oxford University exhibition please see here.

For further information about Evolver please see here.

News – 'Maria' by Nina Danino - interview on Lux

Over the last few years, I’ve had the pleasure on working on the film Maria by director Nina Danino. Part of the process has involved working with a number of incredible musicians to improvise and respond in recording sessions for the soundscore the underlies the piece. LUX have recently published an interview by Jo Blair with Nina where some of this gets discussed:

THE MYTH AND THE CULT OF MARIA CALLAS An Interview with Nina Danino

Symposium: Tune in to Reality! at the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, 2/3 May 2024

Coming up on 2/3 May 2024 is the symposium Tune in to Reality! exploring the life and work of the artist Lily Greenham. Part of the exhibition Lily Greenham: An Art of Living that I have been fortunate enough to co-curate with Anja Casser, Andrew Walsh-Lister and Alex Balgiu, the symposium is going to feature a number of performance responses to Greenham’s work, as well as an incredible array of talks exploring different parts of Greenham’s practice and life. The event, co-hosted by Bricks from the Kiln and the Kunsteverein, also marks the launch of a new publication of Tendentious Neo-Semantics, a record by Greenham originally released by Edition Hoffman. Full information below, the event is free to access.

Tune in to Reality! A symposium on the life and work of Lily Greenham at the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany. 2/3 May 2024.

The cover of Tendentious Neo-Semantics (1970) by Lily Greenham

Interview – radio interview with SWR Germany on 'Lily Greenham: An Art of Living' at the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe

An interview on the German radio station SWR discussing the recently opened exhibition ‘Lily Greenham: An Art of Living’ at the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe.

Talk: Enhancing searchability – archiving practice research

I’ll be a panellist at the following discussion surrounding the sharing and preservation of practice research, hosted by the UK Reproducibility Network on Monday 15 November 2021. Link here: https://www.ukrn.org/event/enhancing-searchability/

Here is an outline of what the workshop will be about:

This workshop will deal with some of the challenges and issues involved with documenting and archiving practice research. Some of the questions this panel will aim to address include:

- How can we ensure that practice research is fully searchable and visible in the public domain?

- Are university repositories able to host the research findings of practice research projects run within, or in collaboration with, universities in the UK?

- What kinds of practices can we design and share that allow for the most effective and efficient means of sharing the research findings of work in this area?

- How do we consider the ways in which disciplinary differences warrant different considerations in devising systems (technological or otherwise) for archiving and disseminating practice research?

Panellists

Chair: Professor Mark d’Inverno, Goldsmiths, University of London

Professor Oriana Baddeley, Former Dead of Research, University of the Arts London

Dr Lauren Redhead, Senion Lecturer in Music, Goldsmiths, University of London

Professor Bambo Syinka, Professor of Story, Bath Spa University

Dr Scott McLaughlin, Lecturer in Composition and Music Technology, Leeds University

Dr James Bulley, artist and composer, co-author of Bulley-Şahin reports on practice research for Research England (2021)

BBC Radio 6 Music - Laura Misch Mix

Some recent experiments of mine with Geofóns, Hydrophones and contact microphones can be heard in this 6Music mix from Laura Misch. Listen here.

Event: Pontefract Giants – Pontefract Castle, Yorkshire, 25–26 September 2021

The weekend of the Autumn Equinox (25-26 September 2021) will see the opening of a forthcoming film-sound installation, Pontefract Giants, created with Matthew Rosier and Daisy Lafarge at Pontefract Castle, Pontefract, West Yorkshire:

Pontefract Giants will transform the castle into an immersive landscape where the ancestors of past residents of Pontefract will greet you and transport you on an expansive and poetic journey through time from the first inhabitants of the area some 300,000 years ago.

Featuring projections of current residents representing the towns ancestors, an immersive soundscape and musical score, this light and sound show will allow you to appreciate the site and history of our town like never before.

(Pontefract Castle website)

More information and tickets here.

'A Thousand Fires' by Saeed Taji Farouky

I’ve recently finished the sound design for a new film, A Thousand Fires — by director Saeed Taji Farouky. It is a visceral, temporal portrayal of life in the Magway region of Myanmar — I have loved working with Saeed on it.

Here is a short excerpt from an article written by The Film Stage about the film following a viewing at the 2021 Locarno Film Festival, where it won the Marco Zucchi Award.

What makes A Thousand Fires stand out is Farouky’s ability to yoke the drama to the substance around which their lives gravitate. Underpinning the film is a Herzogian interest in the way oil drilling works, warts and all; time and again we watch Thein Shwe operate his makeshift derrick, scavenging for crude sixteen meters underground. In Farouky’s hands, the act itself acquires a certain nobility, a sacred beauty that’s amplified by Fatima Dunn’s score and Maxence Ciekawy and James Bulley’s sound design. Watching Thein Shwe pound the ground with his pole, I wondered if what I was looking at wasn’t a man digging, but plugging cables to a beating heart chugging somewhere below the Earth’s surface. Forsaking any vague, abstract statements on “the industry,” A Thousand Fires stays small, focusing instead on the connection between oil and the human body—the tactile, painful efforts to dig up the remnants of millions of years of sedimented histories. It’s a beguiling, epic journey.

More information will be available on the public release of A Thousand Fires soon.

'George III: The Man Behind the Myth' exhibition soundtrack at Kew Palace

Kew Palace, London

A recent composition project that has just seen the light of day is a four room spatial soundtrack for the top floors of the Kew Palace exhibition George III: The Mind Behind the Myth. The composition is based on George Frideric Handel’s Keyboard suite in D minor ( HWV 437), which was a favourite of King George III. The work for Kew Palace unfolds across four rooms, with the audience progressing through the composition as they move through the exhibition.

The exhibition overall is a reconsideration of the story of George III’s mental illness from a contemporary standpoint, and asks how much attitudes to mental health have changed over the last two centuries – or more importantly, how much they haven’t.

Tickets are available online here and the exhibition runs from 10th June to 26 September 2021.
Thank you to Simon Hendry and Gregory White for their work on the sound system design and installation of this piece. Further thanks to KEF UK.

'George III: The Man Behind the Myth' exhibition at Kew Palace

'Unseen Being' interview on Soho Radio with Kinda Studios

A recent interview with Robyn Landau and Katehrine Templar Lewis at Kinda Studios for their Soho Radio show Unseen Being, where we discuss sound, science, our bodies and space, also featuring the brilliant Dr. Yewande Pearse. Listen here.

A soundscape to celebrate the launch of BFTK#4

I’ve put together a soundscape to celebrate the launch of Bricks from the Kiln #4. It’s now streaming on Wax Radio.

Bricks from the Kiln #4 Launch
Featuring: A soundscape / broadcast / playlist, compiled by BFTK and mixed by artist and composer James Bulley, to (belatedly) accompany / announce the release of Bricks from the Kiln #4: On Translation, Transmission & Transposition.

Fifty-four minutes of sounds, voices, readings and compositions from Hildegard of Bingen, Ursula K. Le Guin and Caroline Bergvall; through green hues of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Pink Floyd BBC sessions and Vangelis; to James Joyce and Hazel Felman in oral / aural translation, a 1960s Joy dishwashing liquid television commercial and Slapp Happy with Faust as a backing band.

BFTK#4 is edited by Natalie Ferris, Bryony Quinn, Matthew Stuart and Andrew Walsh-Lister, and published as event / publication, after programming in London, Chicago & Edinburgh. Printed in a green of ‘perpetual unrest’, it features contributions from: Helen Marten, Sophie Collins, Don Mee Choi, Kate Briggs, Phil Baber, Joyce Dixon, Florian Roithmayr, Jen Calleja, J.R. Carpenter, Edgar Wind, Rebecca Collins, Naomi Pearce, Karen Di Franco, James Bulley, Saki Mafundikwa, Natalie Ferris, Matthew Stuart, James Langdon, Bryony Quinn, Peter Nencini, Sophie Seita, Caroline Bergvall, Seb McLauchlan and Maria Fusco.

BFTK#4 is available to order at: www.b-f-t-k.info

Interview: dBs music

A recent interview with Chris Mackin at dBs music can be found here.