Pythagoras’ Toolkit Premieres

Just back from a brilliant week or so in Montreal conducting the premiere of my collaborative puppetry-music work made with Rachel Warr (Dotted Line Theatre). It was fantastic working with Rachel, the amazing musicians of Ensemble Paramirabo, and ridiculously talented puppeteers Gilbert Taylor and Edie Edmundson. The reception from both kids and adults was fantastic, and it was really great to be part of the Festival de Casteliers. Great to see lots of weird and wonderful puppetry in other shows too! Fingers crossed this production leads to further opportunities to do the piece. I’m hugely proud of what Rachel and I have created together and grateful to Jeff Stonehouse and all at Ensemble Paramirabo for believing in it and supporting the project.

Photos by Brenden Friesen

Keys on new Dan Mar-Molinero album

My mate and colleague Dan Mar-Molinero’s bigband album ‘Taproot’ has just been released. I played keys on all 5 tracks on the album, which was recorded remotely during the pandemic lockdowns. Dan is a super talented saxophonist and composer. It was great to learn and play his excellent tunes and particularly loved ‘Our Place’, probably as I feature as soloist in the second half!

Some mega musicians feature on the album. Give it a listen!

LOVE LETTERS [WITH AI]

I’m excited to have received some funding from the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton to lead an interdisciplinary project exploring artificial intelligence language generation of song texts. The ultimate outcome will be a new song cycle for British soul sensation Hannah Williams and a superstar quartet of Riot Ensemble players, which we’ll premiere in Southampton and London in July 2023!! More soon!

Hannah Williams

Pythagoras’ Toolkit production (finally) happening!

I’ve spent the past few months busily revising and reworking, with my creative collaborator Rachel Warr of Dotted Line Theatre, the score of Pythagoras’ Toolkit (La Boîte à outils de Pythagore in French!) for ensemble and puppeteer. We are working towards the inaugural production of the show with the amazing Ensemble Paramirabo, which will take place in early March in Montreal. I’ve just sent off the production score and parts!

Rachel is brilliant to work with. Super talented of course but also so focused on ensuring the narrative of the show is totally honed. We started working on the piece back in 2019 and have had lots of (mostly pandemic induced) setbacks along the way so it’s really great to be finally heading towards showing this piece to the world.

Details of shows on my gigs page. We are filming and recording it too.

Narrow Sea

Been looking at lots of recent vocal based work for my teaching at University of Southampton. Came across this piece by Caroline Shaw, Narrow Sea. It’s really fantastic; moving, beautiful and odd. Brilliant performances by Dawn Upshaw and co too. I’m officially inspired to make a song cycle…

New sax quartet

I’ve been working on a new piece for sax quartet and electronics, which features the PICO Wavetable Oscillator synth Blake Troise made for me back in 2020. The piece is called Avalanche. More on this soon! Excited to try out a new synth Blake has recently made for me too!

Moon Landing (Version 2.0 Longgyi)

Earlier this year I was involved in a fantastic collaborative exhibition by Phantom Limb and Noise in Yangon – ‘A Sound Journey to Freedom’. I worked with the fantastic artist Moe Myat May Zarchi (aka P.O.E.M) on a new film Moon Landing (Version 2.0 Longgyi, which features archive sound, recordings that Moe had made at protests in Myanmar and music. The film was exhibited at God’s House Tower in Southampton earlier this year, and you can watch it below and find out more about the project and other artists here.

Beacons

Was great to receive in the post a beautiful new publication from Sam Belinfante, ‘On the Circulation of Blood’, which documents his Folkestone Triennial project. My score for Beacons is included, as are scores by a group of amazing composers including Neil Luck, Josephine Stephenson, Elaine Mitchener, Sarah Dacey and Bernhard Schimpelsberger. Studio recordings of the scores have been released bandcamp too.

The ‘Beacons’ score

You can find out more and buy the Extended Score and Album here:

https://www.coursdepoetique.org/on-the-circulation-of-blood/?mc_cid=cd145394f9&mc_eid=086e7d3a09

End of a chapter

I’ve just come back from a big summer break with the family, had an awesome time (pic of a lovely Italian vineyard below!). Just before I went away I finished my 3-year stint as Head of Music at the University of Southampton, handing over to my colleague Prof. Tom Irvine. It’s been quite a ride managing things through the pandemic and with other challenges. Really glad I did it but also pleased to return to having more space for creative projects. Lots on the way so watch this space!