Since 2024 I have been working with visual arts and design students on field recordings and soundscapes. The first formal project was with the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arte (NABA) in Milan, in November. Our activities ranged from listening exercises following scores by Pauline Oliveros, soundwalking, field recording, and then Read more…
During 2024 I co-developed a project with improviser and composer Melisa Yıldırım. It was an experiment in collaborative composition, combining my field recordings, audio processing and some of my instruments – oud, saxophone – with her instrument, the Anatolian kamancha. Our interest was in how listening together and working with Read more…
While composing these tracks I was asking myself where we can find hope today, living in such a tortured world.
Recent civil disobedience movements have employed tactics and gestures inspired by water and light – movements which have been subject to unrelenting suppression.
“Musician Beckles Willson (Orientalism and Musical Mission) scrupulously traces the history of the oud—a short-necked, fretless stringed musical instrument—from its first written mention in ancient Persia to the present day. An instrument long associated with bereavement (an early fable holds that a grieving father constructed it from his deceased son’s Read more…
I am thrilled to have my composition Teatime! presented as the first track on NMC’s CD release In These Exceptional Times. In November 2021 NMC launched The Big Lockdown Music Survey, an Arts Council England National Lottery Funded project which invited music creators from across England to submit recordings of music Read more…
Composing music with water, and for water, in a time of exteme climate crisis. This has occupied me in multiple projects in the last year. Playing with the Life of the Sea is a project I began early in 2023. I was deeply grateful that Tom Kieckhefer and Ocean Conservation Research Read more…
Participation and Playfulness in Museums: Engaging Visitors in Climate Action
As of 1 December 2022 I am Professor of Intercultural Performing Arts at Codarts University of the Arts in Rotterdam, and the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts in Leiden. This is a fantastic opportunity to draw together the multiple strands of my hybrid creative practice, and work with a Read more…
What would it sound like if a jukebox, lost at the bottom of a river, tried to make music again? This piece was the result of a collaboration with Distractfold’s Daniel Brew and Alice Purton. “The juke box that drowned” combines my field recordings of aquatic environments with broken melodies Read more…