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. 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 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 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 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 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” Read more…
For a long time the oud was disparaged in Iran, even though the Sassanian empire was fundamental to its development centuries ago. One key to its twentieth-century revival was the musician Mansur Nariman. I recently recorded some of his short Read more…