news

Charlie Sdraulig has just sent me the video of his duo with Weston Olencki, people making sounds, performing lots and lots for us to do a couple of times in February. The performances were at CCRMA at Stanford and Center for New Music in San Francisco. This is the second time the piece has been performed,…

I made a post over Christmas that begins to think think through the #[unassigned] project that I worked on from 2000-2009. I wanted to go back over my notebooks, sketches, scores and recordings to piece together how I made the different versions. So I started with #051000, which is the first proper version of #[unassigned] and…

Jack Sheen interviewed me on Monday in advance of the ddmmyy performance of a new piece, reassigned #1, in his series on 21 April. I was a little groggy with a cold, but it doesn’t [sniffs] come across in the text [splutters]. You can read the interview here

Here is the final piece from Decontamination 6 at RNCM last week. Distractfold are joined by The House of Bedlam and RNCM Electric Experimental Ensemble for the first performance of we gradually have more things to do and fewer things to say. As Larry Goves noted, it’s a bit like bingo. Thanks to Larry and Mauricio…

This is the video of the first performance of all voices are heard using pitches. I’ve copied the video of the original performance with word lists as a comparison. There are some striking differences in the way that the phrases coalesce.

And here’s the performance by Rocío Bolaños and Linda Jankowska from Distractfold at Decontamination 6 at the RNCM on 8 March. More information in this post.

Here’s the video of Nicholas Peters and Ruben Zilberstein performing my new piece in which one thing depends on another for the first time at 840 in London last week. I’ve written about this and Distractfold’s version a couple of days later in this post.

Raphael Smarzoch has just made a programme for SWR2 Now Music on verbal notation to which I contributed. It includes lots of scores – interesting to hear them read out loud – and excerpts from realisations. I’m one of the commentators, along with Joseph Kudirka, Nomi Epstein, Pauline Oliveros and Ross Parfitt, and there’s a…

I’ve got a few performances coming up over the next few weeks, including some new pieces. Last week Weston Olencki and Charlie Sdraulig’s new duo people making sounds played lots and lots for us to do a couple of times in California. In March in which one thing depends on another is being played by Ruben Zilberstein and Alex…

Luke Nickel has spent the past couple of months making a realisation of my piece overlay (with transience). The piece asks the performer to make a specified number of sounds throughout a 15-minute duration. The performer makes many additional recordings over a period of months, each time attempting to match what was played the first time, but without…

Here’s a video of UMUU performing assigned #9 in Helsinki last week (on my birthday!). This is one of the older versions of #[unassigned] I’ve made available for re-performance in my assigned series. Originally this was made for ensemble recherche and performed at their 20th birthday celebrations in Freiburg in 2005. The performance last week uses my original dictaphones, which are…

Stefan Drees has written a short portrait article about my recent work in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. The article includes views on work by me, Luke Bedford and Stephen Daverson as part of the issue’s focus on music in the UK. I’m pleased to see it focuses on my recent investigation of group behaviours, and…

Now it’s been broadcast on Hear and Now, I am sharing the video of the performance of my new piece like you and like you from last week’s Cut and Splice festival at Cafe Oto. The festival was curated by Joanna Bailie and co-produced by Sound and Music and BBC Radio 3 (and there’s a great…

Ryoko Akama has just released a new cd, senu hima, on melange edition containing a new piece I wrote for her alongside work by Sarah Hughes, Jürg Frey and Antoine Beuger. My piece, overlay (with transience), is specifically for a recorded realisation. It asks the performer to make a specified number of sounds throughout a 15-minute duration. The performer…

I’ve finally finished a new piece for Plus Minus for this year’s Cut and Splice at Cafe Oto. It’s a trio for Mark Knoop, Vicky Wright and Alice Purton with sampling keyboards and many objects. The piece – like you and like you – explores imitation and decision making in a slightly different way to some of…

KNM Berlin are playing a new piece in my series things to do in Cottbus next month. The rather wordily titled we do what you say and say what to do is similar to last year’s you say what to do, but the players also give each other instructions in addition to those supplied by the assistants. I’m…

My new CD on Another Timbre arrived  in the post today. I have lots of them and if you would like to buy one then perhaps click the link below, or do exactly the same thing at the Another Timbre website. Now there’s a decision for you.

One of my new pieces, all voices are heard, was performed at Goldsmiths in London on 6 June as part of the Music and/as Process event. I was very pleased to be joined by Richard Glover, John Lely, Luke Nickel, Tim Parkinson, Mira Benjamin and Scott McLaughlin, although we didn’t quite manage to point the camera…

Dominic Lash interviewed me a couple of weeks ago for the Another Timbre website in advance of the release of the CD I made with Apartment House in April. It’s a new assigned piece, and Dom and I discussed how it was made  and its relationship with what I am doing at the moment. The CD…

Mark Knoop and Serge Vuille performed you say what to do at Festival Mixtur in Barcelona last month. There are some lovely photos by Aga Miley on the website. Looks like everyone was having fun.

I decided to start this list on 17 October 2014 while driving home after hearing Rie Nakajima play at Cafe Kino in Bristol. Originally I was building it on a separate site but have decided to move it here as it makes more sense. For some time I’d been formulating a view that there has been…

Here is the interview with Laurence Crane that we recorded in June 2007. Laurence preferred to do a spoken interview, and after struggling to find a time to meet we ended up talking on the phone. The interview came at a point where he was starting to work with ‘timbral’ material and we discuss that…

After a few recent conversations, I’ve decided to make my scores available for free download. I’ve made a page with all the links and will gradually add pieces over the next few weeks. They are released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, so the scores can’t be changed (except of course where this is required by…

I’m gradually making available online the 14 interviews I conducted a few years ago that were originally published in the Ashgate book. I’m beginning with Christian Wolff, and will be uploading one each week for the next few months. Ashgate are very kindly allowing me to reprint the interviews in this way, and are offering…

The score of my piece what you must do, rather than must not do (2012) has been included in the 2014 Experimental Music Yearbook. Founded in 2009 by Casey Anderson and John P. Hastings, The Experimental Music Yearbook is a repository for composers, performers, and the public to glean the methods and styles of various artists working…

I’ve uploaded the recording of the first performance of so many territories by Plus Minus at City University in April. The piece draws on some of the techniques used by the Oulipo to create permutations of elements, specifically mutually orthogonal latin squares. Territories are areas ‘in which one has responsibility with regard to a particular type of…

I’m meeting up with Paul Whitty next week in a field in Devon to make some pieces. Paul has been developing an ongoing series of pieces in a field near Netherexe, working with other musicians. We’ve been trying to get down there for about a year, and have finally managed to find a possible time…

Will Montgomery has organised a project around a new location composite which will take place in March in London. I’m making a new version for poets Amy Cutler and Andrew Spragg. They will write the descriptions that will be compiled into a score for musicians Kostis Kilymis, Sarah Hughes and Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga to perform on Thursday 6 March.…

Bath Spa are part of the new AHRC South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership, which will fund 200 PhDs across the arts and humanities at eight universities in the region over a five year period. This is a really great opportunity if you’re considering a composition PhD, with co-supervision between composers at different Partnership universities…

Tim Parkinson has written an article about British-based composers Matteo Fargion, Laurence Crane, Bryn Harrison, John Lely, Markus Trunk and me for the French magazine Revue & Corrigee. Tim writes about the article: I’’m going to describe the work of six composers in Britain at the moment whose music I like. To me it’s just that:…