About
James Bulley (b.1984) is an artist and composer whose work explores sound, space and the more-than-human world. He is based in London, United Kingdom.
Selected compositions include: Dawns, a work for five players created in collaboration with the artist group non zero one and the National Trust (premiered at dawn, 16 May 2020); Daphne Oram’s Still Point with Shiva Feshareki and the London Contemporary Orchestra (world premiere performance at the BBC Proms, July 2018); Tactus, a touch–sound landscape for the blind and visually impaired (Kaunas Biennial 2015); Living Symphonies (2014–2023), an ecologically composed forest sound installation by Jones/Bulley; Variable 4 (2014–2019), an outdoor spatial sound installation driven by real-time atmospheric conditions.
Bulley has an ongoing collaboration with the experiential art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast, including: Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest (Barbican Curve Gallery, 2022), We Live in an Ocean of Air (Onassis, Athens, 2022), The Tides Within Us (The Reel-Store, Coventry, 2022), The Heal Institute (Museum of the Future, Dubai, 2022), Observations on Being (Coventry City of Culture, 2021); and Distortions in Spacetime (NXT Museum, Amsterdam, 2022). In 2017 Bulley was commissioned by Historic Royal Palaces and design studio Chomko and Rosier to compose the soundscape of Hampton Court Palace, a project whose first stages are already open to the public. Other collaborative works with Chomko and Rosier include the spatial film-sound works City of Trees (City of London, 2021) and Pontefract Giants (Pontefract Castle, 2021).
Sound work for film and virtual reality includes Evolver, directed by Marshmallow Laser Feast (Tribeca Film Festival, 2022): A Thousand Fires directed by Saeed Taji Farouky (2021), a tale of family, fate, and life-cycles in Myanmar's hand-drilled oil fields; Turn of the Screw, a virtual landscape film created with Opera North and Lusion (2020), the score and sound design for Steven Eastwood’s 2017 end-of-life documentary Island; Ayouni by director Yasmin Fedda (2020), a documentary that explores two high-profile figures of the Syrian revolution; Ness directed by Adam Scovell with Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood (2019), and E-LIFE directed by Edward Scott-Clarke, an exploration of the devastating global impact of electronic waste.
Sound work for theatre includes: the score and spatial design for non zero one’s you’ll see me sailing in antarctica (National Theatre, 2012); mountaineering (Roundhouse, 2015), and this is where we got to when we came in (Bush Theatre, 2011). Bulley maintains a longterm collaboration with the artist David Shearing, which includes: The Rising Sun (Romford, 2022), a spatial light-sound installation; The Weather Machine (Leeds, 2015), a scenographic installation composed by atmospheric conditions; and Black Rock (Leeds, 2017), an exploration into the nature of climbing.
Other projects include: Longplayer Day (across London, 2017, 2019), 12-hour events on the Summer Solstice exploring ecological and long-durational thinking (curated with Helen Frosi), and the recent digitisation and open-access publication of Contact: A Journal for Contemporary Music 1971–1990. Bulley is a trustee of Longplayer, a thousand-year long musical composition by Jem Finer.
In 2021, Bulley published two reports (with Dr Özden Şahin) What is practice research? and How can practice research be shared? following a three-year post-doctorate with PRAG-UK and Research England. In 2018 he co-edited a special issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac on curation in sound art, which followed from the Sound Art Curating conference he co-directed at Goldsmiths, University of London (2014). In 2018 Bulley completed a doctorate in Music at Goldsmiths, and following this was a Research Associate and member of the Unit for Sound Practice Research in the Department of Music (2018-2021). He currently a visiting research fellow at the Department of Music at Goldsmiths, where he has established the Lily Greenham Archive, the Hugh Davies Collection, and the Longplayer Archive.
Contact
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