Exhibition – 'Of the Oak' at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Following its installation over the Summer at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Of the Oak by Marshmallow Laser Feast for which I wrote the score and composed the spatial sound design is being installed at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where it will be open to the public from December 2025 until March 2026. YSP is a beautiful place with an incredible collection of sculptures in its landscape – you could spend days there.

To book tickets and find out more information, please see here.

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Of the Oak at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Photograph: Patrick Fry

Event – 'Ayouni' at the London Palestine Film Festival, ICA

‘Ayouni’, an extraordinary film about the human cost of the disappeared in Syria during the Assad regime, by Director Yasmin Fedda, for which I did the sound design and wrote the score, is coming to London, with a screening at the London Palestine Film Festival on Saturday 22 November (tickets here). I’d love to see you there - it’s a rare chance to see the film in London.

You can find out more about the film in Peter Bradshaw’s review in the Guardian here.

Talk – Future Forest at Hooke Park, Architectural Association

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I’m very much looking forward to talking at Hooke Park this Friday for the Future Forest. It’s a great array of speakers encompassing scientists, foresters, architects, curators and artists. Information on tickets (including travel to the Dorset location are available below).

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FUTURE FOREST

7th Nov  | Hooke Park | 11.30 - 17.30 

Future Forest is a one-day multidisciplinary event set within the 140 hectare working woodland at Hooke Park, the Architectural Association’s rural campus in Dorset. Bringing together voices from forestry, ecology, art and architecture, the day explores how creative and scientific practices can co-evolve in the age of climate emergency. 

The morning grounds us in the technical and ecological — with talks from forestry and silviculture experts. This is centred around the future of forestry and the AA Wood Lab’s 100 Year Forest Project - a framework for the long-term management of the working forest at Hooke Park. In the afternoon, the conversation expands to explore how artistic and speculative practices can shape our understanding of environmental and ecological futures.

Tickets for the event are free, tickets including cooked lunch are £7

For anyone coming from London there’s also an option to book a free shuttle bus from Dorchester South and back.

More info here: 

www.aaschool.ac.uk/publicprogramme/whatson/future-forest

Direct link to book tickets here: 

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/future-forest-tickets-1794615135179?aff=oddtdtcreator

Film – Lost for Words at Sheffield Doc Fest

Lost for Words, a feature documentary directed by Hannah Papacek Harper will be shown at Sheffield International Documentary Festival this June. The film features the forest-based sound artwork Living Symphonies by Jones/Bulley.

More about Lost for Words here.

More about Living Symphonies here.

Reviews – 'New Beginning' at the Grand Theatre, Luxembourg

“Entering the Grand Théâtre Studio these past few days was like taking a break, opening a parenthesis in space and time. It was responding to an invitation to participate in a return to the most distant sources of our universe, to take the time to relive what emerged and developed from nothing. An invitation to understand that this has always been our story. And to spark an awareness that can only change our view of our threatened, already compromised world, perhaps leading us to finally react and act.”

Stéphane Gilbart, Luxemburger Wort
23 May 2025

https://www.wort.lu/kultur/les-jeunes-nous-racontent-comment-repenser-notre-lien-a-l-univers/68246560.html

“The result is a strong and intense theatre - conceived and designed by David Shearing - with essential images that question our place and the meaning of our lives. The music and the soundtrack (by James Bulley) contribute to this in large measure, skillfully combining recorded texts and musical vibrations. […]
Culture opens the debate, highlights the important subjects for today's society and tomorrow's... Nothing is more jubilant than an artistically accomplished show that knows how to denounce and raise awareness, while involving the younger generations to the highest degree.
[…]
All dressed in black, as if in mourning, very dignified and grave, these young people are our whistleblowers. Their conscience awakens ours. It's up to us to act. The message is received 10 out of 10.”

Alexandre Pham, Classique News
19 May 2025

https://www.classiquenews.com/critique-spectacle-musical-luxembourg-grand-theatre-le-17-mai-2025-new-beginning-variable-matter-creation/

More information about Variable Matter’s New Beginning can be found here.

News – Longplayer article on the Quietus

An article in the Quietus yesterday about Longplayer:

What becomes clear as we talk is that Longplayer is not a passive work but rather a challenge, a sort of quest in time and space. In Zoroastrian culture, they keep Fire Temples where the flames have not gone out for hundreds of years. Successive generations must tend to them and in doing so the culture survives. In Japan, the Ise Shrine is torn down periodically and rebuilt. This is an act of seeming madness to the capitalist utilitarian worldview, but genius as it forces people to retain the knowledge of how to build wooden temples as well as embodying ideas of transience and the cyclical nature of life. It has done so for at least 1000 years. Longplayer possesses a similar spirit, “There is this social side, with people taking responsibility for looking after it,” Finer says. “It goes back to the Hackney Empire in a way. The embodiment of tradition and responsibility, and how it replenishes itself.”  Future custodians will be keeping something alive then that is both tangible and intangible – a piece of music, or music itself, an idea, a way of life, a lifeform, or a form of communion. 

Darran Anderson, The Quietus
3 April 2025

To support and hear Longplayer you can purchase the app available here.

For more about the project please visit the Longplayer website.

Longplayer Installation at Trinity Buoy Wharf
Photograph: James Whitaker

Performance – Longplayer Live at the Roundhouse

I’m hugely looking forward to performing as part of Longplayer Live at the Roundhouse, London on 5 April 2025. The performance of 1000 minutes of Longplayer’s score is 0720–midnight and celebrates the 25th birthday of Longplayer.

You can find tickets and further information here, and a lot more about Longplayer itself here.

“Spend one unique day with Longplayer, live at the Roundhouse.

A 1000-year-long piece of music, Longplayer has been playing continuously since the first moments of this millennium and is composed to continue until the final moments of the next.

On 5th April 2025, Longplayer will return to the Roundhouse for a performance of the 1000-minute section of its score, as written for that particular time and date, from 7.20am to midnight.

Longplayer’s duration means that, given the unknowability of the future, its score was written so as to be independent of any one technology. For most of its life it has been performed by computers, while its caretakers, the Longplayer Trust, explore alternatives which have included the use of the human voice, vinyl records, code, a beam of light and, as first heard at the Roundhouse in 2009, live performance by musicians.

Akin to what Longplayer’s composer, Jem Finer, calls a ‘vast, Bronze Age synthesiser’, Longplayer Live is performed on a large orchestral instrument comprised of 234 singing bowls, arranged in six concentric rings and played by shifts of six to twelve people at any one time, reading from a graphic score.

Audiences can spend as long as they wish listening and watching, and are invited to move around or find a space to rest, with the possibility to leave and return to the venue throughout the performance’s duration.

Longplayer hopes to enrich intergenerational conversations about how we can imagine the future. For this 25th anniversary performance, 18 young people from the Roundhouse’s creative community will join the orchestra of musicians and artists: a meeting of present and future custodians who will shape Longplayer’s next 25 years.

Longplayer Live is generously supported by the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust and Urban Space Management. Thanks is also due to Universal Works for their generosity in supporting, designing and making the performers’ clothing.”

Longplayer Live. Photograph: © Jem Finer

Longplayer Live. Photograph: © Bruce Atherton and Jana Chiellino

Exhibition – Lily Greenham at Kunsthalle Wien: 'Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960-1991'

Lily Greenham’s computing works, first exhibited as part of the Badischer Kunstverein exhibition in Karlsruhe (March–May 2024) that I co-curated with Andrew Walsh-Lister, Anja Casser and Alex Balgiu, are now travelling to Vienna, where they will be exhibited in the excellent travelling show ‘Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960-1991.’ The exhibition runs in Vienna from 2025-02-28 to 2025-05-25 and is well worth a visit.

More information about the exhibition and how to visit can be found here.

Event – 'Still the Hours' at Hampton Court Palace

Very pleased to announce that tickets are now on sale for Still the Hours, a new piece I’ve been working on over the last six months with the excellent writer and director Claire Doherty. It’s an extraordinary and beautifully wrought piece, that encompasses an in depth exploration of binaural sound recording techniques, spatial site-specific sound and promenade art.

The piece runs from 19 March to Sunday 30 March 2025 and takes place after dark at Hampton Court Palace, London.

Tickets are very limited, and available here.

Still The Hours is an audio-led journey through Hampton Court Palace after hours. Conceived from the stories of women who lived or worked in the palace from 1541 to 1925, the promenade experience blends binaural audio with site-specific spatial sound across the palace’s rooms.

Produced in the centenary year of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Still The Hours is inspired by the novel’s exploration of time as both linear and circular. It is said that though the palace’s astronomical clock has functioned to mark the passage of time over 500 years, on certain occasions the clock has paused or stuttered, as if within the palace gates, time is unreliable.

Featuring the voices of Kathryn Hunter (Black Doves, Harry Potter, Poor Things), Miranda Richardson (Good Omens, The Hours), and Ayesha Dharker (The Father), alongside an ensemble cast of established and emerging actors, students from the Rose Youth Theatre and staff at Hampton Court Palace, Still The Hours listens in to women’s lives at the palace, their struggles for survival, their triumphs and losses over five centuries.

Event – 'Breathing with the Forest' at Compton Verney

Marshmallow Laser Feast’s Breathing with the Forest, for which I created the spatial sound score has just opened at Compton Verney in Warwickshire. The exhibition runs until April 2025, and you can find tickets and visiting information here. More about the piece here.

‘Breathing with the Forest’ at Oxo Exhibition, 2024 (Image courtesy: Marshmallow Laser Feast)

Review - 'Poetics of Soil: Fly Agaric I' in the Observer

“The most spectacular work in the show concerns this secret labour. The artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast take us on a psychedelic film journey underground to reveal the astonishing role of fungi roots in breaking down and recycling dead plant and animal matter to enrich the soil. This flowing network twinkles like a highway by night, glowing with miraculous colours and sending up the life force into a mushroom above, which in turns sheds its spores out across the air – altering the world’s weather. Merlin Sheldrake’s commentary – about the wild intimacies of our coexistence with soil, how being is always being with, and so on – is pure poetry. And the film continues without cease in the most perfect ecological loop.”

— Laura Cumming, The Observer (26 January 2025)

More about ‘Poetics of Soil: Fly Agaric I’ here.
The full article in the Observer can be found here.

Marshmallow Laser Feast’s ‘astonishing’ psychedelic fungi film Fly Agaric 1-Poetics of Soil screening at Somerset House Photograph: David Parry/PA

Curation – An Individual Note: Works by Daphne Oram, Contrechamps, Ansermet, Geneva

I’m really pleased to be co-curating (with the inimitable Ian Stonehouse) a concert of works by the composer Daphne Oram, as part of the Contrechamps series at Auditorium Ansermet, Geneva on 6 February 2025. Oram’s tape works will be spatialised over a D&B Soundscape system within the Auditorium Ansermet. Further information on the Contrechamps website here.

Event – 'Time Loops' at the Science Museum, London: 6 Feburary 2025

Over the last few months, I’ve been working with Ian Stonehouse and Jake Tyler on building copies of Hugh Davies’ Shozygs for a forthcoming piece by Gavin Bryars. Gavin’s piece will premier at the Science Museum, London on 6 February 2025 alongside new pieces performed with Icebreaker Ensemble by the excellent Shiva Feshareki and Sarah Angliss.

Tickets and further information about the project here.

Figure 6 : Shozyg I (1968) © Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library

Event - 'Poetics of Soil: Fly Agaric I' at forthcoming exhibition 'SOIL: The World at Our Feet' at Somerset House, London

'Poetics of Soil: Fly Agaric I' by Marshmallow Laser Feast, for which I have composed the 12.1 soundscape and composition will premiere as part of the forthcoming exhibition ‘SOIL: The World at Our Feet,’ at Somerset House, London at the end of January.

You can find out more about the work here.

Event – 'Evolver' UK premiere at Oxford University

Evolver the collective virtual reality experience by Marshmallow Laser Feast, which I directed the sound and created the sound design for is premiering in the UK at Oxford University in October 2024. The piece is an ambisonic sound composition and features music from Meredith Monk, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Howard Skempton and Jonny Greenwood as well as a voiceover by Cate Blanchett written by the poet Daisy Lafarge.

Evolver drops audiences deep inside the landscape of the body, following the flow of oxygen through our branching ecosystem, to a single ‘breathing’ cell. Through this transcendental narrative, it becomes clear that breath not only sparks life, but also connects us to the natural world through the cycle of respiration.”

For tickets and visiting information for the Oxford University exhibition please see here.

For further information about Evolver please see here.

Event – 'Breathing With The Forest' – Emergence Magazine: Online Launch

Breathing With The Forest, an immersive work that I worked on with Marshmallow Laser Feast exploring the interrelation of beings and focused around a Ceiba Pentandra tree in the Araras district of the Colombian Amazon has just launched as an online experience with Emergence Magazine, with a new voiceover by the wonderful British Actor, Colin Salmon.

You can access the piece here.

At our Shifting Landscapes exhibition in London last December, we premiered the large-scale immersive experience “Breathing with the Forest” from celebrated art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast. Conceived as an open-eyed meditation, the installation invited people to feel into the ways we are intimately linked with forests through the greater respiration of the Earth. While not always tangible, this connection is ever-present—trees inhale our breath and use sunlight to exhale oxygen. In this eternal cycle of reciprocity, the world flows into us and we flow into the world.

Over the last few months we’ve been working on creating an online adaptation of this boundary-pushing installation that draws you into an exchange with the Amazon rainforest. In this new interactive multimedia experience, narrated by acclaimed British actor Colin Salmon, explore layers of molecular exchange and synchronize the rhythm of your own breath with the cycles and currents of air and water flowing between the trees and mycelial networks. Within a soundscape of birdsong, moving water, and insect chirr, open your senses to the invisible continuities between the forest, the ecosystem beneath it, and the wider living world.

(Emergence Magazine)

News – 'Maria' by Nina Danino - interview on Lux

Over the last few years, I’ve had the pleasure on working on the film Maria by director Nina Danino. Part of the process has involved working with a number of incredible musicians to improvise and respond in recording sessions for the soundscore the underlies the piece. LUX have recently published an interview by Jo Blair with Nina where some of this gets discussed:

THE MYTH AND THE CULT OF MARIA CALLAS An Interview with Nina Danino

Event – Longplayer Long Afternoon with Ansuman Biswas, Sunday 9 June, 9-5

On Sunday 9th June, Longplayer invites you to spend a Long Afternoon with Ansuman Biswas at London’s only lighthouse. This special event will take the form of a particularly long afternoon, with Ansuman offering a durational performance from 9am-5pm.

Escaping the 9 to 5 is a work of imagination. It’s hard to see what’s there until you imagine it not. Longplayer is measuring out a thousand years. One thousandth of a year is 8.76 hours. One millionth of the length of Longplayer is 8.76 hours. That’s roughly 9am to 5pm. 

On June 9th, rather than taking the Sunday off work, Ansuman Biswas will start playing. He will dip into the stream of Longplayer for one working day, clocking on at 9am and clocking off at 5.46pm. Ansuman invites you to come and join him and Longplayer for as long as you like.

Longplayer Trust Chair Ella Finer and Producer Imogen Free will also offer a reflective conversation at the Armadillo, CLT Sound Pavilion at Trinity Buoy Wharf - as part for the London Festival of Architecture - from 4-5pm, and a young person’s facilitator will be present in the ground floor stairwell of the Lighthouse 12-3.30pm. 

 Link for further information & to book tickets: 

https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/longplayer-trust/a-very-long-afternoon-with-longplayer-and-ansuman-biswas-performing-9-to-5/e-mbaxbv

Symposium: Tune in to Reality! at the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, 2/3 May 2024

Coming up on 2/3 May 2024 is the symposium Tune in to Reality! exploring the life and work of the artist Lily Greenham. Part of the exhibition Lily Greenham: An Art of Living that I have been fortunate enough to co-curate with Anja Casser, Andrew Walsh-Lister and Alex Balgiu, the symposium is going to feature a number of performance responses to Greenham’s work, as well as an incredible array of talks exploring different parts of Greenham’s practice and life. The event, co-hosted by Bricks from the Kiln and the Kunsteverein, also marks the launch of a new publication of Tendentious Neo-Semantics, a record by Greenham originally released by Edition Hoffman. Full information below, the event is free to access.

Tune in to Reality! A symposium on the life and work of Lily Greenham at the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany. 2/3 May 2024.

The cover of Tendentious Neo-Semantics (1970) by Lily Greenham

Talk – Lucerne University: Practice Research Keynote

On the 2nd of May at Lucerne University, Switzerland at the School of Music, I’ll be giving a keynote on practice research as part of an excellent program that explores artistic and art education research. Details of the symposium, which is free to attend, can be found here.

Photograph of toaster as part of The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites. © Daniel Alexander 2009.