'New Beginning' review 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.

Performing in 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

'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.

'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.

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

Interview on dBs music

A recent interview I took part in with Chris Mackin at dBs music can be found here.