This June, we’ll be hosting renowned improvisers Australian Art Orchestra in Huddersfield as they deliver the very first overseas edition of the Creative Music Intensive. Led by renowned trumpeter Peter Knight, the AAO is currently in its third decade of activity, and the last eight years have been marked in particular by this annual residency – in which they invite artists to come and make music with them in the remote southern Australian state of Tasmania.
This is the first time the AAO have packed up the Creative Music Intensive and brought it over to the UK. In this new, bitesize format, members of the ensemble will spend three days between Tuesday 14 June and Thursday 16 June working with artists in Huddersfield, workshopping new music pieces collaboratively. On the final day of the residency, the artists will perform these new works in an hcmf// concert.
In partnership with the AAO’s Peter Knight, we ran an open call for UK-based artists interested in taking place in the Creative Music Intensive. We’re delighted to announce that Megan Steinberg, Alex Ives, Bell Lungs and Seth Bennett will join us in Huddersfield this June to take part in the project. Find out more about the artists, and their work, below.
Megan Steinberg
An experimental composer and turntablist, Megan Steinberg’s music hints at her origin story as a jazz guitarist, bringing specks of improvisation into an otherwise defined soundworld. Using chance procedures and found audio – whether digital or physical – her music plays on expectation and induction. She tweaks as we follow; her low-flying loop piece Podie #2AI uses turntable clicks like punctuation without precedent, creating chance interruptions across a disquietingly muffled piano sample.
Megan’s work is informed by an open-ended approach to source material. Throughout her career as a composer, she’s embraced acoustic instruments, analogue turntables and a wide array of humble inanimate objects. Her compositions betray a subversive approach to her instruments and how they can be arranged; in Before the World Ends, she washes out raw field recordings in shimmering synthetic drone, while The Snow Falling Faintly Through the Universe sees her explore busy, bristling arrangements at immensely low volumes.
Megan is a dedicated advocate for accessibility and representation in new music, and is interested in putting these ideals at the start of her creative process. Her work is inspired by video games, architecture, feminism, environmentalism and mental health.
Visit Megan’s website here.
Alex Ives
For the past five years, Alex Ives has been making music under the name of Specimens, creating ambient music that is simultaneously delicate and overdriven. Alex has been honing his craft as a composer in real time; with his first two records, Sculptures and In the Dust of Idols, he developed as a producer, presenting his pieces with acoustics so airtight it felt as if they were being observed in museum cabinets. From there, he’s experimented with his songwriting, putting his own saxophone improvisations into the lounge jazz record Cafe Songs before releasing this year’s collaborative collection Intersections, in which he reshapes his sound with contributions from artists such as Peter Broderick and Midori Hirano.
Alex is a keen collaborator. As one of the founders of First Terrace Recordings, an experimental music label based in London, he facilitates artists working across noise, drone and choral music, closing the gap on genres as he goes. He also works for Ninja Tunes and Big Dada.
Alex is one of our Fielding Talent artists, and you can read more about his work in our feature from last year.
Bell Lungs
Bell Lungs is the occasional alter-ego of Ceylan Hay, a vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and composer who can constantly be found deliberating over boundaries, and whether she should step over them. She is a collector of new ideas, embracing a smorgasbord of scenes, genres and sounds that range from harsh noise, doom metal, electro-pop and traditional music. The more she makes music, the more she finds herself swinging across its spectrum, mixing abstraction with melody, groundedness with psychedelia, folk history with freak folk future. An instrument hoarder, she is constantly testing out her new finds for extended techniques, and claims to have a go at ‘bowing everything in sight’.
Ceylan’s music as Bell Lungs is pluralistic, and has yet to settle into one concrete form. Her folk song ‘Seabirds Calling’ puts her front and center through voice and acoustic guitar, drawing us into stories of asylum and pollution. In her live performance, she delivers improvised drone sets with a disarming spontaneity in which sixteen minutes of electronic tinkering can eventually settle up as a pop song.
Visit Ceylan’s website here.
Seth Bennett
A double bassist based in Dundee, Seth Bennett came up through punk music, spending his twenties playing in a roster of different bands. On the side, he was improvising, exploring speculative sound through the lens of jazz music, as well as in more formless, functionless set-ups. As a self-taught musician with no formal training, Seth’s development as a performer and composer came largely through seeking out any collaborative opportunity he could find, be it working with English folk singers, contemporary dancers or jazz bands. Over the years, he’s also amassed experience as a band leader, writing primarily for a free improvising trio while attempting to fully unlock the hidden potentials of his instrument.
Seth primarily explores his instrument through improvisation, effectively treating the double bass as the vessel through which he relates to new spaces and collaborators. His solo piece I am improvising in a room, different to the one you are in now, was created to make the room it was performed in ‘sing’ to him and his audience, his playing becoming as ritualistic as exercise, as if he was powering the space around him.
Visit Seth’s website here.
This project is supported by the Australian Government and Creative Victoria as part of the UK/Australia Season 2021-2022
