hcmf// shorts 2 (SOLD OUT)

Free event
Advance booking required

 

Our free and action-packed day of wall-to-wall events returns for another year! This year, we’re excited to be hosting hcmf// shorts across three of our favourite Huddersfield venues. hcmf// shorts 2 features live performances of last year’s Zeitgeist Commissions, alongside new music from Nwando Ebizie, Lottie Sadd and Zubin Kanga.

 

Featuring:

 

Zeitgeist Commission: Auclair 

 

Auclair (UK/Rwanda, 1978)
Munganyinka is a Transformer (2020) 6’

Auclair has appeared across a staggering range of projects. Alongside making abstract electro-pop records, she has taken part in the bee-themed opera The Swarm, contributed to Beck’s Song Reader project, and has been part of a live rework of the Afro-Brazilian classic Black Orpheus. She has also explored sound art, drawing it into her composition with works such as Four Points Talk, a piece built from recordings of buildings, and Dawn Chorus Live, an exploration of birdsong with Marcus Coates. Auclair’s Zeitgeist Commission is a strikingly personal work, paying tribute to her mother: ‘Ma’s heartbeat is the first rhythm I heard. Ma’s voice is the first music I have known. Munganyinka is a Transformer is an amplification of her unique cadences, a retelling of a memory, a tribute to her capacity to transform’.

 

Premiered as part of hcmf// 2020‘s online programme, this is the first live performance of Munganyinka is a Transformer.

 

Munganyinka is a Transformer is co-commissioned by the Riot Ensemble and hcmf// in partnership with Zeitgeist Online Gallery

 

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Sound Pioneers: Nwando Ebizie

 

Nwando Ebizie voice / percussion / piano / electronics
Christopher Bangs cello
Sophie Cooper trombone

 

Nwando Ebizie (UK/Nigeria, 1982)
Solve et Coagula (2021) 12’ World Premiere

 

Nwando Ebizie is a multidisciplinary artist and curator whose work converges around immersive installation, performance art personas, experimental theatre, neuroscience, music and African diasporic ritual. Carving out her own particular strand of Afrofuturism, she combines research into the neuroscience of perception, inspired by her own neurodiversity, and an obsession with science fiction with a ritualistic live art practice. Her work combines visceral presentation with speculative forward thinking, grounding imagined worlds.  

 

Ebizie’s new piece, Solve et Coagula, is inspired by the alchemical concept of the same name, which asserts that to build something up, you must first break it down. The piece is a ritual experience – an invitation to experience the psychic phenomena of breaking down the self in order to let go, pass through, remake oneself anew. In writing it, Ebizie was inspired by ‘Biophilic observations, and more-than human time scales.’

 

Produced as part of YSWN’s Sound Pioneers Programme, delivered in partnership with CeReNeM and HISS at the University of Huddersfield, Brighter Sound and hcmf// supported by PRS Foundation’s Open Fund for Organisations

 

Supported by the PRSF Composers Fund and the Jerwood Arts’ Live Work Fund Award 2021

 

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Zubin Kanga

 

Zubin Kanga piano / live electronics

 

Zubin Kanga (Australia, 1982)
Steel on Bone (2021) 5’ World Premiere

Georgia Rodgers (UK, 1985)
Ringinglow (2021) 11’ World Premiere

Laurence Osborn (UK, 1989)
Absorber (2019) 14’

Simon Steen-Andersen (Denmark, 1976)
Pretty Sound (Up and Down) (2008 rev. 2021) 6’ World Premiere

 

Pianist, composer and technologist, Zubin Kanga performs works that extend and transform the piano’s sound using electronics, keyboards and percussive tools. For pianists, moving away from the keys and into the body of the piano feels like touching the bones, flesh and sinew of the instrument. Kanga’s new work, Steel on Bone is inspired by two types of films: medical documentaries and the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa. Steel is the material of both the scalpel and the katana, used for healing and for fatal duels. Using steel implements inside the body of the instrument, he draws out delicate and violent sounds, transforming them using MiMU’s multi-sensor gloves. 

 

Alongside his own piece, Kanga performs a range of work by composers that explores the emotion, and psychology, of the piano, drawing on sine tones, dated synth sounds and digital interfacing on his way to drawing up a new lexicon for his instrument. 

 

Zubin Kanga’s work as composer, performer and researcher is supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. Thanks also to MiMU for their support and advice in the creation on Steel on Bone. 

 

Ringinglow is commissioned by Zubin Kanga with the support of the Hinrichsen Foundation

 

Absorber is commissioned by Zubin Kanga with the support of the RVW Trust

 

Simon Steen-Andersen’s revised version of Pretty Sound (Up and Down), and its new performance materials by Sam Underwood, are commissioned by Zubin Kanga with the support of a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship

 

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Zeitgeist Commission: Heloise Tunstall-Behrans

 

Adam Swayne piano 

 

Heloise Tunstall-Behrens (UK, 1985)
Picea 433 (2020) 5’30” 

 

Heloise Tunstall-Behrens has made sound art, played in indie bands and written experimental operas about the interior workings of beehives. She’s interested in the sounds of community, across all sorts of existences. Her new work Picea 433 pays respect to the Spruce tree, which is the source of pianos’ resonating soundboards. On one of her side quests as an anthropologist, Tunstall-Behrens studied these trees in their native Norway, looking at scientific analysis that pays attention to ‘age and growth patterns’, and the reasons that the wood makes for a good piano. The piece goes into forensic detail of the piano’s life source, thinking about what was given to animate it. As is typical of Tunstall-Behrens, Picea 433 is up close and personal with its ideas, taking natural recordings of the subject; it’s accompanied by ‘media drawn from a recording of Spruce roots, which is played through the piano strings’.

 

Premiered as part of hcmf// 2020‘s online programme, this is the first live performance of Picea 433.

 

Picea 433 is co-commissioned by the Riot Ensemble and hcmf// in partnership with Zeitgeist Online Gallery

 

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Sound Pioneers: Lottie Sadd 

 

Lottie Sadd (UK, 1994)
I’m made up of more space than I actually take up (2021) 12’ World Premiere 

 

Lottie Sadd electronics 

 

Informed by traditional Eastern aesthetics, electronic artist Lottie Sadd centres her work on the act of creation itself. Themes of unfolding, evolving and becoming are integral in her music, as is the concept of place. Through these ideas, her works invite listeners to step outside the traditional object-centric experience – the exchange of artwork between artist and audience – and into the process.

 

Taking its title from Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s novel The Discomfort of Evening, Sadd’s I am made up of more space than I actually take up is a gristling, bloating dissection of the living body. It is composed entirely from recordings of Sadd’s own body, using highly sensitive microphones to reveal the usually-hidden nuances of the internal world that we all possess and inhabit. Using these sounds in both raw and electronically manipulated states, the work illuminates the everyday grotesque in our bodies, and their inherent flux between growth and decay.

 

Produced as part of YSWN’s Sound Pioneers Programme, delivered in partnership with CeReNeM and HISS at the University of Huddersfield, Brighter Sound and hcmf// supported by PRS Foundation’s Open Fund for Organisations

 

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Zeitgeist Commission: Matthew Grouse 

Matthew Grouse (UK, 1996)
Left Right, Left Right (2020) 9’

 

Sam Wilson percussion

 

Using traditional instrumentation, brash electronics and a mash-up of digital media, Matthew Grouse’s work blows up the disquieting nature of augmented daily life. His concert music, which has been performed by a wide range of renowned ensembles, plays with dynamic tension, pairing off tense murmurations with unapologetic bangs of sound. Left Right, Left Right finds its starting point in obsessive behaviours and routines, magnified during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. The primary instrument is percussionist Sam Wilson’s own practice pad; each of his hits trigger deconstructed recordings of the collaborative process, his playing becoming a vehicle to re-tell portions of the conversations behind making the piece.

 

Premiered as part of hcmf// 2020‘s online programme, this is the first live performance of Left Right, Left Right.

 

Left Right, Left Right is co-commissioned by the Riot Ensemble and hcmf// in partnership with Zeitgeist Online Gallery

 

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Simon Emmerson + Irine Røsnes 

 

Simon Emmerson (UK, 1950)
Stringscape (2010) 18’

 

Irine Røsnes violin
Simon Emmerson electronics

 

Composer Simon Emmerson describes Stringscape as a work with three main characters: lyric, drone and texture. Intertwined throughout his piece, they become one, the work taking on the form of a ‘mosaic’ that changes focus throughout, folding melody into minimalism through layers of violin and electronics. Performed by Emmerson alongside Irine Røsnes, the piece retains its contained approach to dynamics, with Røsnes’ solo part scoping it a fixed and finite space. 

 

Commissioned by Darragh Morgan

 

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hcmf// shorts is produced by hcmf//

 

Photo: Lottie Sadd © Emmanuelle Waeckerle