The hcmf// shorts programme returns for 2025, showcasing new works and world-class, bite-sized performances which often turn out to be festival highlights. Celebrating renowned figures in experimental music alongside innovative early-career artists, this year’s programme features no fewer than 7 UK premieres and 4 world premieres across 14 performances.
These free-to-attend concerts, spread across venues as varied as the performances themselves, comprise a full day at the festival. The 2025 edition of this day-long programme takes place on Monday 24 November.
Full concert details will be available in due course – until then, explore a summary of the day’s proceedings below:
12pm | Christopher Bowers-Broadbent
A solo performance from renowned British organist and composer Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, celebrating seminal works by Arvo Pärt, Judith Weir, Kevin Volans and Philip Glass.
12.50pm | Natalie Hyacinth: After The End of The World (installation version)
The world premiere of an immersive installation by Natalie Hyacinth, exploring the intersection of climate emergency, nature loss and racial justice and posing the question: how does it feel to live at the edge of the world and how can we collectively rebuild it?
1.30pm | Heiner Goebbels + Mingo Rajandi
The first in a series of duo performances representing ‘artistic first encounters’ between Heiner Goebbels – one of the great innovators in the world of theatre, music and performance art – and three exceptional composer/instrumentalists. Here, Goebbels is joined by Mingo Rajandi – a composer and double bassist who boldly seeks common ground between refined compositions and improvisations.
2.30pm | Darragh Morgan
Irish violinist Darragh Morgan showcases the versatility of his instruments with works (by Shiva Feshareki, Irene Buckley and Frank Lyons) from his recent record For Violin and Electronics II (Diatribe Records) alongside fellow violinist and composer Angharad Davies’ Pentref y Feiolinau/Village of Violins.
3.30pm | Tomoko Hojo
Based on personal experiences during the Asian Hate Movement in NYC, Hojo’s Whispered Screaming serves as a form of micro-resistance against the increasing outbursts of rage, violence, and hate spreading across the world
4.30pm | Sarah Hennies: Fleas
A semi-improvised piece for solo vibraphone with an ensemble of bell ringers, playing bells sourced from thrift stores – not exactly made from trash, but music made with instruments or toys or souvenirs that someone didn’t want any more.
5.20pm | Frazer Merrick: Musical Mudlarking
An homage to the Rover Colne in Colchester – a soundscape of live bubbling mud percolates beneath a collage of riverside field recordings and up-cycled instruments, all born from the mud. This is the sound of a river and those who call it home.
6.10pm | Heiner Goebbels + Arnas Mikalkėnas
In the second of three duo performances, Goebbels is joined by percussionist, pianist, composer and improviser Arnas Mikalkėnas – a sound-oriented creator who is not afraid of (and on the contrary, strives to transcend) musical frameworks, finding his own relationship with music.
7pm | Natalie Hyacinth: After The End of The World: Act I LIVE
A second chance to experience Natalie Hyacinth’s new work marrying ideas from Afrofuturism with ecological thought, this time performed live.
7.50pm | Sonic Threads: Ultimate Breath / Helen Anahita Wilson + Tuulikki Bartosik
A mixed-bill programme featuring two standout performances: while Sonic Threads transcend cultural and genre boundaries, seamlessly merging Eastern and Western influences with the world premiere of two pieces exploring breath and air, Helen Anahita Wilson + Tuulikki Bartosik perform a new piece exploring attachment theory through composed, indeterminate, and improvised exercises in wild musical masochism.
9.30pm | Heiner Goebbels + Raymond MacDonald
The last of three performances by Heiner Goebbels, this time joined by Raymond MacDonald – a saxophonist and composer whose work is deeply influenced by the idea of improvisation as a social, collaborative and uniquely creative process.
10.30pm | Edgy Palates: Queen of the Night
An alternative musical narrative in which well-known opera heroines break free from the traditional frameworks of tragedy, reinterpreting classical repertoire and reimagining the stories of powerful women who experience love in very different ways.
11.20pm | Mark Reid Bulatović + Thorkell Nordal: animistic rituals
A series of ‘rituals’ dissolve the boundaries between performer and instrument, begging the questions: How would an instrument speak if it could? What would it say? And importantly, how would it feel about the way it is treated?
Photo: Tomoko Hojo © Scott Walden