Yoko Konishi / Polymer Hauntings / Megan Steinberg

Free event

Yoko Konishi performer

Yoko Konishi (Japan, 1986) Fluctuating Beings II (2022) 17’ (World Premiere)
Content warning: this performance contains feedback sounds, including extremely high notes

The sounds of feedback inspired this piece, and from then I commenced creating it. The feedback adds a pure and mysterious vibe to the piece, like a small beam of intense light with the possibility to develop into large-scale energy. I entitled the piece Fluctuating Beings since I imagined all the matter in the world as a mass of floating energy. Most of the sounds used in the piece come from feedback, and I have sought various approaches to generating and controlling it both beforehand and in real-time. Although this composition has a relatively tiny acoustic space, it is spatially elaborated. © Yoko Konishi

Siwan Rhys + Katherine Tinker piano / recycled plastics 

Claudia Molitor (Germany/UK, 1974) Polymer Hauntings (2022) 20’

Polymer Hauntings is a requiem to fossil fuel, using one of its most day-to-day, visible manifestations, plastic. Plastics are wondrous, precious, life-saving (in their medical use) materials, yet we treat them as a single-use, dispensable material. It is in this thoughtless use that it represents our cavalier use of fossil fuels, in all its forms, that threatens our existence. I hope Polymer Hauntings will become un-performable in the very near future, due to its need for every-day, single-use plastic. In this sense it is its own requiem. © Claudia Molitor

Megan Steinberg turntable

Megan Steinberg (UK, 1995) Side A/B (2022) 30’ (World Premiere)
Content warning: this performance may include content around diet culture and body image

Megan Steinberg is an experimental composer and abstract turntablist, working with found sound, chance procedures, graphic scores, quietness and microtonality. Megan is studying a PhD at Royal Northern College of Music, where she is the Lucy Hale Doctoral Composer in Association with Drake Music, and her research is focused on the creation of works for Disabled musicians and AI. In 2016, she was awarded the FI Williams Prize for Composition for her piece The Dying Sakura Tree. Her music has been performed at Kings Place in London, Grachtenfestival in Amsterdam, and Arts by the Sea Festival in Bournemouth.

Side A/B is a piece for solo turntable about mental health, signified by the two sides of a vinyl record.

Produced by hcmf//

Photo credits: Sam Walton / Yoko Konishi