My debut album with Strange Boy is out now on Groenland Records.
★★★★ The Rolling Stone
´the most beautiful melancholy´
Deb Grant, BBC Radio 6 Music
´just gorgeous´
★★★★ MOJO
´enthralling, elegant ballads´
Deeply proud of this work, thanks to Matt Huxley, Richard Formby, Nico Muhly, Paul Corley, Valgeir Sigurðsson and Anna B Savage for their collaboration.
It was heaps of fun to work on the music for TV sci-fi series Soulmates, for AMC. I did a mixture of arranging, scoring and performing on episodes with composers Craig Armstrong, Toydrum, Will Gregory and Anne Nikitin. It was a great privilege to see the different ways they work and I learned a lot from it.
The show, made by Will Bridges who co-wrote Black Mirror episodes, is an anthology series that imagines a world where scientists are able to track and trace each person’s biological ‘soulmate’. All you have to do is take the test, and they can put you in touch! Unfortunately many people who have done the test are already married/dead etc. so it poses various ethical and logistical issues for their loved ones, as one might imagine. The show has a really great cast including actors Sarah Snook (Succession) and Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things).
Soulmates has aired in the US and will eventually be on Amazon Prime in the UK.
The Rising Sea Symphony - BBC Radio 3
I was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 to make the music for The Rising Sea Symphony, an experimental documentary made in collaboration with Laurence Grissell of BBC Radio Documentaries. The piece was written and recorded at home in lockdown, and featured remote contributions from the BBC Philharmonic and members of Shards.
The piece, very loosely structured around that of a symphony, weaves vocal, orchestral and electronic layers in and out of spoken word and field recordings from places around the world where rising sea levels are causing natural disasters.
The whole whole thing was done in just over a month, and was the most difficult things I have every had to do. Turns out making orchestral scores is a very time-consuming thing to have to squeeze in around writing and producing music like this, who would’ve known!
You can listen to the whole thing HERE via the shiny new BBC Sounds. I’m proud of how it all sounded in the end, and hope that the music and sounds do justice to the fantastic work Laurence did stringing the stories together.
It was also very cool to be the Radio Pick of the Day in the Sunday Times, even if the photo used was from a time where I was experimenting with a centre-parting. I didn’t think it was so bad but, according to several friends and family, it was.
Massive thanks to Laurence Grissell, Beth Wells and the BBC Phil, Josephine Stephenson and Augustus Perkins Ray, Ben Andrewes and Donald McDonald for their help and patience!
Photo in Sunday Times by Matilda Hill Jenkins
TROMP! Percussion Competition
My first piece as composer in residence at the Muziekgebouw Eindhoven, cold tingle of infinity, was performed by the 8 semifinalists of the TROMP! percussion competition in 2020. The performance took place online this year; I was delighted by the performances and how varied they were despite the various limitations of playing along to a track. You can read more about it here.
Thank you to those who have been in touch about purchasing the piece, we’re working on it! Do drop me a message to let me know if you’re interested and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s available.
The first weeks of lockdown were, for most musicians, the most perplexing and worrying of our careers. We found ourselves thrust into a state of flux and uncertainty, and then into a phase of gradual realisation that our livelihoods and means of expression were effectively cancelled for the time being.
Our biggest Shards shows to date - a showcase at SXSW in Austin, Texas; a show at the Barbican in London; the launch of my residency at the Muziekgebouw in Eindhoven; a live BBC Radio 3 Broadcast with orchestra (!) and much more - were all cancelled one by one. For a long time it seemed as though the government would not support those who were self employed; despite the recently announced package, many musicians (myself included) slipped through the gaps and have still received no support.
As I read stories and outpourings of grief from fellow musicians online, I felt that the only music I could bring myself to write in those first few weeks was something which engaged with the situation we found ourselves in. So I asked a number of musician friends and pen-pals if they would remotely contribute vocals to form an ‘Isolation Choir’ and sing something I would pen in response to the sudden pandemic.
The result was ‘Inside I’ll Sing’, a simple, folk-like song whose lyrics drew from the real experiences of musicians I had read about or spoken to about their worries and hopes for the future. It was a privilege to receive the recordings back from the all-star cast of amazing singers (full list below), who sent their contributions from around the UK, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Australia and the US.
While piecing together this mosaic and blending the voices in as they arrived in my inbox, I got speaking to Fiona Burgess (whose beautiful and distinct voice fronts the band Woman’s Hour) about ideas for a video. By some miraculous stroke of luck, she had some unused footage of two dancers in a disused space which she had wanted to find a home for. Fiona and her orbit of uber-generous collaborators worked tirelessly to edit and grade a video which looks like it was made specifically with the song in mind. We can’t thank them enough.
Shortly after its release, ‘Inside I’ll Sing’ was played in the Channel 4 documentary, ‘NHS Heroes: Fighting to Save Our Lives’.
All proceeds from the recording of the song will go towards Help Musicians UK, please do consider buying the song on Bandcamp.
This iteration of Shards & Isolation Choir featured the voices and contributions of:
Ana Silvera , Anna Meredith, Douglas Dare, Fiona Jane Burgess, Gabriella Swallow, Hatis Noit, Héloïse Werner, JFDR, Jack Lawrence-Jones, Joe Newman (Alt-J), Jonathan Donahue (Mercury Rev), Josephine Stephenson, Kate Huggett, Luke Howard, Matt Huxley, Rose Martin, Red Moon, Sin Fang & William Doyle.
I’m very excited to be taking over from the uber-talented Daníel Bjarnason as Composer in Residence at the Muziekgebouw Eindhoven from the 2020/21 season.
I am honoured to be working with Frank Veenstra and his colleagues at the Muziekgebouw; together they run one of most interesting and diverse music venues in Europe. We’ll be celebrating the start of the residency with an evening with Shards, Strange Boy and my friend James McVinnie. The concert will be part of the STRP festival of electronic music, and tickets and info can be found here.
The beautiful video for our Shards song Unrest is out now. Made by the very talented Josha Eiffel, the video uses 3D scans to create broken images of an imagined digital past…
I had a chat in Berlin with Nicholas Graves from CLASH magazine about the making of our new Shards record, Find Sound.
I also gave him all of my holiday snaps, and some of them came out pretty nicely.
You can read it precisely here !
I made an arrangement of a Faoese Folk Song, Nornagest Ríma, for my friends The King’s Singers. They released it on The Library Vol. 1 EP, which you can check out now! Click precisely here !
so excited to announce my first full album, FIND SOUND, will be released this August 30th.
released with my vocal group, SHARDS via the wonderful Erased Tapes label.
have a listen to the first single, SUMMER SICKNESS, by clicking here!
our new Strange Boy single, featuring the amazing voice of JFDR, is out now!
listen on Spotify or iTunes or Soundcloud
I'm so pleased to share this song, Annunciation, with the world!
The track was recorded in Paris last year with the excellent Jon Lefèvre-Reich and mastered by the legendary Valgeir Sigurðsson at his Greenhouse studios.
The song looks at a tragic moment in a young person's life in a sort-of kaleidoscopic way, interpreting it from different perspectives and moments in time and space. I wrote it on a piano given to me by my wonderful friend & former singing teacher Lisa Beckley and her husband Robin. It's maybe the first song I've ever written by sitting at a keyboard.
Matt (other 1/2 of SB) did such a particularly good job on this one. The electronic jolts in the chorus are so beautiful, and took the song in a whole different direction.
Our friend & maybe-future-labelmate Jethro Cooke made a beautiful video for the track, which you can watch here:
July is over. Hurrah!
That's never something I thought I'd say, but I'm glad that it is. July 2017 was a month where the biggest things I'm working on this year all collided with each other. It was fun and kind of hectic.
After finishing up the year with concerts at Hampton Court House, I was off to Berlin for more work on Nils Frahm's upcoming album, All Melody. We had lots of fun recording in the stunning Funkhaus, and I was glad to be joined by 3 lovely singers from Shards: Heloïse, Kate and Lucy. The studio's grounds turned into one big summer barbecue park, and there was plenty of time to relax in the sun on the banks of the Spree.
Writing and recording in the Funkhaus with Nils & Shards
After this it was back to the UK for more Shards recording- this time for Michael Price's upcoming album, Tender Symmetry.
Each of the album's tracks will be recorded this summer/autumn in a different National Trust location around the country- this time we were at the Sandham Memorial Chapel, a quaint building filled with murals by Stanley Spencer. I spent all day taking arty shots of the choir in front of the murals, but it turns out that that's not allowed. Here's a picture of Michael sat on the floor with some synths instead...
The day after was spent doing two things- meeting with a record label to discuss Shards' debut album (more on that in the near future....) and recording double bass for our next Strange Boy EP. We spent a couple of hours with the awesome Marianne Schofield of the Hermes Experiment, making some beautiful and not-so-beautiful bass sounds (all on purpose, of course). I've known Marianne since we were sort-of at school together, and am very grateful for her contributions to this record!!
Marianne!
The day after Matt and I left London for New York, where we are recording our next EP thanks to the support of our Pledgers and the Emerging Artist Fund 2017. More about that soon...
Here we were at the end ofJuly and the start of our trip on the Highline, NYC.
more soon!
I'm really pleased that Strange Boy has been awarded the Emerging Artist Fund 2017, a grant made possible by Help Musicians UK and Pledge Music.
We are using the financial help to go to New York this summer to record our next EP with the wonderful Jake Aron. We met Jake in Iceland last year and are really looking forward to working with him. We'll be having the EP mastered by Valgeir Sigurðsson, who did some amazing work on our Annunciation EP which we are releasing soon.
In order to receive the grant we need to run a Pledge Campaign, where fans can preorder our upcoming releases and bur some other fun things. Please have a look at our store here!!
Matt always describes our live set up as 'moody Pet Shop Boys'. Here we are rubbing shoulders with them on the Pledge website:
This summer is getting busy with lots of musical projects, which is very exciting. One of the big things happening is...
STRANGE BOY will be releasing our debut EP, Annunciation, on August 18th. We made it almost a year ago, so I'm really excited to be finally putting it out there.
We've made some beautiful handmade CDs, with artwork by my very own grandma, Lois Brunt! It looks like this:
This week I turn 24. In honour of my becoming something more of an adult I have decided to update this news section more frequently.
Emmy the Great was 24 once! She wrote a song about it and name-drops one of my absolute <3s, Diane Cluck: