RESEARCH

I conduct practice-based artistic research, which is build on my doctoral studies at University of Surrey where my focus was on corporeality in electronic music. My doctoral thesis from 2018 is called The Corporeosonic Composer: Corporeality, Feedback and Movement in Electronic Music and was supervised by Matthew Sansom and Tom Armstrong. Before my PhD, I did an MRes at De Montfort University, supervised by John Young.

As a lecturer at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, I get to teach what I practice, and am currently developing a course that draws on my research in a concrete way.

My practical work consists of acousmatic compositions and music composed for contemporary dance and drama performances in which I explore the role of the body in creating music and as a quality of the resulting music. For this purpose, I have also designed a gestural feedback instrument that allows me to get in direct touch with the sound: experientially, playing the instrument feels like shaping the sound with my hands and my body. The feedback sounds are processed in a Nord Modular G2 synthesizer and controlled by OSC/MIDI via Max/MSP. Finally, I create music with a live electronic setup combining no input feedback with electroacoustic feedback and objects (which I prefer to see as subjects). Voice also sometimes feature in this music, as an instrument, more seldom as a lead voice with lyrics.

My theoretical framework for this research is fundamentally contemporary animism. I am insipred by and in resonance with scholars such as Nurit Bird-David and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. My performance Seeress explores concepts such as the dividual and relatedness (Bird-David) but also concepts from old Norse cosmology, which contain animist ideas. Especially Norse conceptualisations of the different selves of a person are at play in the performance, in accordance with the idea of sound as a living individual/agency as expressed by Rodgers (2011), O’Callaghan (2010) and Peters (2013), along with a range of composers/musicians working with feedback, such as David Tudor, the Barrons and Toshimaru Nakamura. Bird-David sees contemporary animism as a relational epistemology, where the focus is on relatedness (1999) which is why my research also entails touch and intimacy in relation to the sounds, the technology and the music. These are treated as subjects rather than objects in a form of holistic unity: perhaps what David Bohm terms holomovement (1980) or what the Nahua terms Teotl.

Presentations:

2012 iFIMPac conference at Leeds College of Music: Duet (performance for gestural feedback instrument and dancer Joop Oonk)

2013 The Place, London: The Fear Factor (contemporary dance performance)

2013 University of Surrey: Score! 4 1 3 (film/installation/dance performance)

2013 University of Surrey: Cheap Blue (performance with dancer Joop Oonk)

2013 Agony Art, London: Cheap Blue (performance with dancer Joop Oonk)

2013 Corporeal Computing conference at University of Surrey: REACH (performance with dancer Angélina Jandolo and Kinect visualizer Chris Kilding

2013 Agony Art, London: There May Be Trouble Ahead - An Experiment (structured, improvised performance with 12 dancers and four musicians)

2013 The Hat Factory, Luton: The Earth Will Absolve Me (live art performance with the Ahhhness of Things Collective)

2014 The Hundred Years Gallery, London: Found, installation/performance with Jia-Yu Corti

2014 Royal Holloway: Animism in electronic music (paper)

2014 Tour in Sweden: Seeress (performance with gestural feedback instrument and live video artists alKamie)

2014 University of Surrey: Animism in Electronic Music (paper)

2014 INTERactions conference at University of Bangor: Animism in Electronic Music (paper)

2014 SSSP at De Montfort University: Animism in Electronic Music (paper)

2014 Duende residential workshop in Lesbos, Greece: Home and Cement Mixer (improvised performances)

2014 SPILL festival, Ipswich: The Earth Will Absolve Me (live art performance with the Ahhhness of Things Collective)

2015 Written and Composed in London: music from the play Prometheus Bound with live text

2015 University of Surrey: Seeress and the Six Selves: old Norse cosmology as a framework for the experience of the corporeosonic composer. (paper)

2015 Ivy Arts, Guildford: Seeress (performance with gestural feedback instrument and live video artists alKamie)

2015 Rich Mix, London: Setting Up (solo performance)

2015 The Horse Hospital, London: live electronics cinema gig

2015 MuSA conference Karlsruhe, Germany: Seeress and the Six Selves: old Norse cosmology as a framework for the experience of the corporeosonic composer. (paper)

Publications:

2012 Online lecture for the Mid Sweden University: Att känna med öronen - förmedla känsla med ljud (To feel with your ears - mediating emotion with sound)

2013 Review of Bodily Expression in Electronic Music for the Journal of Music, Technology and Education Vol 6:2, p.221.

Residencies:

2013 IDKA Gävle, Sweden for development of feedback instrument

2013 FST, Cortona Italy, composition residency

2013 FST, Berlin, composition residency

2014 EMS, Stockholm, composition residency

2014 Duende, Lesbos, Greece, residential performance workshop

Grants:

2012 AHRC grant for PhD studies

2014 FST composition grant

2014 Stiftelsen Alvar Krafts minne scholarship

2014 RANK touring support for Seeress