I have just written a piece Players for the wonderful vocal quintet Amarcord from Leipzig. It makes a connection between Amarcord's early music repertoire (specifically a beautiful song What is our Life? by another Orlando, Orlando Gibbons) and the present day. First performance in Leipzig on May 30th, in a programme (brilliantly) called Music from the country with no music. It's part of a singing festival the group organises every year.

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And I have just written a series of pieces Elemental for the excellent baroque ensemble Apollo's Cabinet. It will be part of a programme that features French baroque music about the elements and includes an extraordinary radical piece Le Chaos by Jean-Féry Rebel (good name!) which begins with a repeated chord cluster that includes every single note of the D harmonic minor scale. I've written five pieces - Earth, Water, Air, Fire (obviously) and The Fifth Element - us humans. It ends very much as Rebel's piece begins.

 

The artist David Ward and I have made a book about bell-ringing, A Sculpture That Sings published by Little Toller. Beautiful images by David, some abstract visualisations of the sound of a bell, some photgraphs of the casting of bells at John Taylors of Loughborough, the only remaining bell foundry in Britain, and an essay by me about bell-ringing as music.

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In collaboration with sound guru Alastair Goolden I made a sound installation 

De Nadder for Messums West. The gallery is in an extraordinarily beautiful medieval tithe barn in Tisbury, Wiltshire. Radically for a commercial gallery it was empty of any objects for the two months of the installation. Nadder is the name of the river that runs past the gallery, and at the same time a version of the word 'nada' - nothing (just explaining the pun!) The installation features the voice of Melanie Pappenheim. 

Listen here.

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Sian Croose, Jonathan Baker, their wonderful choir The Voice Project and I have made The Lie of the Land a site-specific choral event at Houghton Hall, Norfolk around Antony Gormley's installation Time Horizon. 

And recently we've made Arc of the Sky, a film about flight, perspective, scale, solitude and connection - watch here - and The Distance Between Us, a choral lockdown diary - watch here.

 

Herd, an epic site-specific piece in Kirklees, West Yorkshire, produced by Artichoke, happened last July. The artist Dave Young fabricated 23 sheep, ranging from life-size to massive, which were equipped with speakers. On July 11th they started to appear at sites in the countryside, playing soundscapes inspired by the geography and history and people of the area, an area that was for 200 years dominated by the woollen textile trade.  Over the next six days they were herded, via 19th century industrial areas and towns, into St George's Square in Huddersfield, where on July 16th they met 300 performers - choirs, brass bands, soloists for a finale which looked at the future - the future of Kirklees, the future of sheep, the future of the planet.

The film-maker Colm Hogan and I have made a half-hour film based on the event, edited by David Qualter. Look here.

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I've made the music for Light Towers, an installation by the artist Bruce Munro at Paso Robles, Sensorio, California. The music, a loopable a cappella 20-minute piece, featuring the voices of Sarah Gabriel, Sianed Jones, Rebecca Askew, Sian Croose, Melanie Pappenheim, Hazel Holder, Jeremy Avis, Manickam Yogeswaran, Ben McKee, Jonathan Williams and Jonathan Baker, is a recording, but we will occasionally do live performances with 69 singers. Listen here. Bruce will be releasing a vinyl soon.

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I've written a book about Brighton, Coming and Going: part memoir, part psychogeography (whatever that may be), part history, occasionally fiction. George the Fourth, Dusty Springfield, seagulls, Edward Carpenter and my brother Jamie, Le Gateau Chocolat, Biba, bungaroosh, Heile Selassie and Max Miller, flint penises, Wartz, Elizabeth Robins, Fatboy Slim, Gandhi, Ranji, Caroline Lucas, vegan fish and chips..... Essentially it's a sequence of stories, but at the same time it's fascinated by the relationship of past and present, of fact and fiction, of the urban landscape and the natural world. You can order a copy here.

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I'm about to embark on a project with the artist Amartey Golding, a short but epic film commissioned by Scottish Ballet.​

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I've been working with the composer Gabriel Prokofiev and the viol consort Fretwork on Albion, a sequence of arrangements (you could call them cover versions, you could call them remixes) of all kinds of British songs and instrumental pieces, from Worldes Blis, written in 1150,  to Purcell to Elgar to Holst to Delia Darbyshire to Napalm Death, and beyond. We've asked a group of frisky composers and producers to contribute versions - so far Sarah Dacey, Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian, Ewan Campbell, Blasio Kavuma, Sally Beamish, Yfat Soul Zisso, Max de Wardener, Genevieve Murphy, Talvin Singh. There have been performances at Dartington and at Kings Place, London. More performances next year. There's an introductory video here, made by the excellent Sam Stadlen of Fretwork.​

 

I've written a post Listen Hear about the idea of composers 'hearing' music, and what that might mean.

When we lurched out of the first lockdown, I was thinking about the fate of the amateur choir, and wrote a little post Covid Choral.

 

Thirty years on.......Man Jumping's albums Jumpcut and World Service are up on Spotify. Jumpcut, and two albums of remixes by Khidja, Bullion, Gengahr, Reckonwrong and William Doyle, is available on vinyl from Emotional Rescue.

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Consultant on Jem Finer's Longplayer (choral version)