Programme

Concert Programme Notes and Biographies

Triadic Flow — Emma Margetson

Triadic Flow explores the dynamic relationships between three interconnected sonic bodies, unfolding as a continuous exchange of energy, space, and motion. Drawing on the idea of the triad as both a structural and symbolic form, the work navigates shifting balances – between density and clarity, stasis and movement, individuality and fusion.

Emma Margetson (b.1993) is an acousmatic composer and sound artist based in the United Kingdom. Her output encompasses acousmatic composition, sound art, acousmatic performance interpretation and, occasionally, live electronic music improvisation. Her research interests include sound diffusion and spatialisation practices; site-specific works, sound walks and installations; audience development and engagement; and community music practice. Her music has been recognised and performed extensively in concerts and festivals internationally, and has been the recipient of a special mention in the Biennial Acousmatic Composition Competition Métamorphoses (Belgium, 2020), the Excellence in Sound Art & Sound Design Prize in the klingt gut! Young Artist Award (Germany, 2018), and a First prize ex æquo in the Space of Sound Spatialization Performance Competition (Belgium, 2019). Emma Margetson is a Senior Lecturer in Music and Sound and Programme Leader of the MA Music and Sound Design course at the University of Greenwich (England, UK). She is also Co-Director of the Loudspeaker Orchestra Concert Series. Her work is available on several recording labels, including empreintes DIGITALes.

Prestidigitation III — Aaron Einbond

AI is the magic of the present. Daily we ask the computer our deepest questions and respond to its commands. Computer music algorithms with names like the “oracle” are summoned by performers like shamans. 3-D loudspeakers, such as the IKO spherical loudspeaker array, can embody this more-than-human presence. Their viral geometric forms, reminiscent of an icosahedral bacteriophage, are at once familiar and sinister. Prestidigitation III is created specifically for this occasion as a new fixed-mediaversion of Prestidigitation for percussion and 3-D electronics. A central spherical loudspeaker array stands in place of the live percussionist, projecting his spatial performance virtually, while two more spherical loudspeaker arrays positioned on either side react with generative 3-D improvisation.

Prestidigitation was written in 2022 in collaboration with percussionist Maxime Echardour, who gathered an array of objects and materials—seashells, nutshells, bells, chimes, and other symbols of far-away environments—to assemble them into a sculptural installation. In Echardour’s recorded performance, he examines each object, bringing it to life like a puppeteer, reanimating it like a magician. The sculpture is completed by a frame drum that brings together the entire assemblage into composite gestures of growing density. Both minute and explosive, the sounds are captured and projected to the listeners in 3-D, situating them in the midst of the micro-theater. The totemic loudspeakers at first amplify the performers’ gestures, then gradually extend them into improvisations, blurring the boundary between the real and the virtual. From within the detailed score, the performer responds with brief improvisatory passages if his own, to which the loudspeakers multiply their unpredictable feedback. The ritual closes as the percussionist falls silent and the loudspeakers take over with a final improvisation, but the oracle’s answers are inconclusive.

Aaron Einbond’s work connects instrumental music, sound art, field recording, and interactive technology to explore connections between performer, listener, space, and place. Record label all that dust released his portrait album Cosmologies performed by cellist Séverine Ballon, pianist Alvise Sinivia, and the Riot Ensemble conducted by Aaron Holloway-Nahum. His album Cities features collaborations with ensemble Yarn/Wire and Matilde Meireles, and his portrait album Without Words was recorded by Ensemble Dal Niente. Other recent collaborators include EXAUDI, L’Instant Donné, United Instruments of Lucilin, Ensemble Recherche, soundinitiative, loadbang, Opera Lab Berlin, soloists Maxime Echardour, Samuel Stoll, and Marco Fusi; and festivals Présences, Venice Biennale, rainy days, November Music, Transit, Nordic Music Days, and Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Giga-Hertz Förderpreis, and Artistic Research Residencies at IRCAM and ZKM. He teaches at City St George’s, University of London, where he directs SPARC Lab for research in immersive sound and movement funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). He has taught at Columbia University, the University of Huddersfield, and Harvard University and studied at Harvard University, the University of Cambridge, the University of California Berkeley, and IRCAM with teachers including Mario Davidovsky, Julian Anderson, Edmund Campion, and Philippe Leroux.

A place to meet — Lara Weaver

My piece explores subterranean London: the hidden chambers and channels, systems of tunnels and thoroughfares, wires, pipes, and rails. Abandoned tube stations, forgotten rivers, the Greenwich foot tunnel: where my grandfather used to sneak under the river to meet my grandmother, during a time when it was considered unseemly to date across the river.

My concept for this residency was to explore this underworld of connections. Using my own field recording practice around the city for sonic material, I experiment with the movement of sound. The rapid, whistle-resounding darkness of tube channels. The cavernous reflections of large tunnels. Highways of water. The emergence into unexpected meeting places, punctuated by footsteps and laughter, the spray of graffiti cans, broadcast music and voices rebounding off the walls.

Amongst all this, I have grounded the piece in my own family history: a secret meeting place under the river. The piece ruminates on subterranean London not merely as a network of movement, but also of memory, connection, and finding, in amidst the noise, a place in which to meet.

Lara Weaver – I am a composer, sound artist, and Doctor of Music. In December 2025, I was awarded my PhD from the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at Queen’s University Belfast. My thesis investigated the unusual sounds of two contrasting environments: the bubbling of Northern Irish peatlands and the ‘singing’ sand dunes of the Empty Quarter desert (Rub’ al-Khali, United Arab Emirates), by means of field recording and sound composition. Previously, I was at St John’s College, Cambridge, where I read for my undergraduate degree in Music, achieving a First, and MPhil in Composition, which was awarded with Distinction. As a composer, my output includes orchestral, choral, chamber music and song, electroacoustic music (often using my own field recordings), immersive audio and ambisonic works (including expertise working with the SARC Sonic Lab), and multi-channel gallery installations. I am currently working on a commission with the London Symphony Orchestra (resident at the Barbican) as a Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composer (2026-2027). Other recent projects include works composed for the Crash Ensemble as a Crash Works Creator 2023-2025 (‘Singing Sands’, premiered at New Music Dublin 2025); and Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble (‘Soft Ground’, exploring the sounds of Irish boglands, premiered at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2024). I compose music for a wide variety of artists and ensembles, my music has received multiple broadcasts on BBC Radio 3, and my work has recently been released on Crash Records as part of their Crash Works II album.”

Wheels within Wheels — Gianni Bencich-Grigore

This piece investigates IKO-specific non-linear perceptual phenomena emerging from the interaction of beamformed projection and simple recursive spatial formulas.
All materials in this piece were synthesised with the sapf (Sound as Pure Form) audio programming language.

Gianni Bencich-Grigore is a composer, performer, and researcher based in the United Kingdom.

His work explores the intersections of microsound, critical theory, and mysticism. His creative practice examines how sound can become a space for discovering the new, disrupting the apparent, and encountering the unknown.

Gianni is currently associated with the Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST) and the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Electronic Music, where he is developing work around AI synthesis, spatialised listening, and the aesthetics of the Real.

His music has been presented in festivals and venues across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, including major international festivals like Donaueschinger Musiktage (Germany), Festival Cervantino (Mexico), and BEAST FEaST (UK).

Bassial Pressure — Dushume

Bassial Pressure transforms architectural space into a living, resonant instrument. Drawing on spatial audio and sound system culture, the work places deep bass at the centre – not as background, but as a force that shapes structure, space, and sensation.

Low-frequency vibrations move through the materials of the building and the bodies within it, forming a dynamic field that audiences do not simply hear but physically inhabit. Within this environment, higher-frequency sounds are projected and set in motion, tracing shifting trajectories through the air. The result is an evolving interplay between grounded weight and spatial movement: bass anchors the space, while other sounds circulate and transform.

Informed by dub and diasporic bass cultures, the work invites a fully embodied mode of listening – one that emphasises noise, vibration, immersion, and collective experience over fixed sonic images or precise localisation.

Here, sound operates as both an architectural and social force, reshaping how space is perceived and shared. The audience is not positioned in front of the work, but within it: immersed in a field of pressure, resonance, and moving sound.

Dr Amit Dinesh Patel, aka Dushume, is an experimental noise and sound artist, influenced by Asian underground music and DJ culture. His work focuses on performing and improvising with purpose built do-it-yourself instruments, and recording these instruments incorporating looping, re-mixing and re-editing techniques. Lack and loss of control are central to his work. He has a PhD in Music, “Studio Bench: the DIY nomad and Noise Selector” (2019), from the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. He is a Senior Lecturer in Music and Sound and an active member of the Sound/Image Research Centre at the University of Greenwich, London

Labourer Others — Angela McArthur

A co-authored exploration of the lives of sex workers in New York City. Originally composed in 2019, the piece foregrounds the nuanced realities behind this work, the deeply human aspects of the work, as well as the meaning and solidarity it can create. In widening perspectives, it attends to the complex network of human relationships at the centre of what is often ‘othered’ in an attempt to distance us from sex labourers, their clients, and the physical, psychological and emotional labour of the work. In distancing them, we invoke societal defence mechanisms founded on shame, and a disowning of our interconnectedness.

Dr. Angela McArthur is an artist, academic and interdisciplinary advocate. She leads a Master’s programme in spatial sound in the department of Anthropology at University College London. She has undertaken many artist residencies and interdisciplinary collaborations, including a five month residency working with the IKO loudspeaker at the Institut für Elektronische Musik (IEM) in Graz. She initiated the first UK tour of IKO works in 2019. Her work centres around the practice and theorisation of aesthetics in sound, underrepresented (including other-than-human) onto-epistemologies, and ocean environments. She champions diversity in access and representation. She’s worked in studio, live and location environments and founded Soundstack, an annual series of workshops, masterclasses and concerts about spatial sound aesthetics.

Truncated-Tetra-Icosahedron Meta-Instrument — Colin Frank

with performers Maria Sappho & Pablo Galaz

Three performers will play Truncated Tetrahedron digital musical instruments, each controlling sound generation and diffusion across a corresponding IKO loudspeaker. The Truncated Tetrahedron DMI is similar to the IKO loudspeaker in its design as it contains four joysticks arranged equally around its four hexagonal faces. This even distribution requires that performers grasp and move the controller in a manner unlike an ergonomically designed device. The joysticks are mapped to chaotic noise generators, glitched synthesizers, heavily filtered field recordings and sound spatialization, which when combined with the joystick layout requires performers to attentively listen and fine-tune their grasp and movements. The resulting performance is an intricate navigation of body position, microgesture, and an evolving electronic sound world.

For Sonic Spheres, the controller’s current multichannel diffusion system (used on octophonic, quadrophonic and stereo setups) will be remapped to the icosahedron’s 20-channel diffusion. Due to the similarity in shape between an IKO speaker and the DMI, mapping will correlate between the DMI and the IKO speaker. This will allow each performer to experience a direct relationship between their handheld device and the speaker’s sound diffusion. Gestures performed with the joysticks will correlate to movement of sound across the IKO speaker’s surface, in addition to the sound synthesis/manipulation based on three independently running versions of the core Truncated Tetrahedron improvisation environment.

The performers will move throughout the space using Bluetooth versions of the DMI, allowing them to reorientate themselves to their IKO speakers and finetune their movements to the speaker’s diffusion. This will also provide audience members with close-up perspectives of the fine motor movements required when playing the controllers.

Dr Colin Frank is a percussionist, composer, and sound artist whose work explores found objects, environmental noise and immersive technology. His texturally rich percussion playing and noise compositions have been heard at numerous international festivals including the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, CTM Berlin, Beast Feast, and Percussive Arts Society Day of Percussion. He has been commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble, Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, TAK, and AndPlay. His audience-interactive sound installations have been exhibited at New Adventures in Sound Art, Le Vivier festival, Analix Forever and Salem Art Works. He holds a PhD from the University of Huddersfield, teaches percussion and composition at Leeds Conservatoire, and is winner of the Hildegard Westerkamp Award for sound composition.

Spring Brain — Kat Pegler

A spatial sound work that immerses audiences in the shifting cognitive landscape of ADHD, tracing a journey from winter burnout to the intense, fast-moving energy of a “spring brain” through layered, overlapping sound in motion.

Using spherical loudspeaker arrays, the piece spatialises thought as orbiting, colliding, and dissolving streams, creating an embodied listening experience that offers insight into neurodivergent perception and attention.

Kat Pegler is an interdisciplinary artist and artistic researcher working across immersive sound, participatory practice, and ecological methodologies. Her work explores flow-state and music as a method for environmental connection, creating sensory and collective experiences that investigate relationships between people, place, and more-than-human systems. She develops spatial sound compositions, installations, and community-led projects that bridge artistic practice and environmental research. Kat has been Lead Artist on the Horizon EU VOICE project and is Co-Founder of Kerbside Collective, a sustainability-led research studio working across heritage, public space, and climate engagement. Her recent work includes immersive sonic projects on climate futures (Brunel University), and spatial audio for XR and exhibitions. She has received Arts Council England funding to develop her spatial sound practice and has contributed to international collaborations across art, science, and technology.