Jo Thomas

Jo Thomas 
Poly plastic
PolyPlastic from A Sketch of Nature, Composer Jo Thomas Violinist Simmy Singh
 Ty Cerdd 2021

PolyPlastic from A Sketch of Nature, Composer Jo Thomas Violinist Simmy Singh

Cascade Infinity is a work for Gezhung and Electronics . It was composed by Jo Thomas. Played live in Pontio by Luxi Tain on the 18.2.24

Cascade Infinity Jo Thomas (segements)

We swim where the birds are

Agna Rita – many voices, one message - review by Abi Bliss 
All fish weirs on the Thames and the Medway and throughout England are to be entirely removed, save on the sea coast.
You may be forgiven for not immediately identifying that as a line from the Magna Carta, the document revered across eight centuries as one of the icons of British freedom and democracy. But the treaty signed by King John in 1215 was chiefly about restraint. It offered royal subjects freedom through protection, whether that meant limiting the power of the crown to seize property and demand taxes, standardising weights and measures of wine, ale, corn and cloth – or stopping the obstruction of waterways. 
View it from a distance through the foggy lens of history and the Magna Carta makes a fine symbol of liberty; examine the details up close and you discover clauses such as: No-one is to be taken or imprisoned on the appeal of woman for the death of anyone save for the death of that woman’s husband. It seems that freedom is more for some than others.
In contrast, electroacoustic music entices with the promise of a world without limits. Confined only by their own imagination and the available technology, composers can sculpt sounds, synthesise, manipulate and refine them to levels of detail more delicate than any human ear can perceive. They can recreate worlds or shape impossible new ones, bend the laws of physics or, as Jo Thomas did on 2010’s Alpha, merge human with machine into a cyborg future.
In a similar way to abstract visual art and sculpture, electroacoustic music offers listeners – indeed, demands that they exercise – the freedom to interpret. And if composers are rulers only in the most intangible sense and only for the length of each piece, still it is here that they should feel the need for self-restraint, to allow listeners space to build their own houses of meaning around these orphaned sounds and furnish them with individual experience.
Diffused across 22 speaker channels and more than an hour in length in its installation form, Agna Rita is Thomas’s largest and boldest work to date. Even in its stereo CD version, the scope is striking. Yet although at times it confronts and challenges, there are no bombastic displays of power here. Instead, it welcomes in listeners on a human scale. 


Our Noise Agna Rita

Jo Thomas Live Performance from Leeds Belgrave Music Hall.
Inspired by the work of Radio Phonic's This album has been put together for the Synth Remix Tour. 
Composed and Remixed for the Synth Remix Tour./ Classical Remix 
Inspired by work from the papers of Delia Derbyshire and notes from the Radio phonic workshop. 
Support and Funding for the whole project gratefully received from 
Arts Council of England, Sound and Music, PRS Foundation and the Fenton Arts Trust..
credits
Composition and performance Jo Thomas
Sound Hannah Broderick
Live at Belgrave Music Hall

Nature's Numbers: Echo's of the Earth [ Live at Leeds Belgrave Hall]

Home is part of a commission from the IOU gallery written in April/ May 2020. The work was written for the Speaking Tubes installation in Halifax.
Image used courtesy of the IOU Gallery Halifax

In a Still place

In a still place

band camp Buy

Home

Jo Thomas is an artist composer and creative musician based in London who works with live electronic and installation. Her work is published through her own imprint Soft Apple , Naxos, NMC recordings, Holiday Records and Entracte. 
www.jothomas.me