In 2020 Jo Thomas was commissioned by IOU to create a new musical work to be played on sculptural sound installation Speaking Tubes. Her final work titled ‘In a Still Place’ was written in 4 weeks of lockdown during April to May 2020. It is a work that explores different states of stillness whilst acknowledging sometimes rapid change. 

A unique spatialised version of ‘In a Still Place’ was created and shared online on 4 June 2020. There are four small movements to the work making a 25-minute electronic music work: Static, Cover, Macabre and Home. 

Static 

Cover 

Macabre 

Home 

Of this piece Jo Thomas says: 

“For this work, I decided to focus on what was immediately around me. The sound of birdsong the static nature of lockdown, silences, fear, grief gaps, communal warmth, media messages, glitches and a home. The speaking tubes are designed as vortex cannons. I always had this in mind when I was composing music for projection inside a sculptural space. The music is composed to move freely allowing perspectives change and alter.”
credits
released June 4, 2020 

Image used courtesy of the IOU Gallery Halifax 
Composer/ Jo Thomas

In a still place

Jo Thomas

Wide Blossom is a last movement of Sketch of Nature.

Wide Blossom

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

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

Static Love

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Static 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

Static

Cover

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

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Home

Macabre 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.
I
mage used courtesy of the IOU Gallery Halifax

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Macabre

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