AI Song Contest 2022
อสุระเทวะชุมนุม - ญาบอย ฮานอย
Enter Demons & Gods – Yaboi Hanoi

Eager to learn about the AI? Read my process doc to find out more https://lamtharnhantrakul.github.io/enter-demons-and-gods/

อสุระเทวะชุมนุม - Enter Demons & Gods

For solo violin, performed by Jeanne-Marie Conquer of Ensemble Intercontemporain at the University of York, 22nd November 2022.

A phasmid is a creature from the order of insects that includes stick insects, but here it refers to the Insulidian Phasmid, a fictional creature from Disco Elysium, ZA/UM's elegiac 2019 masterpiece. At the game's climax, the giant insect emerges from the reeds, stridulating while it converses with you. Its chirruping is described as sounding 'like a reel-to-reel tape machine spinning after the tape breaks', creating sounds 'that swarm around you head like swallows. Like laughter. A sort of happiness.'

Phasmid

Awarded 1st Prize by judge Jo Kondo as part of 2023's Toru Takemitsu Composition Award. Performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Kosuke Tsunoda.

Selvedge (Tokyo Philharmonic Performance)

Tristram Williams, trumpet & Peter Neville, percussion
ELISION concert, 24 september 2014, Clothworker's Hall, University of Leeds

Ehwaz (Journeying), 2010 for trumpet & percussion

2015 
Rebecca Lloyd-Jones (Percussion) Tristram Williams (Trumpet)
Performed Live at the Amazing Women #4 Concert Series | QCGU

Liza Lim | Ehwaz (Journeying)

Commissioned by EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble. 
https://cassandramiller.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/guide/

Guide

Guide - EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble (2013)

After their 2012 inaugural performance at Tate Modern The Tanks, the duo Jatinder Singh Durhailay and Suren Seneviratne return to their fruitful collaboration with a new experimental and minimalistic sonic musical endeavour titled Petit Oiseau. The project brings together rare classical Indian string instruments played by Durhailay known as the Dilruba and the Taus, unusually combined with Seneviratne’s interests in alternate tunings and numerology through custom patches built on a E-MU Command Station digital synthesizer.

Petit Oiseau, French for ‘small bird’, encompasses both the airiness of the avant-garde compositions, while also standing as a poetic ode to migration and South Asian diaspora.

Jatinder Singh Durhailay, is a painter and musician born and based in London. Recent performances include The National Gallery (London), Het Bos (Antwerp), Vacant and Atelier Fluss (Tokyo).

Suren Seneviratne, a.k.a My Panda Shall Fly, is a musician born in Sri Lanka and currently based in London. Recent performances include Barbican and Boiler Room (London).

Petit Oiseau Live - Suren and Jatinder

This piece was written for the Ligeti Quartet for their project at the Centre for New Music at Sheffield, supported by Arts Council England.


workshop recording

Samoyeds

This is a live recording of Joe Bates' piece Ceasing which we performed at the Barbican Centre's Sound Unbound festival on Sunday 19 May at St Bartholomew-the-Great in London. 

Ceasing is a piece for choir and live electronics commissioned specially for our Vox Machina project which is supported by Arts Council England. 

Text: 
In the cab, I can hardly bear to face the driver.
Do I cry, so he knows, or lock my eyes upon the road ahead?
As we creep through traffic, I track the time as though she’s waiting on a given hour,
As if she’s going to meet me there, as if she’s going to wait for me.

When I arrived, she was already dead.
There isn’t much else that I remember.
The priest took too long,
I didn’t know how to pray,
She seemed so small, such a small thing.

What did I miss?
Was there some last coherence?
Some glimpse of pain, a grimace?
Random tremors, monitors chiming,
Rattling breath, gasping, sagging, a clouding,
A ceasing, not a parting.
Perhaps a fading, too? 
Unconscious for hours, or confused.

It was when we heard / When they called / When I saw a foreign number come up / when the machines turned off
We knew / I knew for the first time / had known for years / for the first time since the stroke / for hours / for a while 
We were no longer needed / we couldn’t help at all
But when she was sick / because when she was in hospital / in the home she hated 
There was somewhere to congregate
Now we have to find new markers
Her grave / his ashes /best to forget him / his favourite joke / the anniversary match / that time over Easter when we almost died laughing

---
Joe Bates is a composer and curator, and artistic director Filthy Lucre. His work has been internationally-recognised by major competitions such as MATA Festival and the London Symphony Orchestra Panufnik Scheme. His work is programmed in venues across London, from established festivals like Occupy the Pianos at St. John’s Smith Square and the Barbican’s Sound Unbound programme, to independent music nights and theatre. It has been described as a work ‘made with brilliant material,’ whose ‘result was utterly uncanny.’ (New York Classical Review) He also performs his own music as an electronic artist. His recent electronic EP, Flim Flam, was described by composer Dominic Murcott as “quirky and floating somewhere between classical music and electronica.”

Joe Bates | Ceasing (LIVE)

Clarinet - Scott Lygate
Viola - Paul Silverthorne
Yangqin - Reylon Yount

Performance at LSO St. Luke's for the London Symphony Orchestra's Soundhub Showcase

Photo credit: Henry & Co.

Introductory notes:

I have often wondered what it would have been like if I had grown up 6,000 miles away in Hong Kong instead of London, which was a very real possibility. What would my musical tastes be? Would I be pursuing a different career path? Would my values be different? Who could I be? Who would I be? It can be quite a disorienting experience reflecting on this alternative reality, one that alludes to a notion of ‘distance’ that is at once geographical, temporal and cultural.

At a time when technology has undoubtedly better connected this world and Hong Kong is only a Google search and a scroll away, distances are arguably becoming increasingly obsolete. Suddenly the cultures, traditions and musics of Hong Kong are readily accessible and perhaps aren’t so far after all. Yet these technological offerings shed no light on answers to my questions, and only seem to accentuate the futility of looking for them. It is as if technology is a veil that once removed, reveals unbreakable and untraversable distances.

'Spiralling scrolls' looks to explore these ideas of distance and their implications on structural narratives and the development of relationships between instruments from distinct cultures. The piece looks to raise questions about the perception of identity and consequently how these identities can be recontextualised, reshaped and reimagined. Indeed, the hope is to reflect the complex and fluid nature of diasporic culture, for although there are questions that will never be answered, there are new possibilities and realities as a result.

Spiralling Scrolls for Clarinet, Viola and Yangqin (2019)

Concerto for cello and string ensemble, performed by Trinity Laban Contemporary Music Group, conducted by Gregory Rose and with soloist Thibault Blanchard-Dubois

Phasmid

Joseph Bates