Written at a time when COVID19 and Black Lives Matter occurred simultaneously. Both these currents had an underlying theme – I can’t breathe. A further dimension that multiplied that feeling of suffocation and exhaustion was the loneliness of physical and spatial dislocation. This sample doesn’t show positive liberation that occurs later in the piece – art is a vehicle to escape, not just reflect on the common current.

Extinct Angels

Erik Drescher, flute
Commissioned by the VIPA Festival for Erik Drescher
Premiered July 6, 2017 in Valencia, Spain
Recording Engineer: Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Preliminary mix: Jacob Sachs-Mishalanie 
Mixed and mastered by Murat Çolak

You'll see me return to the city of fury

Nirmali Fenn is a Sri Lankan-born Australian composer. She received her initial music education in Australia from the universities of New South Wales and Melbourne, graduating with high distinction. With the support of a prestigious Clarendon Fund Scholarship, she later read music at Oxford University, U.K. She has worked on the faculties of the University of Hong Kong, New York University, University of New South Wales, Yale-NUS College, Singapore. She currently lives in New York working at University of Stony Brook.

The kinaesthetic qualities of Nirmali's music has attracted the attention of distinguished choreographers such as Pun Siu Fai, Daniel Leung and Jiří  Bartovanec. Her collaboration with the Guangdong Modern Dance Company opened the 9th Guangdong Dance Festival in Guangzhou, China. Her project 'Resistance' with Jiří  Bartovanec from the Sascha Waltz Co. and ensemble united Berlin will be premiering June 06, 2021.

Nirmali has served as composer-in-residence at a number of major European festivals, most notably the Lakes District Summer Music Festival in the U.K. and the Saxophone Habanera Festival in Poitiers, France. Of the first performance of her song cycle Over Exposed at Abbaye Royaumont in Paris, Le Monde praised it as “standing out in the genre of ‘songs’ of today” and La Croix described it as “deeply moving”. Her compositions have been performed by the Arditti String Quartet, Ensemble Cairn, Ensemble Linea, the Kuss Quartet, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Tin Alley String Quartet, Sounds Underground, the Endymion Ensemble, the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, Ensemble Concorde, the S.E.M Ensemble and the Eastman Broadband Ensemble. 

Through her music, Nirmali often challenges performers to ‘see’ with their ears and construct spatial ‘views’ of their surroundings. She believes that sound is one tool to give audiences the chance to experience the volume of the space in which they exist.

Extinct Angels

Nirmali Fenn

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