Name: Interview with Jac van Steen by Steven Berryman
Duration: 4 min 39 s
Description: Pre-performance interview with Jac van Steen before the first performance of Cypher (2011) by BBC National Orchestra of Wales in 2011.

Pre-performance interview with Jac van Steen before the first performance of Cypher (2011) by BBC National Orchestra of Wales in 2011. 

Interview with Jac van Steen

London-based alternative pop auteur Tom O C Wilson releases his new single “Better Off” on May 2nd, with guest vocals from Australian singer songwriter The Magic Lantern. This is the fourth in a series of singles from Tom O C Wilson featuring rotating guest vocalists, while Tom handles songwriting and arrangements.

Where previous songs had a leftfield indie pop sound, Better Off is more electronic, built around jarring dissonances and abstract synth sounds inspired by Tom’s appreciation for artists such as Low, Portishead, M.I.A., and Northwest.

The choice of The Magic Lantern as guest vocalist for Tom’s most electronic song to date feels unusual at first glance. Jamie’s own music is acoustic and warm, and his beautifully humane voice makes a marked contrast to the song’s disembodied musical arrangement.

Yet it is precisely this playing against type that Tom wanted. The lyrics describe a set of mixed feelings occurring after an unspecified trauma, with the narrator trying to reassure himself that it is a positive change. This ambiguity is mirrored in the music, at once unsettling and consoling, with a beautiful vocal melody that sounds like a lullaby to the self.  

It’s a bold move typical of Tom’s unique approach - nostalgic for the craft and quality of classic pop, while always searching for new sounds to embody the most complex of human emotions. 

https://linktr.ee/tomocwilson
tom@tomocwilson.com

Tom O C Wilson - Better Off (feat. The Magic Lantern)

Karusell

On the 12th of May 2025, I was shocked to discover that my wife was a stranger (at least, according to Keir Starmer). 

I have sampled Starmer's speech, reversed it, slowed it down, and processed it in an (impossible) attempt to musically counteract his Reform-like rhetoric. This is an ambient composition that can be listened to in isolation, or used as an accompaniment to improvisation. 

Strange Island

Vivaldi’s musical depiction of the seasons, much like the actual seasons he probably knew, consist of unique moments in the passing of time with very delicate and precise architectures, patterns, cultural traditions or what have you, relying on an accordance of carefully balanced factors, musical or environmental. As this delicate balance radically changes, as we all know, the result follows. My piece is a re-imagining of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons perhaps if they, like the earth’s climate, had been subject to the progressive and radical differences in that architecture brought about by relatively recent human activity. You could say my piece doesn’t so much resemble a new single season per se, but reflects something akin to which we are progressivity acclimatizing - a chained-together series of semi- extreme weather events. For example, material that seems to sit in one place forever, sudden violent changes of direction, the feeling of winter during summer, material that blows backwards and forwards, an endless compression spiral, or an eddy of musical material that whirls faster and faster. To depict all of this, I chose to stay very close to Vivaldi’s musical language in order to give the audience the ability to feel distance – the distance between the climate Vivaldi knew and the climate we experience daily. The title refers to both an action that indicates an active taking of something by will, and also at the same time refers to something that becomes stiff, immobile, and stops functioning. 

Dutch Brew House, Lonneke van Straalen, solo violin 
Concertgebouw, October, 2024

Sieze (highlights) 2024

Music by Ryan Latimer
Performed by Britten Sinfonia
Milton Court, London
20 October 2023

Music Producer: Andrew Walton
Engineer: Deborah Spanton
Videographer: Bobby Williams

More at http://www.ryanlatimer.com

Pound of Cure [Excerpts]

Ecollage_3 forms part of a developing series of performances, installations, and audiovisual pieces called “Ecollages”. Each piece explores listening- and sounding-with the more-than-human world, through improvisatory listening and performance strategies of different kinds.

The series uses combinations of field recordings, DIY and non-DIY instruments, electronics, visuals, and movement to think about our relationships with dynamic, living environments. Ecollages questions – ‘how can we better think, see, hear, and feel ourselves as part of natural ecologies?’ – ‘how might we find ways of co-composing with human and more-than-human sounds where neither is prioritised, neither is erased, and both can be valued?’ – ‘what changes can be made in our listening to understand that we are always ‘sounding with’ the world around us’?
The scores for Ecollage_3 come from a collection titled ‘Scores for Plant-Listening’, a group of variably notated works which explores the poetic, aesthetic, and geo-bio-political relationships between plants and other entities (including human and other eukaryotic life, prokaryotes, and mineral beings).

Scores for Plant Listening takes, as its premise, the cultivation of attentive listening (with the ears, body, and mind) as the ground for developing a critically needed empathy with the more-than-human world.

ecollage_03 (2025)

Performed by EXAUDI, conducted by James Weeks, at the Wigmore Hall, 2025.

Paroles Gelées

"an almost unexpected note" is an experimental work - not glitch, not orchestral, not ambient, but somehow a fusion of all three.   It is a fully composed work ...

Interview with Jac van Steen

Steven Berryman

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