Enter a world of searing strings and experimental electronics with our annual showcase event, Battle of the Bands. We are delighted to announce the six finalists performing at our annual showcase, selected from over 100 applications to our open call by our industry expert panel.
Join us at MOTH Club on Wednesday 18 January to see them perform live – book your tickets here.
Help us support these emerging performers with more opportunities and higher performance honorariums – we need to raise £5,000 by Wednesday 18 January! Donate to our fundraiser.
Anders Waller, Alex Lyon and Hannah Thomas
Anders Waller is a composer, performer, and painter. Creating work that is often textural, atmospheric, and harmonically diverse - arising from unpredictable rhythms and pitches. Designing aleatoric processes for sound to unfold in imitation of natural sounds or abstract concepts, drawing inspiration from paintings and sculpture. Anders' work, in the pursuit of harmonic and visual texture, has often involved blending acoustic and electronic instruments to generate sound in the context of contemporary dance, installations, and performance art. With visceral tones, dense layers of frequencies, and shuddering drone-like ambiances, Anders drives a tonal environment for performance artists to respond with movement. All in the effort to display the human experience of audiovisual texture. Sounds of a similar nature to the likes of Alvin Lucier, David Toop, and Meredith Monk.
Hannah Thomas is a movement artist, performer and teacher. Hannah graduated from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance with 1st class honours in 2020, and went on to perform with Wee Dance Company, in Germany. With Wee Dance Company, she was part of the creation and performance of Phönix and Zerinnerrung, amongst other works. In 2023, she will join Joshua Monten Dance Company in Switzerland for a new creation. Hannah's style of movement and teaching is derived from her other passions: in addition to being a passionate mover, she is an avid snowboarder, skateboarder and climber. She incorporates these influences into her practice to encourage full bodied movement and physical awareness.
Their set will involve cymbal, mallets, a glass bowl, a bow and a ring modulator; bringing together visceral sound and movement in three contrasting movements: Wavering, Engulfing and Shuddering.
Julia Set
Lewis Wolstanholme and Francis Devine
Julia Set is an audiovisual project with an artistic focus towards improvisatory and experimental performance practices curated by Lewis Wolstanholme and Francis Devine. Blending their expertise, Lewis and Francis seek to curate immersive audiovisual performances which are deeply rooted in electronic music and site specific sound art installation. Julia Set have released several audiovisual recordings online and have performed at a number of venues including Iklectik and the Bishopsgate Institute. They have also presented their work at ‘New Interfaces for Musical Expression’ (NIME) and the ‘Everyday is Spatial’ Immersive Audio Conference. Lewis Wolstanholme is a composer and creative coder currently studying for his PhD in artificial intelligence and music at Queen Mary University of London. Francis Devine is an interdisciplinary artist and musician based in London, who received his BMus from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Julia Set will perform a 15-minute improvisatory audiovisual set using a plethora of electronic instruments and software.
Kemal Yusuf
Kemal Yusuf is a composer from the UK who has composed over 150 works for soloists, large and small ensembles, film, and dance. In 2016 he received his first large-scale commission from the Norfolk and Norwich Festival to compose a 30 minute piece for the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and NNF chorus. He has worked with the Carducci Quartet, the BBC Singers, Streetwise Opera, Fidelio Trio, and the National Children's Orchestras of Great Britain, amongst others including many students and young people.
In 2020 Kemal began working with video as a way to enhance his creative expression during lockdown. These experiments evolved into a new audio-visual form which takes impressions of composed and recorded works through the “musical editing” of the videos. He took the idea further by working with extremely small clips of video, and what emerged were glitchy, playful start-stop musical performances. Kemal was the first to give an operatic premiere on Tik Tok with The Night is in You; an opera in which the protagonists is expressed as multiple versions of themself through Kemal’s “Glitch” techniques.
Kemal’s set will be an audio-visual performance combining keyboard, vocals, live electronics and projection.
KOGG
Selena Kay and Cerys Hogg
KOGG is an experimental electronic music duo which is a fusion of the musical influences of Selena Kay and Cerys Hogg. With backgrounds in classical contemporary composition and jazz improvisation respectively, KOGG create their own unique sound with composed, generative and improvised elements. The result is music with off-centre melodies and elastic rhythms and a rich sonic palette derived from real instruments, homemade instruments and field recordings.
Listen out for manipulated elastic bands, sampled vocals from a distant past recorded by Bartók onto wax cylinder and a homemade instrument constructed from Christmas cracker whistles accompanied by video projection.
Recycled Materials Trio
Hangrui Zhang, Rianna Henriques, Bingliang Liu and Joel Dixon
Hangrui Zhang initiated the Recycled Materials Trio following the completion of his composition Music for Recycled Materials. Visual artist Andrew Pierce Scott collaborated with Hangrui to make a wide selection of functioning musical instruments out of unconventional and unwanted materials. The trio’s debut was performing Episode IV: Ambient Music for Recycled Materials, at IKLECTIK Art Lab, in Waterloo.
Rianna Henriques, playing the ‘metal flute’, is a joint principal study flautist and saxophonist studying an Undergraduate degree at the RCM. Rianna is a lover of both jazz and classical music, and she regularly performs with the Chineke! Orchestra, the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, and Brixton Chamber Orchestra.
Chinese oboist, Bingliang “Billy” Liu, playing the ‘metal clarinet’, has won numerous awards and competitions in the UK and internationally. Most recently, Billy toured with the London Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle at the Barbican Centre and the Paris Philharmonie. Billy was one of the three UK laureates in the 2022 Yamaha Music Europe Foundation Scholarship competition, and winner of the 2021 Oboe Classics Telemann Fantasias Recording Competition.
Oboist Joel Dixon, performing on the ‘contrabass metal clarinet’, recently graduated from the Royal College of Music and has performed in many concert venues internationally varying from the Royal Albert Hall, in London, to the Carnegie Hall, in New York. Joel is currently working as a freelance oboist and teacher.
The trio will perform on Andrew’s selection of unconventional instruments, uncovering new imaginitive sounds from everyday materials.
Vulva Voce
Julia Sandros-Alper, Georgina MacDonell Finlayson, Nadia Eskandari and Lucy McLuckie
Vulva Voce is an all-female genre-defying string quartet that brings exciting, dynamic performances of music composed by women and underrepresented voices to spaces and venues beyond the concert hall. Their mission is to break away from long held conventions of classical music and the string quartet, presenting audiences with radical and refreshing musical experiences. All classically trained, but with interests in folk, jazz, improvisation, contemporary classical and experimental music making, their performances are a unique delve into female composers from across centuries.
Vulva Voce will perform works by Pauline Oliveros and Caroline Shaw.
We need your help!
Help us support these innovative emerging performers. We’re over 20% of the way there but we need your help to offer them more opportunities, artistic development and financial support.
