The third release of 2020 is from Oliver Leith, a London based composer making acoustic music, electronic music and video. His work focuses on text, image, video, theatre, pathos and the everyday.
Balloonwas originally commissioned by theLondon Sinfoniettaas an acoustic piece, and first performed at the Southbank centre'sSound Unboundfestival in 2019.
" This is an arrangement for synthesisers of many tunings. I called it Balloon because I had this image of thrashing a balloon with a baseball bat or something, rather than breaking or bursting it just sort of floats off - unhurt, even if you absolutely pelted it."
Slide" is old and one of my first purely electronic pieces and really was me doing a hack job with computers. On my aged software you could make parameters and automation dance around by using a mouse and track pad at the same time, that doesn't work anymore because my computer tries to be sensible so I'm back to shifting tiny notes all the time which is about as slow as pencilling in acoustic music. It felt like quite an analogue way to play with notes so that's a shame." (Oliver Leith)
Winner of Ivor Novello 2020 fo Large Chamber work.
Boomkat Wonderfully bittersweet modern composition from Oliver Leith, who piqued our attention with an ace debut for Herbert's Accidental, and grabs it again with his puckered melodies and keening tunings for SN Variations.