“The Irish composer Jennifer Walshe nails down, better than any artist I know, the antic, raucous, confessional, sordid, semi-sublime texture of modern digitized life. At the age of forty-six, she has established herself not only as a composer but also as an electrifying vocalist, a sly comedian and storyteller, a fertile maker of videos and visual art.”
Alex Ross on Jennifer Walshe for “The New Yorker”
“From pieces built on the splutters and falters of human speech to adding virtual pop stars to contemporary music, welcome to the world of the composer and Arco ensemble and squib-box founder.”
Robert Barry on Neil Luck for “The Quietus”
“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (“The Irish Times”) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (“Frankfurter Rundschau”), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Recent projects include TIME TIME TIME, an opera written in collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton, and The Site of an Investigation, a 30-minute epic for Walshe’s voice and orchestra, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. The Site has been performed by Walshe and the NSO, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and also the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra. Walshe has worked extensively with AI. ULTRACHUNK, made in collaboration with Memo Akten in 2018, features an AI-generated version of Walshe. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, released on Tetbind in 2020, uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history. A Late Anthology was chosen as an album of the year in “The Irish Times”, “The Wire” and “The Quietus”. Walshe is currently professor of composition at the University of Oxford.
Neil Luck is a composer based in the UK. His work often explores the pathos and interaction between live human performance and multimedia, and attempts to frame the act of music making as something curious, or weird, or useful, or spectacular in and of itself. Neil’s work takes a range of forms from music-theatre, to concert works, radio, public projects and recordings. He is the founder and director of the music-theatre ensemble ARCO; an experimental music-theatre company. ARCO has been commissioned to produce work for arts institutions, galleries and music institutions around the UK and overseas. Independently, he has also worked with and written for people and ensembles in the UK and abroad, and presented work at music venues, festivals, and galleries internationally including Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Venice Biennale, ICA, Whitechapel Gallery, MATA Festival (New York), BBC Proms, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), BBC Proms, London Contemporray Music Festival, and Tokyo Experimental Festival. His music has been released on several labels including Entr’acte, Nonclassical, and Accidental Records. From 2022-2023 Neil was a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany). In 2024 he will be in residence at Mahler Lewitt studios (Spoleto, Italy), and at Kinosaki Arts Centre (Japan). He is currently professor of Experimental Music Performance at the Royal College of Music, London.
Supported by Culture Ireland.
