PLAY: new Music for Game Controllers

Robert Laidlow’s “gigantically imaginative” (BBC Radio 3) music is concerned with discovering and developing new forms of musical expression through the relation-ship between advanced technology, scientific collaboration, and live performance. Recent compositions include ‘Silicon’ for orchestra and artificial intelligence and ‘Post-Singularity Songs’ for soprano and electronics. He is a Fellow in Composition at Jesus College, Oxford University, and from 2018-22 he was the RNCM PRiSM PhD Researcher in Artificial Intelligence with the BBC Philharmonic.

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The House of Bedlam are an ensemble described by the Guardian as an engagingly unquantifiable collective. Dedicated to new and recent music they have performed around the UK, released music on NMC and Nonclassical, and have been broadcast extensively on BBC Radio 3. They are Larry Goves (director, composer, and electronics), Kathryn Williams (flutes), Carl Raven (clarinets and saxophones), and Stephanie Tress (cello).

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Hongshuo Fan 范弘硕 is a Chinese cross-disciplinary composer, new media artist, and creative programmer. He has extensive experience in creating real-time inter-active multimedia content, including acoustic instruments, live electronics, gen-erative visuals, light, and body movements and is particularly interested in the fusion of traditional culture and cutting-edge technology. Hongshuo holds a PhD in Electroacoustic Composition from the University of Manchester and is the Research Software Engineer at RNCM PRiSM.

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Cassie Kinoshi is a Mercury Prize-nominated and Ivors Academy Award-winning composer, arranger and alto-saxophonist with a focus on creating multi-disciplinary and genre-blending performance work in various audio-visual contexts. As a bandleader, she writes for and performs with her ten-piece ensemble seed. which features many top London-based improvising musicians. In 2023 her commission ‘gratitude’ for the London Contemporary Orchestra, seed. and award-winning turntablist NikNak was premiered at the Southbank Centre and in 2021 she was Artist-in-Resident for London Unwrapped festival at King’s Place.

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Bofan Ma is a Manchester-based composer-performer and intermedia researcher. Originally from China, he makes music that embodies a normalised, transnational creative identity, addressing issues around cultural bias, inclusion, and accessibility in the age of AI. He has worked with ensembles/initiatives including the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), SHCM Chinese Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Distractfold, Psappha, ANU Productions Ireland, Ensemble X.y, Vonnegut Collective, Music Theatre Wales.

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Ellen Sargen is a creative practitioner working through composition and performance to interrogate participatory approaches to composition. Her collaborative work extends across diverse projects based in experimental and/ or instrumental performance, community music-making, cross-cultural research, and AI. Ellen’s work often entangles with ethnography and anthropology and her recent commissions blossomed from her practice of creating music from the playful, sincere, intimate relationships she develops with players during the creative process.

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Carol J Jones is a composer and doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, specialising in deconstructing newly found sounds from nature using scientific data. She increasingly participates in cross-genre collaborations including a sound installation at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and an immersive experience that turned St John’s Smith Square into a planetarium. An LSO Soundhub Associate, she has worked with various ensembles, including Southbank Sinfonia, the Orchestra of Opera North and the Ligeti Quartet.

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Sarah Hennies s a composer and percussionist based in upstate New York whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic chamber music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was a participant in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.