The Room to breathe concert at Sound Festival 2022 in late October (as pictured above) has come and gone. I think on the whole it went very well and it was a jolly nice experience with a huge learning curve which I always think is a very good thing indeed. With musicians from Drake Music Scotland’s iPad lab and Nevis Ensemble we formed an inclusive ensemble of digital and acoustic instruments for the performance. More than that we formed a brilliant team with kindred souls coming together and excellent support from all angles. With a running time of one hour and 5 movements (or rooms!), it is the longest work I have written. As well as traditional musical notation I made use of cued timelines, audio tracks for each movement with audio cues written into the tracks and Figurenotes (written by the multi-talented Clare Johnston!). The work for Room to breathe had started back in April 2022 and it had a long slow build up with well-paced rehearsals and deadlines leading to the concert. I hope to post some of the performance online next month.
November is looking to be as relentless as October but just as filled up with very lovely things. Last week I joined the whole of Independent Arts Projects Sensory Collective residential at Boat of Garten community centre near Aviemore for chats, fun, frolics and a lovely forest walk with smashing wheelchair accessible track. It is the first time we have managed to all be in the same room together a year after the project started and that felt like an amazing achievement in itself. The Sensory Collective is filled with an eclectic mix of wonderful artist/humans, and I think that between us we cover most of the art forms. Each artist is tasked with creating a sensory idea/project and to work with one or more key sectors of the community. It is wonderful to see these different projects forming from the ideas they originated from and to learn from one another in terms of practice and approaches to the work. There is always so much to learn from others. I love this bit muchly when someone’s eyes light up when they talk about things that are meaningful to them and to hear about all of their experiences both brilliant and trying. So much of what I create myself is a combination of success and failure and I carry what I learn from the previous project into the ones that follow.