vox machina
CHOIR + LIVE ELECTRONICS
Vox Machina brings together vocal and electronic music to investigate the relationships between humanity and technology.
“ear opening, refreshing, inspiring”
Through this combination the human voice is presented as both autonomous and automated: natural vocal resonances are processed, manipulated and deconstructed to produce new musical textures and striking sound effects.
The project is a collaboration between SANSARA and composer-curator Joe Bates with the aim to explore and expand the choral-electronic repertoire through the performance of existing pieces for choir and electronics and the commissioning of new works by emerging composers.
Vox Machina was premiered at the Barbican Centre’s Sound Unbound festival with two performances on Sunday 19 May 2019. The programme has since been presented by Lammermuir Festival, St Martin-in-the-Fields and York University.
Photos by Nick Rutter
harvey - stabat mater
One of the central pieces of this project is Jonathan Harvey’s kaleidoscopic arrangement of Palestrina’s Stabat Mater à8 for choir and surround sound electronics.
We gave the UK premiere of the piece at the Lammermuir Festival in September 2022 following a lengthy restoration process in collaboration with Harvey’s original colleague Gilbert Nuono.
“Some music is, for me, a connection to mysterious worlds beyond the reach of the normal perception of our five senses. SANSARA’s performance of Stabat Mater was other-worldly; the human warmth of eight voices reflected in a ghostly electronic mirror, a mother and her dead son, this life and the one beyond.”
Watch the premiere performance of Ceasing here:
past performances
17.05.23 - York University
31.03.23 - St Martin-in-the-Fields, London
14.09.22 - Lammermuir Festival
19.05.19 - St Bartholomew-the-Great, Barbican Sound Unbound
Joe Bates is a composer and curator, and artistic director Filthy Lucre. His work has been internationally-recognised by major competitions such as MATA Festival and the London Symphony Orchestra Panufnik Scheme. His work is programmed in venues across London, from established festivals like Occupy the Pianos at St. John’s Smith Square and the Barbican’s Sound Unbound programme, to independent music nights and theatre. It has been described as a work ‘made with brilliant material,’ whose ‘result was utterly uncanny.’ (New York Classical Review) He also performs his own music as an electronic artist. His recent electronic EP, Flim Flam, was described by composer Dominic Murcott as “quirky and floating somewhere between classical music and electronica.”
