Staring at the Sun:
Musarc Folk Meet on a Midsummer Day until Dusk VI
Saturday 21 June 2025
6.30pm – sunset
St Paul’s Bow Common
Burdett Road
London E3 4AR
Director of Music
Oli Kitching
Artistic Director
Joseph Kohlmaier
Associate Directors
Carol Mancke
Sam Belinfante
Photography
Yiannis Katsaris
Cooks
Agnieszka Cybul
Aliya Ebo
Amy Teh
Anna Cséfalvay
Anna Schabel *
Aranzazu Ferndández Rangel
Belén Duran
Carol Mancke
Carolyn Roy
Hélène Lomenech
Lisa Peachey
Łukasz Kopeć
Michael Guggenheim *
Mercedes Vicente
Tara Marshall-Tierney
Special Thanks
Aliya Ebo
Andrew Price
Mother Bernadette Hegarty
Carolyn Ann Delaney Akande
Esther Kohlmaier-Sims
Jochen Driessle
Judith Lösing
Julian Brears
Naomi Groves
Richard Spencer
Toby O’Connor
Staring at the Sun is Musarc’s sixth annual midsummer concert which sees the choir sing into the sunset on the longest day of the year. The evening features a new durational performance by Joanna Ward and Reuben Esterhuizen + music from Affordances, Musarc’s new album with Heleen van Haegenborgh which we are launching on the night + early polyphonies + and the choir’s traditional solstice performance of Lin Chiwei’s tape score Quipou Sonore 1.5 Stéréo for Musarc for double choir.
The event takes place in one of the country’s most beautiful modernist spaces. The setting is informal and convivial, with no fixed stage. Performance arrangements change as the evening progresses and visitors are invited to move around, stand or sit on benches and blankets on the floor. Food prepared by the choir is served. There will be no artificial lighting in the space and the audience is given candles to illuminate the auditorium as darkness falls. The concert is expected to finish just after sunset, which on the day is at 9.22pm.
The evening opens with an ambitious and poetic new work by composers Joanna Ward and Reuben Esterhuizen that draws on the life and death of magician, escape artist, modernist icon and pop medium of the early mass-age, Harry Houdini. Staring at the Sun explodes the process of composition and performance. The eponymous piece acts like a container in which multiple works are activated by the choir as happenings playing out in space and time. Each deconstructs and materialises the myth of Houdini inside a vacillating field of multiple choral pieces, solo performances, video and sound screenings that appear like stations in a landscape. A crowd gathers to see the spectacle, a choir within it rises and falls, suspended, believed. In Staring at the Sun, characters close to Houdini, such as his wife Bess or his press agent Kit Clarke, meet for a strange séance with Kate Bush and Dua Lipa. Scenes overlap and orbit, repeating in different configurations while the audience form individual pathways through the performance which evolves over the timespan of an hour.
St Paul’s Bow is one of London’s most beautiful and welcoming public spaces. Designed in 1960 by Maguire and Murray, the building is considered a Brutalist masterpiece. In 2013, it won the National Churches Trust Diamond Jubilee Award for best Modern Church built in the UK since 1953. Unlike other churches in London, St Paul’s remains a civic space and a continuation of the city, open all day to the community and passers-by for contemplation or as a refuge. It is is a town square, able to process the assembled detritus of the people and things that pass through it. Benches surround the altar, alongside crayons and nursery chairs, pianos, a coffee machine, a box of home-made instruments, cushions, cleaning paraphernalia, stacks of chairs and trestles, extension leads, Ikea bags overflowing with stuff for the next jumble sale, balloons from a christening, flowers. From the ceiling issue two bell pulls and salt weeps through two cracks in the concrete, forming small stalagmites on the floor that look like patches of snow. Its dignity lies in its complete disregard for barriers, security and corporate balance sheets. St Paul’s has offered Musarc time and space to rehearse and perform in return for a donation. The choir would like to thank the church and its guardians, Julian Brears and Mother Bernadette Hegarty, for their generosity and welcome.
Staring at the Sun is a container in itself, constructed and choreographed by the composers and animated by the singers. Inside it, two distinct and new works for choir are placed: Rosabel, Believe! by Joanna Ward and The Great End by Reuben Esterhuizen. The composers, both regular singers with Musarc, have used the opportunity of working with the choir to explore the possibilities of ‘Choir as Method’ – working with the singers to generate material while honing in on the unique affordances of the ensemble. The result is a work that makes space for individual autonomies, yet comes into existence due to the strength of the collective voice.
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We are thrilled to launch a new album in collaboration with SN Variations. Affordances presents four works written by Belgian composer Heleen van Haegenborgh for Musarc between 2019–25. Scored for voices and free melodic instruments, each piece tunes into a different dimension of the vibrant and oracular polyphony of the chorus, its joyful hallucinations, its many languages and the many ways it has with the world as a body of bodies, singular and plural: at times sounding restrained and hauntingly beautiful, at other times triumphant and clear.
Musarc Folk Meet on a Midsummer Day until Dusk VI
Saturday 21 June 2025, 6.30–sunset
Joanna Ward is a composer and performer from Newcastle upon Tyne, based in London. Her practice revolves around experimental score-making methodologies, and exploring what happens when improvisation is situated alongside simple, repetitious musical ideas. She likes to work closely with other artists on her projects which often layer live sound with recorded sound, video, and/or other media. Recent projects have included creating works for: LCMF 2025, working with her sister, Laurie Ward, on an experimental performance piece; Figure Ensemble, premiere at Stone Nest, January 2025; Marian Consort, Aldeburgh Festival 2024; live saxophone and video, in collaboration with Lucy Havelock; Slide Action’s album on NMC Recordings; the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Tectonics Festival 2022; the Aldeburgh Festival 2022, for which she created an experimental documentary; and EXAUDI at the Norfolk & Norwich Festival. Her work is regularly performed in the UK, Europe, and the US. Joanna graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA in Music in 2019, and with an MA in Composition from Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 2021, learning with Amber Priestley. She was a Junior Fellow at Guildhall School, and a Britten Pears Young Artist in 2021–22. She currently teaches on the MA Arts Management course at Goldsmiths University. As a vocalist and performer, Joanna mostly performs contemporary, experimental, and improvised musics. She has a duo project with fellow composer and performer Omri Kochavi, and regularly performs with Musarc. Alongside her practice as a composer and performer, Joanna works as a charity fundraiser and Arts Council access support worker.
Reuben Esterhuizen is a London-based composer and performer. His work utilises minimal materials and intuitive systems, with a focus on reiteration and sound. His recent work is concerned with presenting various situations that highlight the experience of similarity and focuses on the effects of layering and ambiguity in the listening experience. He is interested in different practices of score-making. As a composer, he has worked with the Plus-Minus Ensemble, EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble, Musarc, Ensemble 7 Bridges, Unfinished Collective, the Frankland Quartet and various individual instrumentalists. His work has been performed at Siobhan Davies Studios, IKLECTIK, Milton Court Concert Hall, Goodenough College, and The Place Theatre. He is also very interested in cross-disciplinary work, particularly enjoying working with choreographers and involving himself as a mover in collaborations. He is currently enrolled on the Artist Master’s course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he has enjoyed studying with Paul Newland, Laurence Crane, Richard Baker, and Amber Priestley.
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Heleen Van Haegenborgh is a composer who started her career as a pianist specialising in contemporary music and extended techniques. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and often animated by collaboration, crossing a broad range of genres connecting contemporary and old music, jazz, visual
arts, free improvisation, dance and theatre, and experimental underground. Van Haegenborgh’s curiosity and her interest in different musical traditions, formats and instrumentations is voracious. She wrote quartets for electric guitars (Zwerm Electric Guitar Quartet), period instruments (Nordic Affect), or percussion and electronics (Squaring the Circle). She wrote a durational piece for violoncello with crystal objects and electronics (Benjamin Glorieux), solos for melodic instruments of the 16th century and percussion, music for choir, and a number of trios, including for lute, voice and percussion; oboe d’amore, piano and tenor; and electric guitar, violin and piano; as well as pieces for large and small ensembles in various formations. Heleen performs her own compositions for piano with electronics, and in duos with Icelandic harpsichordist Gudrun Oskarsdottir, Christian Mendoza (jazz piano), Esther Venrooy (electronics), Frederik Leroux (jazz guitar) and improv with Tsubasa Hori (Taiko). She was part of the European Melting Pot in Wroclaw, Istanbul Express in Istanbul with Erdem Helvagioglu, Peking Express in China with Wu Fei, and No Choice Toekomstmuziek. Recent albums include Affordances for choir (SN Variations, June 2025) and High Carbon for piano and electronics (W.E.R.F. Records, October 2025). In December a large symphony of city sounds will be premiered in De Singel with theatre director Thomas Verstraeten. Heleen Van Haegenborgh studied composition at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels with Peter Swinnen, piano in Ghent with Daan Vandewalle. Her music appears on Entr’acte, El Negocito Records, De Werf Records, Logos, SN Variations and Het Balanseer.
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Born in Taipei in 1971, Lin Chiwei is a transdisciplinary artist who received academic training in French literature, cultural anthropology and media art. Since the early 1990s, Lin has been involved in the Taiwanese counter-cultural scene. He was a founding member of noise band Z.S.L.O. and responsible for the programming of various alternative art festivals. At the same time, Lin explored the realms of religious music and art, notably temple sculpture and Taoist rituals, through intense research and field studies. These experiences, combined with his practice in noise performance and electronic music composition, developed into critical positions toward contemporary art practices. Since 2004, Lin has worked on the Tape Music and IDCM (Interhuman Dynamic Coordinated Models) series of works – synchronous protocols which allow individual autonomy in the forming of collective intelligence that leads to complex sound works. In his 2012 book Beyond Sound Art – The Avant Garde, Sound Machine and the Modernity of Hearing Lin denies the term ‘Sound Art,’ and provides a holistic view blurring the boundary between human culture and technology. Lin’s art works were shown in various biennales and museums including Tate Modern, Pompidou Center, PSA Shanghai along with other non-art sites including local community projects, private residences, public schools, factories, churches, temples, bars and live venues in different countries around the world. Lin Chiwei lives and works in Shanghai, Taipei, and Paris.
Oli Kitching is Musarc’s Director of Music. Oli is a conductor, facilitator and singer working at the intersection of choral music, contemporary art and social change. From immersive gigs in disused car parks to songwriting in prisons, they collaborate with choirs and communities in ways that are musically ambitious and psychologically attuned. Current projects include work with Bold Tendencies, London Youth Choir, English Touring Opera and the Irene Taylor Trust, always using music as a tool for self-expression, connection and transformation. With Musarc, Oli recently conducted the choir in Belgium for their latest recording, Affordances. Their background spans large-scale concert work including Brahms’s Requiem and Handel’s Messiah, a fellowship with the RSNO Chorus, and conducting roles with the Hallé Choir and at the University of Manchester. Now training in integrative psychotherapy, Oli is passionate about creating emotionally resonant, creatively alive and politically conscious rehearsal spaces. They are committed to integrating choral music with contemporary artistic visions, technology and interdisciplinary art forms – expanding what choral performance can be and who it can speak to.
Ada Egg Koskiluoma is a Swiss/ Finnish artist, musician and composer. Their sound practice is rooted in experimental, electronic music production and incorporates field recordings and the writing of words. They are currently working on a new album. Pickling and fermenting food, as well as gardening makes their heart full. Agnieszka Cybul is a designer, traveller and actress. She loves acting for giving her an opportunity of becoming a different person. Her favourite projects she has done are Downton Abbey and Bridgerton for an experience of time travelling through fashion and interiors. She is passionate about travelling. She has got to Everest base camp in Tibet in 2017 which was her big dream. Adam Khan is an architect, activist and singer based in
London, exploring the weaving of these together in practices of collective intimacy, presence and empowerment. Alice Ortona Coles is an Anglo-Italian dancer, choreographer and costume designer/maker. She uses design to drive and shape choreography. Alice Watson is a maths teacher and a dancer. She loves playing her accordion too. Aliya Ebo is a painter and Fine Arts student working across gesture, memory and the emotional textures of shared space. With roots in performance from choral harmonies to jazz and steel bands, her practice dances between sound and markmaking, drawn increasingly to the delicious poetics of collaboration. Amy Teh is a public realm designer and woodworker. Her latest project was a young people’s workshop entitled, ‘Bugs Bugs Bugs: A Critterly Crowd of Scrappy Stools’ as part of Wokingham Borough’s Forest of Imagination. Anastasia Glover is a singing architect. When not singing, Anastasia can be found on a building site in London, the countryside or a Greek island. Some days are spent teaching architecture with fellow Musarcians, Margit, Toby and Lara. In a previous life she was a Japanese linguist. She is happiest bathing in a bubble bath of choral sounds. Andy Cowton is a composer working across multiple platforms of film and performance. Anna Cséfalavy is a cognition architect exploring how language, embodiment and spatial understanding are intertwined, perpetually trying to measure the distance between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Anna Schabel is an architect and director of Wilton Studio Ltd. She is a writer for architecture magazines and visiting university critic. She produced a film about women architects and chaired Women in Architecture UK. She is a school governor and trustee of the Hackney School of Food. Annelie Kops has been a core member of the choir since 2011. She is an architect who specialises in buildings for work and education, but has also designed a theatre, worked on homes and residential projects, and developed meanwhile use and placemaking strategies. She is an experienced teacher, and has taught at Central Saint Martins, the University of Bath and the University of Greenwich. Aranzazu Fernández Rangel is an architect whose practice centres around public realm design and placemaking. She
holds an MA in Narrative Spaces from CSM and a PG Dip in Integrative Arts Psychotherapy from UEL. She is passionate about transforming environments, internal and external, through relationship building and participation. Belén Duran is an adopted Londoner originally from Seville. She is a systemic psychotherapist working in an NHS organization. She is fascinated by the creative possibilities which evolve in diverse human systems. Belen joined Musarc in 2022 and relishes the opportunity to engage in the cocreation and performance of irreverent and subversive artistic expressions. Ashmi Thapar is an architect, maker and performer, driving sustainable design with a social purpose. Alongside her practice in innovative housing, she furthers the discourse by curating events, teaching, participating in expert panels and writing. She is passionate about the body in sound, exploring this with Musarc since 2019. After many years in architectural practice and teaching, Carol Mancke plays in the intersection of fine art and cities. Her collaborative projects engage different time frames and use images, objects, physicality, humour, hospitality and conversation, to create clearings in the midst of everyday life. She would like to be a water dwelling mammal in her next life. Carolyn Roy is a dancer currently interested in fundamentally useless activities and barely perceptible micro performances. She teaches various things at Trinity Laban, LCDS and Independent Dance and is a member of Chisenhale Dance Space. Charles HM Mok is a former boy soprano and art history major who has sung in classical and gospel choirs, and is keen to explore further possibilities with the voice. Chloé Rochefort is a playful textile artist and a community facilitator. They create things like interactive textile installations, public art trails and workshop programmes, aiming to make Art more inclusive and accessible for all! Clara Fran Calladine is an interdisciplinary spatial designer focused on making cities more inclusive. A recent graduate of The London School of Architecture, she juggles research into public realm, international development, and advocating for women in construction, while also creating opportunities for young people to shape the spaces around them. Through illustration, she brings ideas to life and joy into the world! Derk Ringers is a designer and researcher with a strong background in industrial systems. After completing his MA in Industrial
Design at Central Saint Martins, he has been working on projects that reimagine systems of material production and social organisation. His work has a strong anthropological focus, and he uses aesthetic decisionmaking to engage with complexity. Through an analytical approach, playful investigations, and speculative provocations, Derk’s work aims to express diverse perspectives and imagining resilient futures. Dominic Thurston is a partner, a son, a friend, a brother, an uncle and a collaborator. Much of his life has been shaped by a fascination with people, how they connect and develop relationships, communities, organisations and cultures. He also likes word games, sea swims, yellow socks, weird music, and that perfect final mouthful of dinner that has all the best bits (not an exhaustive list). Douglas Cape has certificates for BA(Hons) French, PG Diploma of Theatre Studies, WSET Sommelier, and PADI Open Water Diver. In reality he is a photographer, webmaster, blogger, cyclist, grandfather and jazz fan. Founded z360.com Emily Foster is an Architectural Assistant at Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. Having recently completed a degree apprenticeship with the practice, she is an advocate for alternative routes into architecture through her work with the Royal Institute of British Architects and architectural charities such as Open City and HomeGrown Plus. Fiona Thendean is a London-based, California-born AI Scientist focusing on responsible AI development. She earned her MSc in Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Development at UCL, where she researched explainability for deep reinforcement learning in the context of climate change policy models. When she isn’t working with code, she designs jewellery, plays piano, and takes long nature walks (and copious photos of birds). Franziska Böhm is an independent German artist based in London, working across music, dance and academia.Drawn to collaboration, she explores what emerges if we soften into relations: with Hannah Archambault she explores voice and movement; she co-directs Palpable with Sofia Pomeroy; cofounded Sounding Sensations Praxis with Serena Ruth. She has a cat called RatBetty and works in a Spanish deli pairing wine and meat. Hannah Archambault is a French-Polish artist, musician and performer. She explores music for its meditative qualities in performance or installation settings. Her voice, organ drones and field recordings are inherent to her compositions. Her latest EP Uneven
Places of Love was released on Glossy Mistakes label. She also forms a duo with Franziska Böhm which has movement, singing and music at its core. Hanna Zafiropoulos works as a researcher, designer and curator. She spends most of her time bringing people together to try and solve complex problems. Hannes Voss joined Musarc in 2011. He embraces the surprise elements of Musarc’s performative choral repertoire which makes him question established principles of conformity. This exposure complements his day-to-day work in the construction industry and nurtures the broader interest in promoting holistic models of working. Besides being a grounded baritone within the ensemble, Hannes provides practical support and logistical skill for the choir’s events at home and abroad.
Hélène Lomenech is a Breton living in South East London since 1996. Currently working as an occupational therapist in a psychiatric hospital, she has a great appreciation for music and sounds – notably birds – and very much enjoys the company of cats. Heni Hale has worked in performance-making, contemporary dance and movement research in higher education. She is currently doing doctoral study using artistic practice to research the archive of a social science organisation. Joining Musarc aligns with her new interests in voice practices, and the dynamics of group relations. Henry Proudlove is a designer and sometime singer of sea shanties who likes finding unusual things for the human voice to do and has a passion for communal music making. Ian Blake writes music and words, and is continually surprised by everyday enchantment. In a former life he made records and toured a lot.
Ieva Paulina is a Latvian Art Director working in advertising. When she is not making ads she spends her free time illustrating, tufting rugs and keeping her plants alive. A member of Musarc since 2015, Jakub Modrzejewski is forever trying to strike a good balance between his work as a software engineer and a passion for music and performance. Joanna Ward is a composer and performer from Newcastle upon Tyne, based in London. Her practice revolves around experimental score-making methodologies, and exploring what happens when improvisation is situated alongside simple, repetitious musical ideas. She likes to work closely with other artists on her projects which often layer live sound with recorded sound, video, and/or other media. She mostly performs contemporary, experimental,
and improvised musics, usually as a singer. Joseph Kohlmaier is the founder of Musarc and has acted as the ensemble’s creative director since 2008. Joseph’s interdisciplinary practice, which brings together performance, research and teaching, curatorial projects, design, and publishing, has been a driving force in the development of the choir and the foundation of its open, experimental, and research-led approach. Joseph is Associate Professor in Critical and Contextual Studies at the School Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University, and the founding director of graphic design practice Polimekanos (2001–2020). Judith Lösing is an architect, joiner and gardener. She is a director at East and the first research fellow at the Architecture Foundation where she is working on a book called the London Arboretum, and curating Tree Talks at the Barbican. She also sings with F*choir. Kirsty FergussonLewis is a singer, composer, performer and producer from London. She combines an experimental and exploratory approach to vocal composition, performance and electronic music. Kirsty graduated from Goldsmiths University with a Master’s degree in Music, Creative Practice, culminating in Sirena, a feminist opera for three women retelling the sirens from Homer’s Odyssey Lisa Peachey is a landscape architect and artist. Her artwork has often been informed by the point of contact between the personal, the private and the sacred, and questions the idea and value of making, through historical and artisan techniques. As the landscape seems to do its own making mostly, she has recently begun exploring Japanese joinery, pottery and singing to connect with the need to create stuff. Lizi Sánchez is a Peruvian visual artist who has been based in London for the past twenty years. Her work explores language, focusing on how meaning shifts through different processes and contexts. She is also the co-founder of Museo en Residencia, a pocket-sized, collaborative, and itinerant museum project. Lola Wilson is a London-based junior architect based in East London. She studied Sculpture at Central Saint Martins and is particularly interested in the intersection of space, form, and sound. Outside of architecture and music, you might find her cycling past you – she loves her bike. Łukasz Kopec´ likes to play with words, sometimes sounds, once weekly with sourdough, and numbers. Margit Kraft is a registered architect,
practicing landscape architect and sculptor and has a specialism in sustainable architecture, natural healthy materials and collective construction. She was trained in music since she was six and has been performing collectively since the age of ten; engaging creatively with space, sound and performance form an active part of her practice. The outcomes of Margit’s creative process are as varied as the challenges she meets when engaging with a brief; a collection of proposals for repair and hope.
Mariam Bergloff is a music researcher and sound artist based in London. Her compositions take the form of dissonant soundscapes, noisy polyrhythmic loops and generative sound collages. She is also half of Spiraal, a new electronic duo drawing upon the paranormal, OSTs, field recordings, discordant melodies and restless dreams. Max West studies Music Composition at Trinity Laban. Max composes instrumental and electronic music, experimenting with ideas around fragmentation, noise, visual art and language. He is a keen collaborator with dance and as a performer, he is a no-input mixer noise artist. Mercedes Vicente is a curator, writer, researcher and lecturer of Critical and Contextual Studies at London Met. She previously taught at the Royal College of Art and held positions at Whitechapel Gallery, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand, and the Whitney Museum in New York. Michael Poole is a Cornish artist and lazy athlete living and working in South London. His practice is concerned with tracing movement through time in the forms of sound, performance, long distance running and cycling. He enjoys back lanes and discarded objects. Michael Guggenheim is a sociologist, who likes to take experiments seriously and would like to be a cook. He is interested in the expertise of others. Natalie Savva is an architect, educator, art exhibition designer and scenographer. She has always lived on an island and finds peace in scuba diving and sweltering cross-country road trips. An alumna of the Cooper Union in NYC, she co-founded Studio naama, also teaching Architecture with a focus on ‘Making housing public.’ Paul Martin Art School: Painting, Reliefs, Sculpture,
Environment & Performances with fellow students including electronic tape. Sculpture: Tape Pieces (with fan) Film: River Film, Mist on Mountains etc. Competitions: Botanic Gardens Station, Glasgow; Bellevor Tor, Dartmoor; River Crossings, London. Book: Spirals through Eye. Exhibition: Along the Roman Wall – LYC Museum, Banks (photographs). Sound: Crossness Pumping Station. Field Studies 2012 and following with Davide Tidoni, Aki Onda and Akio Suzuki, Joseph Kohlmaier and others. Musarc Choir since 2013. Unbuilt roads.
Petra Johnson is an artist and writer interested in how vocalised breath animates air and curious about sounds that are looking for listening ears. Rebecca Faulkner is a spatial practitioner engaged in the fields of Landscape Architecture, Public Realm, and Architecture. She has a keen interest in the gendering and governance of public spaces, actively challenging inherent design biases. In practice, she advocates for cocollaboration with young women and girls, as well as wider local communities, to create more inclusive and equitable places across the city. Reuben Esterhuizen Reuben Esterhuizen is a composer and performer based in London. As a composer he is primarily interested in reiteration and similarity, achieved through a range of score-making practices. As a performer, he enjoys experimental music and movement, with an emphasis on the durational. He likes Beckett, songwriting, and AbEx. Sam Belinfante is a founding member of Musarc. Along with filmmaking and photographic work, his practice incorporates curating, sound and performance. Recent exhibitions include I See a Voice, The National Festival of Making (2023); This is a Voice at MAAS Sydney and Wellcome Collection, London (2016–17) and To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells, Radar at Loughborough’s Carillion (2018). Recent performances include The Long, very long Journey with Laure Prouvost at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2023); Feedback at Palais De Tokyo, Paris (2017) and On the One Hand and the Other at Camden Art Centre where he was artist in residence 2015–16. For over fifteen years Belinfante has been teaching art at a variety of levels,
including as Assistant Professor of Fine Art at University of Leeds (2021–22) where he acts as director of Centre for Audio Visual Experimentation (since 2016) Sandra Djukic is a visual artist, designer and educator from Serbia/ Croatia/UK. Intertwining thoughts, emotions and play in design, art and craft, the goal is producing authentic and engaged results both in her own practice and helping nurture a student’s path to find those qualities as well. Telling stories on her piano, Saori Miraku is a pianist-composer, improviser and performer. Her musical work includes her compositions, piano solo, improvisation-based collaborations with instrumentalists, sound artists and visual artists. Her music is an invitation to transcend, to reach beyond the everyday world and into a place of stories, memories, imagination, dreams and transformation. Saori released her piano solo album Many Times on Earth in December 2023. She also appears in short films, music videos and photographic projects. Sophie Barshall is an artist and writer from London. Tara Fatehi is a performer, writer, and performance maker and co-founder of From the Lips to the Moon experimental music and poetry nights. She explores playfulness, mistranslation and unfinishedness through dance, poetry, voice and video. Her book Mishandled Archive documents her 365 days microperformances in public space (LADA 2020). Tara Marshall-Tierney is an artist whose work involves collaboration, storytelling and voice, making playful comparisons on the interconnections between physical and online communities. These interests also spill into her day job in arts marketing. Toni Gutman, happily in Hackney since 1973, now spends her time in Musarc, and Maspindzeli (the London Georgian Choir), gardening on her balcony and in Hackney Tree Nursery, Balkan dancing, chatting to neighbours, and (in vain) trying to keep up with all the music, theatre etc. that London offers. Zeina Nasr is a songwriter, improviser, analogue synth devotee, and lover of cats.
Musarc is part of The Centre for Creative Arts, Cultures and Engagement (CREATURE) at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University. The choir rehearses near Aldgate East on Tuesday evenings from September–July. To find out more about the choir and how to join visit musarc.org
Recorded over two days in April 2025 at Luca School of Arts, Ghent, Affordances offers a view into Musarc’s quietly radical, and maybe unrecordable, approach to what a choir can do and the unique space it creates for artists, musicians and singers to develop new ideas. The evening will feature live extracts from Haegenborgh’s music.
A special edition of the vinyl – with a sleeve screen-printed by Ghost and an orange vinyl lathe-cut by Bladud Flies! – will be available for £50 on the night. A digital edition (£8) is available on Bandcamp and on general release via music streaming services. A standard black vinyl edition (£24) can be pre-ordered on Bandcamp.
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The choir first performed Lin Chiwei’s Tape Music at Cafe OTO on 2 April 2015. During a performance of the piece, a 120m-long ribbon embroidered with syllables moves through a spiral of singers who transport the tape collectively, enunciating each syllable as it passes by. A performance of Tape Music does not require preparation, practice or specific skills. The score itself materialises the performance, as long as the performers can form a consensus on the nature of objects and movement, language, tension, space, alignment and misalignment, the voice, or the nature of time and sound. The idea that animates Tape Music, a project Lin Chiwei has been working on since 2004, is exceedingly simple but its effect is quietly radical and subversive. In 2015, the artist created a version of the score for Musarc which was painstakingly constructed and stamped by architect Neil Evenson, then a member of the ensemble, using curtain ribbon. The score and its symbolic charge shifted the choir’s practice dramatically. It is the only work the choir has performed often, at least once a year. Many singers who join the ensemble experience it as an initiation to the choir’s practice, pedagogy and way of working. But it also represents a different epistemology and practice-intelligence that is still being absorbed and fermenting in its body. In 2024, Lin Chiwei created a new tape score for the ensemble based on the quipu, a recording device fashioned from string historically used by the Inca people and other cultures in the region of Andean South America. The quipu stores information in the form
of knots on coloured string, from tax obligations or census records to personal and social calendrical events. Lin Chiwei’s Quipou Sonore 1.5 Stéréo for Musarc employs two string scores that are read simultaneously by a double choir. Unlike Tape Music, the score relies entirely on touch, and can be performed in complete darkness. Information on which consonant to perform, and when to perform it, is given by the texture and braid of the string and the placement of the knots.
Musarc is one of the UK’s foremost experimental choirs. The ensemble has developed a distinct reputation for its interdisciplinary and researchled approach to music and performance, and the space it affords artists and singers to experiment with new ideas. Since its inception, the choir has collaborated with more than 130 artists and composers, including Jennifer Walshe, Keiji Haino, Jay Bernard, Lin Chiwei, Laure Provost, Ed Atkins, Lina Lapelytė, Jack Sheen, Imogen Stidworthy, Neil Luck and many others; and numerous festivals and arts organisations in the UK and abroad including Artangel, Tate Britain, ICA Institute of Contemporary Arts, Northampton Contemporary Arts, BBC Proms, London Contemporary Music Festival, Post Disaster (Taranto, Italy), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the Royal Academy, CCA Goldsmiths, Museum of London, Serpentine Gallery, MK Gallery, Wysing Polyphonic, Cafe OTO and Bold Tendencies. Musarc is part of The Centre for Creative Arts, Cultures and Engagement (CREATURE) at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University.
musarc.org
6.30pm
7.00pm
Staring at the Sun
Joanna Ward, Rosabel, Believe!
Reuben Esterhuizen, The Great End
Staring at the Sun is a durational performance with two central choral works surrounded by multiple happenings. The audience is encouraged to move and change position to experience events from different perspectives.
Musarc commissions. World premiere.
Soloists: Franziska Böhm, Ian Blake, Max West, Reuben Esterhuizen, Saori Miraku
Interval
8.15pm
9.00pm
9.22pm
Sumer is icumen in c. 1250
Heleen van Haegenborgh 2025 Implicit Affordance Possible Affordance
Musarc commissions. World Premiere.
Soloists (Implicit Affordance): Franziska Böhm, Joseph Kohlmaier, Kirsty Ferguson-Lewis, Michael Poole, Sam Belinfante, Sophie Barshall
Thomas Tallis, If Ye Love Me c. 1550
Robert Lucas de Pearsall, Lay a Garland 1840
Interval
Lin Chiwei, Quipou Sonore 1.5 Stéréo for Musarc 2024
Musarc is part of The Centre for Creative Arts, Cultures and Engagement (CREATURE) at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University. The choir rehearses near Aldgate East on Tuesday evenings from September–July. To find out more about the choir and how to join visit musarc.org