Sustainable Composing

A meeting point for discourse, practical exploration, and installations, with a focus on sustainable, environmentally conscious, and site-specific sound practices

How can sound and art strengthen connections between people, local communities, and nature? This seminar allows the audience to meet artists and experience artistic practices that invite us to listen to the world in new ways.

The contributions are based on the use of materials, stories, and technology with a conscious relationship to environment and resources. They draw on local nature, neighbourhoods, and ecological issues, and approach materials, stories, and technology with a sustainable perspective.

Through various presentations, workshops, and conversations, participants are given tools to strengthen connections between people, places, and the more-than-human, and to inspire new forms of care and responsibility.

Some parts of the seminar (10–11 September) are closed and require registration. See the programme below.

Open programme

Friday 12 September (09.30–14.20)

• 09.00. Welcome with coffee and tea
• 09.30. Introduction by composer, sound artist and performer Lil Lacy (moderator)
• 09.35. Luis Fernando Amaya: Musical Exercises to Connect with the More-Than-Human
  Presentation
• 10.35. Natalie Hyacinth: MUVA of da EarTH: Black Sonic Techno Feminism in an Era of Nature Loss
  Presentation on sonic reflections on nature loss, and how music, technology, and feminism can open up new ways of imagining liberation from political and social norms tied to nature.
• 10.55. Frazer Merrick: Musical Mudlarking
  Presentation of an ongoing project with field recordings, conversations, and instruments from the muddy riverbanks of the River Colne in Colchester, England.
• 11.15. Break
• 11.30. Giuseppe Pisano-Riise: The Mic and the Street: A Look into the Ethics of Field Recordings in Urban Environments
  Lecture on the ethics of sound recording in urban contexts, with examples from projects and fieldwork highlighting challenges related to privacy, class, gender, and identity. Reflections on how different contexts require different approaches—and when it is best to put the recorder away.
• 12.30. Lunch
• 13.30. Jessie Cox: Imagining New Futures Through Sound
  Lecture where participants are invited to reflect on how sound can be a tool to imagine new futures and reconsider our relationships with each other and our surroundings.

Installation programme

Friday 12 September (14.30–22.00)

• John Andrew Wilhite: Critical Resonance, Critical Ecologies, video installation
• Frazer Merrick: Musical Mudlarking, installation
• Natalie Hyacinth: MUVA //, installation
• Margrethe Pettersen: Láibmat II, video documentation
• Luis Fernando Amaya: Mi Libro es la Tierra: Rosa Ixchel, video installation and sneak peek

Closed programme

(Registration required, limited capacity)

On 10 and 11 September, a closed seminar programme will be presented for composers and sound artists wishing to explore how environment and ecology can be a driving force in creative practice.

Read more and apply

Contributors include Afrorack (Brian Bamanya), Margrethe Pettersen, Espen Hjort, and Anja Lauvdal.

The programme includes:

• An exploratory and hands-on session on DIY sound technology, recycling, and creative reuse with musician and synth pioneer Afrorack (Brian Bamanya).
• A sound walk and gallery visit with artist Margrethe Pettersen, offering insight into an artistic practice that emphasises ecology, listening, deep time, and care, rooted in specific places, plants, or organisms.
• An excursion to Østmarka with artist and director Espen Hjort, who shares experiences from the development of Treework, a work that attempts to open us to the embodied knowledge of trees, based on the idea that trees are creative beings that express themselves through movement and music.
• Improvisation and conversation with Anja Lauvdal related to her research project Nære lydbilder: An Artistic Exploration of Local Communities.

Course participants are given space to share experiences and reflections related to their own practice.

Biographies

Lil Lacy is a composer, singer, and musician. She has developed her curiosity for composition, sound, and improvisation through a wide range of diverse artistic collaborations, projects, and works. Dialogue across participants and audiences is a central part of her practice.

Luis Fernando Amaya is a composer and researcher. His work often explores collective memories and the relationship between humans and more-than-human actors such as plants, animals, and the environment. His music creates connections between sound, space, and living systems, inviting reflection on how we coexist with the world around us.

Natalie Hyacinth is a sound artist and scholar working at the intersection of music, technology, climate justice, and Black life. Her creative practice is both intersectional and interdisciplinary, with themes from cultural geography, philosophy, and Afrofuturism. Through experimenting with sound and sound technology as forms of resistance, she creates new sonic worlds as part of her activist work under the name The Black Astral.

Frazer Merrick is a sound artist working with field recordings and self-built instruments. His work is interactive and exploratory, combining sound, light, and inventive technology to create surprising and playful sonic experiences.

Giuseppe Pisano-Riise is a composer of electroacoustic music and a researcher in sound studies at the Norwegian Academy of Music. His work is characterised by the use of field recordings to explore space and society. He writes on sound perception, storytelling, epistemology, and politics. As a musician, he composes acousmatic music and is known as an improviser within computer music and acousmonium performances.

Jessie Cox is a composer and percussionist who uses Afrofuturism, listening, and critical theory as entry points into his artistic research. His work explores the universe, future, and existence through sound, creating music that ventures into the unknown and opens new spaces for reflection and experience.

John Andrew Wilhite is a musician, sound artist, and researcher at the Norwegian Academy of Music, working at the intersection of experimental music, visual art, and cross-artistic collaboration. His practice explores the relationships between sound, space, and body, and how music and visual elements can create new experiences and understandings.

Margrethe Iren Pettersen is an artist working site-specifically with ecology, Sámi identity, and the relationship between humans and nature. Her projects unfold through installations, sound walks, sculptures, and photography, often rooted in specific places, plants, or organisms.

Brian Bamanya (aka Afrorack) is a musician and pioneer in building electronic instruments from recycled materials. He combines African rhythms, techno, and acid house in improvised live sets, creating a distinctive sound that has gained recognition both in Africa and internationally.

Espen Hjort is an artist and director. He recently created Treework, an opera made and performed in collaboration with trees. The work arises from an exploration of how more-than-human perspectives can be included in a creative process from start to finish, how a human practice such as theatre might bend or transform to accommodate these perspectives, and the challenges involved in letting go of control and artistic direction.

Anja Lauvdal is a jazz pianist and composer. She is a research fellow at the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she investigates how working with local nature can foster strong emotional connections to nature and a desire to protect it. She explores how improvisation, with its democratic principles of co-listening and momentary intuition, can open the senses of both performers and audiences.

Credits

The programme is part of the one-year project Sustainable Composing & Creative Sound Practices, which addresses, among other things, green sound technology, sustainable choices in creative processes, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and involvement of local communities. The programme is developed by Ultima, Nordic Music Days, and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and is supported by Arts Council England, the Danish Arts Foundation, and Arts Council Norway.