Idyll (from Nature Pieces)

Performed by Vicky Wright, Tom Pauwels, Roderick Chadwick, Marcus Barcham Stevens, Séverine Ballon and Mark Knoop.

Instrumente und Rauschen

Performed at SPOR Festival 2010, Aarhus by Sarah Nicolls, Alexander Waterman, Vicky Wright, Mark Knoop, Joanna Bailie, Tom Pauwels and Matthew Shlomowitz.

1-127

Performed at SPOR Festival 2010 by Tom Pauwels.

Geräuschtöne

Performed by Aisha Orazbayeva, Alice Purton, Serge Vuille and Mark Knoop.

On and Off

Performed at the ICA, May 2009, by Matthew Shlomowitz, Laurence Crane, Tom Pauwels, Alexander Waterman, Mark Knoop and Joanna Bailie.

Octet

Performed at Milton Court Concert Hall, London on 19 October 2021 as part of the ‘Festival of Laurence Crane’. Commissioned by Plus-Minus Ensemble with funds provided by the PRS Foundation.

Cobbled Section After Cobbled Section

Performed at Milton Court Concert Hall, London on 19 October 2021 as part of the ‘Festival of Laurence Crane’. Original version commissioned by BBC Radio 3 for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, this arrangement by Mark Knoop.

Come back to the old specimen cabinet John Vigani, John Vigani

Performed at the ICA, May 2009 by Mark Knoop, Tom Pauwels, Matthew Shlomowitz, Vicky Wright, Laurence Crane, Joanna Bailie on auxiliary instruments, with Alexander Waterman solo cello.

Real Telepaths

Real Telepaths is a 45 minute performance created and performed with members of Plus Minus Ensemble, Neil Luck, and a group of other musicians. The work is an act of visioning; a central performer, incased in a sound-proof foam cube attempts desperately to bring into alignment a diverse array of voices, instruments, radio signals and images. Questions of communication, personal relations, communal experiences, and imagined futures collate in a telepathic squall, finally (almost) coming into focus as a live accompanied cinematic image.

The work uses music already known by the players individually, reframed within a composed structure to create a performance that is unique to the ensemble. By drawing on the individual musical personalities of all the performers involved, Luck creates a primer, a catalogue, or a kind of lexicon of musical materials (in whatever style they play) based on empirical, abstract, and poetic qualities; key, tempo, weight, emotion, profundity, taste.

The performance is an orchestration of these materials, presenting them collectively, individually, simultaneously, warped and twisted in tempo, character, sentiment, and technique. Threaded together by, and responding to a central spoken monologue, Real Telepaths operates as a piece of instrumental theatre, the core of which is the act of musical performance itself.

Plus Minus and Luck serve as ‘sectional’ leaders for the full ensemble, wrangling this unsteady, blurred, saturated mass of sound into collectively poignant form. The vision for the piece is hypnagogic, wildly dynamic, ‘immersive’, oneiric, dense, complex, and overwhelming.

Performances

• Reid School of Music, Edinburgh, 22 September 2021
• Guildhall School of Music and Drama, 19 October 2021
• University of Southampton, 15 November 2021
• Klangspuren Schwaz, 4 July 2023

Shout 1, 2, 3

Performed at Warsaw Autumn Festival, September 2019, by Aisha Orazbayeva, Alice Purton, Vicky Wright, Emma Arden and Primož Sukič.

Anubis, Nout

Anubis

Nout

Performed by Vicky Wright.

After and Before

Performed by Roderick Chadwick, Vicky Wright, Tom Pauwels, Marcus Barcham Stevens, Lucy Railton, Mark Knoop and Newton Armstrong.

Rise

Performed at the 2004 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival by Plus-Minus.

Repetitions in Extended Time

Performed at the 2008 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival by Plus-Minus.

DW23: …Loops for Dr. X

Performed at Kammer Klang, Cafe Oto November 2013 by Vicky Wright, Tom Pauwels, Roderick Chadwick, Mark Knoop, Aisha Orazbayeva and Newton Armstrong.

Forty-eight Variations for Two Pianos

Performed by Roderick Chadwick and Mark Knoop.