LSO Discovery

Below is a quote from David Attenborough on Lucy Rie from Omnibus in 1982:

'[The potter] Lucie Rie uses one particularly distinctive style of decoration that immediately identifies a pot as hers … She starts by painting the raw, unfired clay with an oxide –in this case, manganese. It will fire to a rich chocolate brown; she then scratches lines through it … This scratch decoration, called sgraffito, is only one of the techniques that she uses. Her glazes are subtle and varied. Often she offsets traditional earthy ones – browns, yellows, whites – with startling bands of brilliant colours: greens, golds, reds, and blues … The colour of her pots comes not only from their glaze but from the body of the pot itself. This one is being made from two separate lumps of different clay that were placed together on the wheel and then thrown, so that a spiral of slightly different colours will appear in the pot when it’s fired … Another of her decorative techniques, inlay, is in effect the opposite of sgraffito. The lines are scratched not into the glaze but into the body, which is subsequently covered with pigment. The pot is then washed repeatedly so that the colour of the pigment will appear in the lines alone. Sometimes the effect is simple and delicate. Sometimes the inlay is so complex that the whole surface of the pot is transformed.'

Sam Longbottom

Sam Longbottom is a Manchester-based composer making experimental music for concerts and installations with found, homemade and traditional instruments. Much of his work explores the imperfect, unusual and unexpected sounds of automated systems and acoustic instruments, of mechanising glitches and peripheral noises.

His music has been featured at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Aldeburgh Festival, Sonorities Festival, in Nonclassical concerts at the Southbank Centre and St John’s Church (London), Manchester Art Gallery and broadcast on BBC’s New Music Show. He has previously been a Britten Pears Young Artist, a Manchester Camerata Ruth Sutton Fellow, a resident at Villa Ruffieux (Switzerland) and worked with artists and groups including Angharad Davies, The House of Bedlam and CoMA.

Light echoes are astronomical phenomena observed from afar. A bright flash caused by an explosion such as a supernova appears to expand, gradually illuminating surrounding debris as light travels at finite speed. According to scientists' estimates, 130 stars end their lives by going supernovae every second. Through these spectacular explosions, their fusion cores eject the building materials of life into the universe.

At a slower rate, one human language becomes extinct every 14 days, with half of the 6,500 languages spoken on Earth today projected to disappear by the end of the century.

Stars have served as navigational guides and timekeepers for millennia, inspiring exploration of the unknown. Language processing changes human brain structure, shaping ways in which we think. Just as our societies lose original languages and their collected wisdom through cultural homogenisation, we are also rapidly losing access to the night sky through light pollution and unregulated proliferation of artificial satellites. Both losses have profound implications for our wellbeing and ability to thrive as a species.

Light Echoes is the story of a dying star told in a critically endangered language. I would like to acknowledge astronomer Phil Plait for sparking the initial idea for this piece with Echoes of Light Illuminate the Cosmos, Scientific American, 8 August 2025. This project was developed through LSO Soundhub, generously supported by Susie Thomson with additional support from the Hinrichsen Foundation and mentoring by Angharad Davies.

_{Note by Xenia Pestova Bennett}

Xenia Pestova Bennett

Pianist and composer Xenia Pestova Bennett has earned an international reputation as a leading proponent of uncompromising music. Her work spans a wide range of soundworlds, styles and genres from classical and contemporary art music to free improvisation, experimental electronica, multimedia and avant-pop.

Xenia has been featured at major festivals and concert halls around the world including the National Concert Hall in Dublin, the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, Glasshouse Gateshead, Glasgow Royal Concert Halls, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Festival Archipel (Geneva), Approximation (Dusseldorf), Ars Musica (Brussels), Christchurch Arts Festival (New Zealand), Lanaudière (Canada), London Contemporary Music Festival, Musica (Strasbourg), New Music Dublin, Royal Albert Hall (London), Sonorities (Belfast), Spark (US), Rainy Days (Luxembourg) and Voix Nouvelles Royaumont (France). She has also performed in a tropical rainforest, on a river ferry, deep inside a cave system and while partially submerged in a pond.

Recent highlights include a PRSF Beyond Borders tour of Xenia’s new work BAILE/home for early music instruments and electronics, GLOW for Magnetic Resonator Piano with ensemble and video at the PRSF New Music Biennial in Bradford and London’s Southbank Centre, world premiere of Ed Bennett’s Piano Concerto with the RTE Concert Orchestra Dublin and the release of the complete piano works of Annea Lockwood on Unsounds (Amsterdam).

Early film studios withheld their actors' names, fearing the power and financial demands that recognition would bring. Actress Florence Lawrence was the first to break this arrangement, founding her own production studio, introducing the actor credit and, with it, the era of the film star. Her fame was built entirely on her image; when talkies became the dominant form, her acting career had already slowed, her voice never having fully featured in a film. She was a massively visible and influential screen actor whose voice was never heard.

Sweet People takes the symbolic yet silent role of Lawrence as a point of departure, reflecting on the lure and melancholy of the American cinema apparatus, evoking and skewing the strange afterlives of its images and performers.

The work is part intermedia theatre, part concerto for sensory percussion, ensemble and interactive moving image. It stumbles and slips between the melancholic, janky setting of the Nickelodeon and the metallic synthesis of the platform feed. Regenerated image and unmoored sound accumulate, loop and misalign, assembling and dismantling a studio scene from the wrong time and space.

Thanks to the performers: Chihiro, Eliza, Evangeline and Sana and to Joyce Lam for creating the space for this early experiment to happen in this way. Deep thanks to Klara Kofen for the Murder Ballad text and your support throughout, to Okamirufu for TouchDesigner advice and to James Oldham for directing the initial but invaluable choir rehearsal.

_{Note by Cameron Graham}

Cameron Graham

Cameron is an artist, sensory percussionist and composer whose work unsettles and reorients sonic experience through intermedia, parafiction and simulation. Projects unfold across installation, electronic music, hybrid performance, intermedia and interaction design. Recent work and research explores the role of the voice and entertainment infrastructures in histories of automation, capture, synthesis and AI-mediation – the emergent social and ethical ambiguities that surround contemporary agency and authenticity.

Recent and upcoming projects include Tale of Tales, a performance installation created with Gary Zhexi Zhang and Klara Kofen (October 2026, Somerset House); a new participatory installation with BEK Bergen (February 2026); fake & extinct, made in collaboration with artist Klara Kofen (2025, Centrale Fies’ Live Works Festival; programmed by TBA21 for Terrafilia, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza), Admiror, or Revolutionary Sentiments (2023-25, commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum New York; first commissioned by BEK Bergen/reimagine Europe; created with Klara Kofen and Bahar Noorizadeh), Attrapé un Eclair (2024, commissioned by le lieu unique, Nantes; created with Blandine Briere); and Metamers, directed by Gary Zhexi Zhang (2024, EPFL Lausanne). Exhibitions and installations include Aponia Gallery Paris (2021), Les Limbes St Etienne (2021), and the ISMAG and Solyanka Galleries in Moscow (2019; 2020). Music for moving images has been shown at Glasgow School of Art, ICA London, and the Courtauld Gallery London, as well as his sound design and music featuring in campaigns by brands from miu miu, Ferragamo, Bvlgari and Chanel.