LIVE x EMPRes
Free, booking essential
Discover how music, art, and technology interconnect.
The University of Oxford’s EMPRes group again collaborate with Modern Art Oxford to present an evening of experimental performance, electronic music, sound art, film, and movement.
We are lucky to present an immersive performance from prominent electronic music composer and visual artist, Leafcutter John. He presents two new works, including an improvised collaboration with Music Faculty finalist and Jazz Saxophonist, Eve Boulos.
We will also feature works composed, presented and curated by the students from the University of Oxford’s Music Faculty and Ruskin School of Art, that respond to the MAO retrospective exhibition of Barbara Steveni: I Find Myself - uncovering female stories and exploring the social impact of art through the life and work of artist-activist Barbara Steveni (1 March – 8 June 2025).
Featuring:
Leafcutter John Nothing Makes Sense
Nothing Makes Sense was composed in 2025 for a concert at the legendary Inner Spaces Primavera festival in Milan. The multi-channel piece combines my interests in free improvisation and electro-acoustic music. The backbone of the piece is a pre-recorded improvisation using a broken and dismantled 3D printer, electric guitar, Cretan lyre, and hand drums. Out of which electro acoustic passages branch, creating a dynamic and compelling sonic journey which contrasts the freeness of improvised playing with the precision of tape music.
Bradford-born and Wakefield-raised, Leafcutter John has built a remarkable career in experimental music over the last 24 years. Gaining initial recognition through Mike Paradinas’s Planet Mu record label, John has gone on to develop a varied musical practice. He has released7 solo studio albums, collaborated widely, and was a key agitator in the twice Mercury-nominated band Polar Bear.
Catherine Lamb Curvo Totalitas
Performed by Antoinette Cheng and Henry Wadsworth.
Tom Bruges Toothwart
The piece is part of a series of reflections on the area in and around 50°52'00.0"N 0°38'00.0"E including: “252 Impulses of Magnolia”, “The Viceroy 2’s”, “Hawthorn Blossom”, and now “Toothwort”. Toothwort is a flowering plant commonly found on this seaside glen, parasitic on the roots of hazel and alder. The classical guitar acts as a root system from which the music flowers.
Ynyr Pritchard The Beauty of Stone Deities
The piece is an attempt to explore the boundaries—physical and non-physical—of spaces and how they can or cannot create exclusion and/or inclusion. It is dedicated to the incredible Tom Bruges.
Grace Whorrall-Campbell Half the Work
Half the Work references Barbara Steveni's role in the Artists' Placement Group (APG). The piece explores the soundtrack-ification of the modern workplace through algorithmically generated playlists compiled by online platforms. Half the Work reimagines the earlier sonic landscape of work songs for the modern office. It juxtaposes anonymous folk traditions with similarly anonymous artificial intelligence-generated music, highlighting the ways that data work is invisibilised through the appearance of automated smoothness.
