Sarah Angliss

Sarah Angliss is a composer, performer and robotic artist who composs for film, theatre and the concert stage – including her own live performance. Her finely-wrought, highly inventive music uses voices, orchestral and ancient instruments augmented by her bespoke electronics, Max and hand-built music machines. In 2018 she received a Composer’s Award from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

Angliss’ highly inventive work reflects an eclectic musical background. A classically-trained musician, who specialised in contemporary composition, baroque and renaissance music, Sarah also has degrees in electroacoustic engineering and evolutionary systems (including robotics and machine learning). Sarah combines these disciplines to create her highly distinctive soundworld. Her ‘Ealing Feeder’, for example, is a robotic polyphonic carillon that plays at inhuman speeds, creating a haze of metallic sound, unlike anything that could be conjured through sampling. Thematically, Angliss is inspired by the meeting point of machines and mysticism. She’s also inspired by contemporary expressions of ancient European folklore.

In her work, Sarah devises her own highly-distinctive processing techniques, often reimagining and updating the sound palette of the 1950s and 60s Radiophonic pioneers. Sarah has performed her works at venues around Europe and is currently completing an electroacoustic chamber opera Giant, due for its premiere in summer with Britten Pears Arts (date tbc due to Covid pandemic). Her score for ‘The Hairy Ape’, Eugene O’Neill’s expressionist play on shock of modernity, featured at The Old Vic, London, and Park Avenue Armory, New York. She recently composed an expansive electroacoustic score for Romola Garai’s horror film  ‘Amulet‘ which premiered at Sundance 2020 and was released in July 2020.

Angliss is also a prolific live performer, playing at venues championing new and experimental music including The Royal Festival Hall, Purcell Room, Cafe Oto, Kings’ Place, LSO St Luke’s, The Union Chapel, Camden Arts Centre and BBC Radio Theatre, London; National Sawdust, Brooklyn; The Wales Millennium Centre; Cardiff; BBC Halls, Swansea; Centre for Contemporary Arts and Glad Cafe, Glasgow; Supersonic Festival, Birmingham;  Supernormal, Oxfordshire; The Arnolfini, The Cube and Spike Island, Bristol; Star and Shadow Newcastle; Elektriteater, Tartu, and many others.

A multi-instrumentalist, Sarah is particularly known for her skills on:

Theremin
Recorders (including augmented techniques)
Keyboard – including piano and clavisimbalum

She’s also a highly skilled producer and electronic music programmer – known for her original work with Max/MSP and robotics.

In 2005, Sarah initiated and led Infrasonic (aka Soundless Music) – a highly influential pair of counterbalanced experiments in the Purcell Room, London, in which music was laced with sound below 20Hz. This experiment, involving parapsychologists, musicians and acousticians from the National Physical Laboratory, aimed to explore whether infrasonics could account for strange feelings at reputedly haunted sites – as well as the sense of awe felt when organ music uses extreme bass pipes. The work from Infrasonic has influenced countless other musicians and experimenters over the last 15 years and has led to infrasound being incorporated in stage plays, operas and more.

Sarah also works as a sound designer for leading theatres and researches and writes about sound culture. She’s researched and presented BBC Radio 4 documentaries on the cultural history of the echo and on the strange, ancient practice of teaching birds human tunes. A board member of The Daphne Oram Trust, in 2016 she wrote a biography of electronic pioneer Oram for the introduction to the reprint of Oram’s 1972 treatise: An Individual Note of Sound, Music and Electronics.

The film and theatre enquiries, please contact representative Chantelle Woodnutt at Air-Edel – details below.

For live bookings please contact Creative Producer Angharad Cooper – details on Sarah’s website.