2026-10-12T02:37:39Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/33980638 2026-09-24T07:45:10Z category_48652 category_48781 category_48754 category_48736 category_46546 portal_1068 item_type_2 month_year_09_2026

Vestibule Ed Cooper (24712942) W300 - Music W390 - Music not elsewhere classified W380 - Composition W371 - Sound design/commercial music recording J931 - Music recording Contemporary classical music Experimental music Electroacoustic music Microtonality Heartbeat-tempo structures Extended instrumental techniques Sonic embodiment Listening studies Low-frequency sound Chamber music Vestibule is an album by composer Ed Cooper, performed by Ben Finlay, Jack Adler-McKean, and Octandre Ensemble. Structured as a diptych enclosed within a triptych, its two longer works utilise the performers’ heartbeats as tempi. These pulses offer irregular yet regulatory anchors, both affected by and affecting the players’ gestures, guiding them through drifting, splintering deepness—a duo of eclipsing mobiles of arrhythmia. The pieces’ extended durations and static structures invite an absorbed attentiveness, yet, simultaneously, displace the listener, evoking an experience more akin to eavesdropping than immersion: this detachment is the very mode of their expression. The three shorter pieces similarly occupy low frequencies but, in contrast, present sonic worlds constructed from clearer melodic materials. They suggest something of a framing gesture for the album, but are, paradoxically, themselves transient and intimate, as if disorientated, miniature requiems for the spectral corporeality of their longer counterparts. The Indentation, The Mobile, and The Suppression were composed for cellist and pianist Ben Finlay in 2025 and recorded by Ed Cooper at the University of Leeds in May 2025. They were originally transcriptions of fragments of songs by Jeff Buckley. If a romantic expression is to be found in them, then this is through murky lowness and an uncanny timbral saturation. … grown up, you are grown, and feeling stronger, feeling… was composed for tubist Jack Adler-McKean across 2020–22 and recorded by Aaron Holloway-Nahum at the Royal Northern College of Music in April 2022. The 25-minute-long piece makes use of unusual performance techniques—such as singing, growling, and multiphonics—in both its live and fixed media parts and an unusual four-valved microtonal tuba. The music plots a fracturing path, never explicit in its direction, but momentarily passing through material governed by a lurking, sometimes concealed heartbeat; the piece stutters in and around bodily grumbles. It has been mixed to offer a sense of contorting space, as if the listener oscillates somewhere between noise, melodies, and propelling heartbeats, never settling on one space. The score has been published by Edition Gravis. The piece was premiered at the 2023 Darmstadt Summer Courses and has since been played in Gothenburg as part of the Levande Musik concert series. … as far as… unloving still… down on your stomach… was composed for Octandre Ensemble across 2022–23 and is scored for the unusual line-up of contrabass flute, two bass clarinets, and two double basses. The 26-minute-long piece was recorded at Goldsmiths Music Studios by Sean Woodlock in March 2023 with additional mixing by Aaron Holloway-Nahum and Ed Cooper. With each player straining for lowness amongst overlaid and unclear heartbeats, again through a selection of destabilising techniques, the music inhabits a world of deep, hollow melodies, with harmonies being introduced and disrupted through the mêlée of bodies. Indeed, like its solo counterpart, the chamber piece drifts through material, but uses this multiplicity of corporeal noise as its structural and listening guide. The project was mastered by Miles Whittaker (Demdike Stare and Pendle Coven) at Full Range Mastering. The artwork is made of a series of overlaid black and white film photographs of a dying sunflower head taken by Ed Cooper in Salisbury, a small city in the south of England. It was edited with help from Ronnie Danaher. Performed by Ben Finlay, Jack Adler-McKean, and Octandre Ensemble Recorded and mixed by Ed Cooper and Aaron Holloway-Nahum Mastered by Miles Whittaker at Full Range Mastering Artwork by Ed Cooper and Ronnie Danaher 2026-05-08T00:00:00Z Dataset Media 10.24385/lincoln.33980638.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/media/Vestibule/33980638 All Rights Reserved