LIVE x EMPRes

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 released 7 solo studio albums, collaborated widely, and was a key agitator in the twice Mercury-nominated band Polar Bear. 

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. 

Deshna Shah is an artist and researcher exploring the unseen structures that shape human perception, drawing from Jain philosophy, quantum physics, and cultural identity. Her practice spans immersive installations, experimental film, painting, and Twilight Language – a cryptographic script she developed to encode hidden meanings. Her work examines how meaning is formed, obscured, and reinterpreted. Shah holds a BFA and MFA from the Ruskin School of Art and was a Fellow at Princeton University. She has exhibited widely, including at Tate Modern, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and HOME Manchester.

Juliet Merchant is an award winning composer and pianist. She has written scores for Soviet silent films that have been shown internationally in venues such as Curzon Cinemas, La Cinemateque Paris, Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival, Institut Français, National Cinema Centre Armenia and MoMA. She is a prize-winner of The Blackheath International Music Festival, Ealing Music Festival and The Vigevano Soundscape Competition and is signed by EMI and Motus Music.

Catherine Lamb (b. 1982, Olympia, WA. U.S.) is an active composer exploring the interaction of tone, summations of shapes and shadows, phenomenological expansions, the architecture of the liminal (states in between outside/inside), and the long introduction form. She began her musical life early, later abandoning the conservatory in 2003 to study Hindustani music in Pune, India. She received her BFA in 2006 under James Tenney and Michael Pisaro at CalArts in Los Angeles, where she first developed her research into the interaction of tone and continued to compose, teach, and collaborate with musicians (such as Laura Steenberge and Julia Holter on Singing by Numbers). 

Tom Bruges is a third-year undergraduate reading music at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He has studied classical guitar with Craig Ogden and, after receiving a place on the Ox-RAM scheme, Prof. Stephen Goss. He has performed in many recitals across Oxford, with a particular focus on championing and arranging new music. He is an avid composer, having music performed by Ensemble Isis and as a part of his concert series of new music, Red Lipstick. His music focuses on experimenting with tuning and maximalism.

Ynyr Pritchard is a Maltese-Welsh composer and performer in their final year at the University of Oxford. Ynyr is a member of the faculty’s new music ensemble and collective, Red Lipstick. They are also a member of FISHGUY, a free improvisation group which opened for MATMOS. He currently studies viola with Stephen Upshaw. In 2021 & 2022, Ynyr composed and performed two works building from Annea Lockwood’s ‘Piano Drowning’ with soundlands and Plas Bodfa, the first presented for ISSUE Project Room’s celebrations of Lockwood. In 2023 he was a chosen composer for the Limina Contemporary Music Festival in Salzburg to create a new work with Ensemble Adapter and this summer Ynyr will be attending the Lucerne Festival Academy.

Grace Whorrall-Campbell is an artist, archivist and researcher, interested in history telling and community life under capitalism. Grace’s practice involves moving image, audio and often takes the form of workshops and facilitation, frequently in collaboration. Grace holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and is the Burgess Brock Junior Research Fellow in Modern British History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Grace’s writing has been published by Bloomsbury and the University of London Press. Grace is an Associate Member of The NewBridge Project. 

Chaoming Zheng is an artist with a Literature studies background. She has studied in Fudan University, Royal College of Art, and University of Oxford. Her practice explores themes of connection, feminism, glitches during reproducibility, and overlapping diaspora in archives. She crafts narratives that weave together fiction, digital anomalies and the physical world. She portrays herself as a shapeshifting bard/a slippery fox who fabulizes traumatic realities with symbols both fragile and intimate. Her practice includes a variety of media from print making, painting, to moving images and installations. 

Sophie Li is a second-year undergraduate reading Music at the University of Oxford. 

Her piece Visible Voices is a multimedia installation that intimately explores the collective identity and hidden emotional landscapes of eight diverse women. Through digitally layered and mosaiced portraiture carefully designed to preserve anonymity, the piece reflects on interconnectedness and universal human experiences. Accompanied by an avant-garde, experimental soundscape crafted from everyday household sounds, the work draws attention to the unseen emotional labour and resilience embedded within domestic routines. This interplay between familiar sounds and fragmented visuals invites visitors into a contemplative space, encouraging reflection on themes of vulnerability, strength, and shared humanity.

Rowan Briggs Smith is a first-year BFA Fine Art student at the Ruskin School of Art. She’s currently enjoying a multidisciplinary approach to her practice, moving between painting, writing, and collaborative work. Matthew Wakefield is a first-year BA Music student at the University of Oxford. He’s exploring the role of visual mediums within music and how it affects his writing and improvisation.

Hazel is an artist and researcher on the MFA programme at The Ruskin, working on an expansive project researching the layered ecological and geographic history of the land surrounding the active Gypsum mine at Brightling, East Sussex.  Recent projects include ‘Skein’ 2024, a moving image work in which two women engage in an exchange that begins with movement, as a means for recovering narrative fragments. Recent events and exhibitions include ‘Green Man’, Blackshed gallery, 2024, ‘Five Voices From The Land’, Laines Organic farm, 2024 and October School, 2023. 

As an artist and curator, Lorna is keen to connect people to their surroundings in various ways, through the unconventional use of space in an exhibition, participatory events and an experimental writing practice exploring embodied landscapes, objects and memories. She brings these interests to her role at The Blackshed Gallery in Robertsbridge, through programming exhibitions and events aimed at encouraging learning and participation, about and within the habitats surrounding the gallery. These have included a group exhibition interrogating the folkloric figure of The Green Man, foraging workshops and community pond building.