Autumn is ticking away. At the moment I’m working on a Manitoba Arts Council-funded commission for EXAUDI in London. This piece takes as a starting point the vocal utterances of Glenn Gould while he plays his the Goldberg Variations. I am exploring ways of transforming these musical byproducts into beautiful blooms of choral texture.

I am also beginning research on a solo roller-coaster-building performance. I will use No Limits Coaster as an interface to both build roller coasters and create/perform live electronic music. I am excited to finally make something that I can perform myself!

I’ve recently had the pleasure of developing a new piece for two solo performers at the same time. In this project, I worked with Liam Byrne, viola da gamba, and Émilie Girard-Charest, cello. Both performers received the same instructions, but the result is quite different.

Cousins explores the idea of these two instruments as related-but-different—twisted bloodlines, voices behind walls, overgrown forests… that sort of thing.

Liam has premiered his version of the piece in Bristol on October 12 at Glitch, and Émilie will premiere hers in Argentina at the end of the month. Then, in November, we will all get together in Berlin and see if we can make it into a solo. How exciting!

This summer I will be returning to the work of Éliane Radigue for a new article for TEMPO. I will be researching Éliane’s amazing work in the context of other practitioners—both composers and performers—who also work in an orally-transmitted compositional setting. Once again I will focus on interviews with performers to provide the majority of the content of the article. This will be published in Dec. 2019.

Hopefully alongside I will be working with at least one new soloist on a new living score. Word on the street is that I may be collaborating with the fabulous Liam Byrne (viola da gamba) and Émilie Girard-Charest (cello)… rumour has it there may even be a Bristol performance in the pipeline!

I am very pleased to announce that I will be presenting a new piece and paper at TENOR 2019 in Melbourne, Australia. In July 2019 I will be heading to Monash University to work with Decibel New Music Ensemble on a new piece. This will be another impossible roller coaster piece and, for the first time, I’ll be presenting some written research alongside it.

In a fantastic turn of events, I’m learning how I can export roller coaster track as CVS files. This means that I can effectively turn a roller coaster into data. This is quite fun, because it means that now I can manipulate numbers (in ways that are much more difficult in the hand-built nature of the editor) and import them back as track.

I’m currently experimenting with algorithmically generating roller coaster track. I guess my goal is to make an even more impossible track… something that defies all expectations. Below are a few examples of some initial attempts at building tracks using data manipulation rather than hand-building techniques.

Check out a recorded livestream of my University of Oxford lecture from November 2018.

I am very lucky to have received funding from the Canada Council for the Arts to continue my research on the intersection of impossible roller coasters and music. This will take the form of two projects. The first will be a work for TAK Ensemble. In this piece, I will create a roller coaster accompaniment to a piece of chamber music. In the second piece, written for Decibel New Music in Melbourne, I will create a video score for the ensemble.

I’m feeling very fortunate to be working on something that is essentially a childhood dream of mine!

I have been featured in Musicworks Issue 132 in a lovely piece written by Heather Roche. In her article, Heather discusses collaborating with me on an orally-transmitted composition entitled A Hushed Workshop. She really gets to the heart of working in a pretty unusual manner. The article also features a few excellent (heavily edited) photos by Sam Walton, as well as a gorgeous recording of the piece care of Simon Reynell (of Another Timbre).

James Saunders, Tim Parkinson, and Michael Duch will be touring a new piece I have created for them, String Trio #1. This piece is pretty similar to my String Quartet #1, except that it is a transcription of a piano, violin, and double bass trio (not exactly a string trio… but I like the continuity in names). Parkinson/Saunders/Duch will play the piece in a few different places. If you’re in Norway, be sure to check it out!

Very pleased to announce that I’ll be joining the Canadian League of Composers‘ Pivot Scheme 2018/2019. This means that over the course of the next six months I’ll be writing a new piece for Continuum ensemble in Toronto, which will be performed once in Toronto and once in Montreal in Spring of 2019. I’ll also receive mentoring from an as-of-yet-unchosen composer throughout the year. I’m very excited about this… I’ve wanted to work with Continuum since I was a teenager! Stay tuned for updates and early research for the piece… all I can say is that right now I’m thinking theremins (though that might change!)

More information on the other fabulous Pivot participants here.

On Thursday, November 8th I will be lecturing at the University of Oxford about my recent music alongside Marco Donnarumma. It’s a huge honour to have been asked to deliver this lecture, and I’m looking forward to delving deep into the recent directions I’m heading in…

More information here.

Pleased to announce that my work String Quartet #1 won a 3rd prize in the SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers. I had previously thought my work was maybe too strange to win awards anymore, but this has me reconsidering!

The rest of the winners can be found here.

Big things are afoot.

After about a year’s gestation, I have begun to continue my research into impossible roller coasters (and their possible links to music). To recap: last spring, I spent a one week residency at the Arnolfini in Bristol, UK. During my week there, I endeavoured to make a “realistic” roller coaster. I visited the same online forums I used to design roller coasters when I was a young teenager, and tried to hold myself to the same level of technical prowess.

Well, spoiler alert… I couldn’t do it anymore! Somehow my technical capabilities have dwindled. Or I am just not as interested in making realistic roller coasters. I was very lucky though in that a friend and fellow composer/performer Dominic Lash visited me on the final day of my residency. He remarked that, while the “realistic” roller coaster would make a pretty boring score, an impossible roller coaster would make a more interesting one.

I am spending some of this summer making small forays into impossible roller coaster design. I am particularly interested in knots and tangles. It will be very interesting to see where this all leads…!

Some months ago, Jennie Gottschalk’s wonderful Experimental Music Since 1970 was released. This book is—so far—the only resource of its kind, attempting to map out some of the conceptual orientations of the current field of experimental music. Jennie provides countless examples of unusual practices from around the world, and the writing is lush and descriptive.

I’m very pleased to be included! You can find some writing about my work on pages 216-217. Here’s a little quote about my work Made of my Mother’s Cravings:

In both recorded performances, there is an unusual quality of rawness. The players are participating in an oral, folkloric tradition without any sense of irony or fl ippancy. Each player is working hard to project something that is already internalized. The interaction among the players is not simply about execution, but about content, and about diff erences in perception between each of them.

Purchase the book here.

I had the good fortune to present a new piece on BBC’s “Hear and Now” program in London, UK on October 14, 2017.

The piece was created for the Parkinson Saunders Duo, and is a new strand of research that involves performers transcribing texts live on stage to create erratic looping soundscapes.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/295abe7f-220c-4eca-9cd8-2494903fed0c

Recently, Tim Rutherford-Johnson (whose well-known blog has been a favourite of mine for a long time) interviewed me for an article in the Wire. Tim’s article (Unsettling Scores) is about embodied scores, and features some great writing about composers such as Celeste Oram, Claudia Molitor, Michael Baldwin, and Louis d’Heudieres.

Here’s a small quote about my work:

With any written record destroyed, they have to rely on their memories and Nickel’s own instructions for disseminating its contents to others, creating a new, socially networked form of composition. Nickel distributed instructions through soundfiles, “little radio broadcasts” in which tone of voice, vocal cadence and “vibe” are compositional parameters. Some of these could be listened to more than once; others would have to be deleted, Mission Impossible-style, after hearing.

This week upcoming I will be engaging in a short residency in the Dark Studio of Arnolfini in Bristol, UK.

I’ll be developing a new project themed around on-ride videos of rollercoasters. I used to be very interested in rollercoasters as a teen, and when I checked to see if my simulator of choice had a new version, it did! Enter No Limits 2

In the gallery I’ll spend the week building simulated rollercoasters and thinking about what the intersection of art and rollercoasters might be, whether I should design something “realistic” (and what that even means), what role process might have in my design, how online communities and critique might influence my thinking and—because I’m a composer—how live musicians might interact with the project as a kind of score or environment.

(example track from the No Limits website showing what the sim can do!)

In recent months, I have had the pleasure of creating a new piece for (and with…) Manitoban pianist Everett Hopfner. The piece examines the character of Oshima from Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. Oshima is a very organized librarian who serves as the pivotal axis around which all supernatural events in the novel seem to flow. He fields characters toward each other, toward locations, and toward the surreal—but he never participates himself. Oshima has a kind of considered calculation but a considerable amount of heart. I was very inspired.

I create Oshima with Hopfner by way of late-night radio-style vocal transmissions. I explained aspects of the piece to Hopfner, who only listened to them once before assimilating the information into his understanding of the piece. In the final rehearsal before the performance, Hopfner’s own understanding of the piece far surpassed mine—just how I like it!

Oshima was premiered on March 12, 2017 at the Winnipeg Art Gallery during the Cluster: New Music + Integrated Arts Festival. An image can be seen below, and a recording should be available soon.

(me with Hopfner, photo care of Leif Norman)

(Hopfner performing the piece with many bells and whistles, photo care of Leif Norman)

During December 2016 and January 2017 I wrote a new piece for the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra. The piece, entitled aaadagio, is a re-imagining of Barber’s Adagio for Strings… or at least, the first three chords of it. I’ve included a program note below, as well as a picture of one page of the score. You can hear the performance in Winnipeg, Manitoba on April 26, 2017. This piece was made possible by the generous support of the Manitoba Arts Council.

Program Note:

For the last three years, I have not written a single note of music. Instead, I’ve made pieces collaboratively with musicians using any means except musical notation. I’ve made pieces that consist solely of orally-transmitted descriptions of an imaginary factory. I’ve made pieces that chew up existing music and spit it out into tangled new configurations. I’ve made pieces for art galleries that contain only speaking, not a note of music to be heard.  

This piece for the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra marks my return to traditional musical notation. But with it I bring the great joy and endless possibility that I found using these other compositional methods.

In writing for the MCO, I have chosen to use Barber’s Adagio as a source material. I’ve always been intrigued by the first musical phrase of the piece: the succulent chords, the sense of floating tension…

I like to imagine Barber’s Adagio as a great ship that sails calmly through our collective subconscious. In my piece, aaadagio, we listen to what lies beneath the behemoth ship. What turgid melodies swirl through the deep? What creaking sounds does the ship make while weathering a storm? How does light sound when it glints on the water?

Full disclosure: I’m writing this description before I’ve written the piece, let alone heard it! So, please consider this a statement of intent, and forgive me if the piece you’re about to hear doesn’t quite match what you’ve read.

In short:

A former composition teacher would often jokingly ask me what the effect would be if I used Barber’s Adagio to end of one of my compositions. This piece is my answer.

(aaadagio is dedicated to Chris Paul Harman, to whom I owe my love of musical provocation)

I have recently completed my PhD, more info about which can be found on the “Research” page of this site. This might explain the lack of news and new pieces on my website… I’ve basically spent the last 9 months writing, submitting, and defending the PhD. More to come!

I am testing out a new idea for a choral piece centred around recordings made by Glenn Gould. I had the opportunity to try it within the context of James Saunders’ Open Scores Lab. Below is some text from the accompanying lab report (written by James) as well as videos for context.

For the rest of his session, we worked on a new piece by Luke, provisionally titled after Glenn Gould. The piece involves a group of performers watching a film of Glenn Gould’s 1981 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and listening through headphones. The audience only see the performers and do not experience the source material directly. The performers mimic Gould’s mouth shapes and quietly echo his singing, but only when his mouth is visible. As with Luke’s other pieces, this brings a hidden layer to the fore.

We tried two versions of the piece: once with just the trio (James Saunders, Louis d’Heudieres, Caitlin Rowley), and once where we were joined by Michael Winter reading from a text, in this case White Fang again, using the same methods as in Literary Field Recording. The situation for the performer is complex, trying to distinguish the moments when Gould’s mouth is visible (he often turns away from the camera or ducks down behind the piano) in order to begin singing. Given the low volume level of both Gould’s singing and that of the other two performers’ sung echoes, distinguishing who is singing is also somewhat difficult. I was also very much aware that my experience of the piece was very different, given my exposure to the piano playing in addition to Gould’s singing and our group response. In this way, Luke and Louis’s work have some correspondence, presenting hidden materials in a way that makes their function clear for the audience. I like this element of translation very much.

My article on the fabulous collaborative compositions of Eliane Radigue has been published in the January 2016 version of TEMPO new music journal. Abstract and link below:

After nearly 40 years of creating recorded electronic music, for the last 10 years Éliane Radigue has created music exclusively in collaboration with performers, using solely oral and aural transmission. Focusing on the details of this ‘scoreless’ working method, this article considers the performer’s perspective on Radigue’s Occam Ocean (2011–), a series of 22 infinitely combinable solos and over 20 chamber pieces. Through interviews with the performers and Radigue, a composite understanding of their collaboration is reached, focusing on the emergent ideas of virtuosity, memory, images, scores, hospitality and non-hierarchy. A typical transmission and collaboration is described, and a new lens for viewing this method is proposed, the living score. The article concludes with a brief discussion of how Radigue and her collaborators’ non-hierarchical model of collaboration may offer an alternative compositional framework.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0040298215000601

Matthew Lee Knowles made a video featuring some of my drawings! In it, Matthew deploys a sonic process while creatively reframing/revealing my drawings. I love how as the video goes on and the sound gets dreamier, the framing gets more extreme and stretched out. Check it out!

A small quote which I’ve translated from Eliane Radigue’s article of the same name found in Portraits polychromes no. 17 relating to her extraordinary oral practice of transmitting pieces. It’s quite beautiful in the original French…

How does it work? By the mysterious power of the projection of ideas that inhabit the spirit of the work and which determine the work’s structure; images projected either by words or intuitively/abstractly, associated with a hint of the intellectual, the same nature of the music, transported as if by magic in a way that eastern thought calls “heart to heart” (the location of the spirit in these cultures), which here in the west we have had the tendency to situate after having mentalized, stripped of affect, in the brain”

– Eliane Radigue “Pour répondre à le demande de Julien” in Portraits Polychromes no. 17

As mentioned in previous posts, I’ve had the good fortune of having Michael Baldwin perform [Factory] twice in the last year. Michael’s just posted about his second performance. Read it here.

Extending from a tradition of verbal scores using text and language to communicate ideas for making music, Nickel’s [factory] is unique in the way its musical and artistic ideas are communicated. As a part of a larger project, Luke has orally expressed a range of ideas to a group of humans who have agreed to act as mentally encapsulated vessels of specific ideas, committing to memory a one-off communicated ur-speech. Upon creating and storing these memories, each human is considered to be a live, embodied manifestation of the original ideas, rendering them into, what Luke would call, living scores (what I consider to be living repositories which store, maintain, and disseminate living scores).

– Michael Baldwin on [Factory]

Even in this short quote, one can see Michael’s commitment to thinking deeply about ideas implicit and explicit to such conceptual work. I find it most interesting at the end of the quote when Michael makes a distinction as to where the score is located: people are archives or repositories for scores, rather than being the score themselves. This is an important distinction to make, and one I need to sit with for a while. My impulse is still to cite the score as actually being a person, for the reason that we’re not actually dealing with any sort of written information or artifacts (just “ideas”). Similarly, I see score/performance practice/praxis as wrapped into one, and then wrapped up with the person themselves. I can probably find more answers to this in a book that both Michael and I are reading, Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire.

For more of Michael’s thoughts, please also check out this interview he’s done (it can be found around the 40 minute mark). Again, more thoughts that I need to investigate, but I particularly like the way that Michael’s thinking about the rooms as distinct temporal zones …

Exciting news today.

As some of you might know, over the last few months I’ve been interviewing musicians involved in Eliane Radigue’s fascinating Occam series. Each Occam piece is created in collaboration with a specific musician using a unique method of oral transmission. I’m working on forming a composite view of what the process behind making these pieces looks like, and what ramifications it has on memory and community.

Today I’ve spoken with Eliane herself, and have scheduled the final interview of the project for mid-August.

I’m really looking forward to rounding out my understanding of such an interesting series of compositions, as well as speaking to such an iconic composer.

I’ll have the final piece of writing done sometime later this year.

Very pleased to announce that I’ve been included in Sound and Music’s New Voices 2015!

Sound and Music’s New Voices represent some of the most exciting composers working in Britain today. The scheme focuses on raising the profile for emerging talent that exists outside of the support of commercial publishers or record companies.

Coming from an enormous range of musical backgrounds, 2015’s New Voices have each been composer-in-residence with one of the UK’s leading creative organisations, or individuals, through Sound and Music’s Embedded or Portfolio programmes, selected through a highly competitive open process to create new work with and for their hosts.

Partners in 2015 have included percussionist Joby Burgess, the Bozzini Quartet, Club Inégales, the Bohman Brothers, EXAUDI and more.

A full list of the composers included can be found here and a link to my personal page can be found here!

I recently had the pleasure of testing out a new project at Bang the Bore in Bristol. This is another work in my ongoing series using speaking performers.

In White Fang Field Recording, I asked four performers to silently read text from White Fang by Jack London. When they encountered words that they deemed to be related to sound, I asked them to read out loud.

The idea of this work is to link two historic Canadian practices, field recording and literature, both of which rely heavily on Canada’s unique geographic landscape.

Thanks to Mike Pony, Josie Hypatia Grounds, Seth Cooke and Dan Bennett for reading.

Michael Baldwin has performed [Factory] for the second time, this time at Weisslich III on July 4th at the Hundred Years Gallery in London.

I wasn’t able to attend, so all I can really do is look at the pictures found here by the wonderful Dimitri Djuric and wonder what happened! This raises some interesting questions about open scores, the actions that might fill in the open-bits, and what happens when those actions are reified….

I respect Michael and his performances enormously. I’m looking forward to speaking with him and others in attendance more about what happened…

More information about [Factory] can be found on my “works” page.

I recently had the pleasure of attending and presenting at Music and/as Process in London at Goldsmiths University.

Or I should say, the thrilling mira benjamin presented for me. The conference had a unique format which encouraged presenters to either present in a performative way (putting “process” right out front!) or to step back and let the music do the talking (with a detailed program note).

I chose the latter. More information (and my program note) can be found in my “works” section. Below is a recording of Mira playing [Factory] last August in Norway with Canadian percussionist Isaiah Ceccarelli.

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Great news!

Looks like in fall 2015 I’ll be supported by the Canada Council for the Arts to write a new piece for Architek Percussion and Viva Voce!

Here’s a performance featuring Architek playing some tasty John Cage.

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I just had the excellent fortune to be awarded a short residency at the Arnolfini Art Gallery in Bristol.

The event, called sound, silence, and listening, was an afternoon dedicated to the work of Christine Sun Kim. I was lucky enough to be asked to perform/present a new work.

Watching and listening to Christine present about her work was incredible. Her enthusiasm about plumbing the depths of sound, scores, and the relationships these elicit was very illuminating.

The work which I presented, String Quartet #1, was an exploration into the idea of making sound into text. In the work, I used a recording of a string quartet rehearsal, transcribed it into text, and then had actors perform it. The “music” from the rehearsal was deleted, leaving ungainly silences in their wake. For the Arnolfini performance I also subtitled the work, introducing another element to the aspect of transcription and translation.

The image is of my “fake” string quartet!