Laurie Tompkins (b.1990) is a UK composer, performer and co-founder and co-director of the Slip label.
From scores for samples, instruments and voices he creates a grabbable music that dreams and confounds. Bodies, things, words, and sounds strain under duress, looping their way through scenes of grubby presence, not-quite riff, mouldy echo, and swollen bombast.
His spring 2022 discs for Entr’acte, 33-33 and Hyperdelia are a thick, unruly soup of keys and computer with pianist Eliza McCarthy; a desperate suite of consoling, tanked songs with takes from Jess Hickie-Kallenbach, Teresa Winter, Gwilly Edmondez and videos by Joel Wycherley; and some dilated rotten soul with Eliza and Ashley Paul.
Laurie helms Slip, which has released music by Yeah You, Mica Levi, Julia Reidy, Bass Clef, Object Collection, ilgendo, Chaines & Competition, Old releases of his own include ‘Ample Profanity' (2018), with cellist Oliver Coates; 'Heat, War, Sweat, Law' (2016); and 'Exorcise' (2021), as Yes Indeed with bassist Otto Willberg, justly hailed as “proper, mad scones” (Boomkat).
Performances: Café Oto, Aldeburgh Music, Spike Island, Harp Art Lab (Harplinge) and National Sawdust (New York). Commissions: House of Bedlam, Daylight Editions, LSO Soundhub Scheme, ddmmyy and 840 series. Radio: specials for NTS and Resonance FM and a session with Adam Bohman recorded at Maida Vale studios, broadcast on BBC Radio 3.