Throughout 2020 and continuing in 2021 Supriya Nagarajan and Duncan Chapman have been creating a series of trio online collaborative performances with musicians from across the world. Starting out as a way of staying in touch by inviting existing collaborators to send a 30 minute recording of them playing, singing or recording their environment the project has grown into a regular series of live-streamed events. Combining shared recordings with live Carnatic singing from Supriya and live electronic manipulation / instrumental sounds from Duncan and broadcast on social media with an accompanying movie, slideshow or imagery generated from the sound.
In September 2020 they invited acclaimed harpist Rhodri Davies to send them a recording to work with. What they got from Rhodri was a sublime 30 minutes of bowed harp with occasional gestural moments. This recording is of a live performance which merges this with voice, spectral processing of the harp sound and added electronic parts.
More recordings are available from Manasamitra's Bandcamp here.
and from Rhodri Davies
Duncan Chapman: composer / musician based in Lincolnshire UK. Much of his work involves collaborations with a wide range of people creating performances, installations & recordings. Recent projects include online live events, curating a concert for the Aural Diversity project and performances at the Jaipur Literature Festival in India. Current projects include work with BCMG, Sound Scotland, x-church Gainsborough,COMA Glasgow, online performances with Comb Filter and Humbox and several projects with Manasamitra. Solo work is on Silent, Takuroku & Linear Obsessional labels & Dusk Notes, (a collaboration with Supriya Nagarajan) was released in 2020. Current work includes an album of marimba and live electronic pieces with Simon Limbrick, a residency at EMS in Stockholm, performances (with Supriya Nagarajan) of Lullaby:Sonic Cradle at Radiophrenia in Glasgow, Casa Da Musica (Porto) and the WOMAD festival, developing events using the new multichannel sound system at x-church in Gainsborough and participatory projects with Music in the Round (Sheffield) and BCMG (Birmingham).
Rhodri Davies is immersed in the worlds of improvisation, musical experimentation, composition and contemporary classical performance. He plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations and has released six solo albums. His regular groups include: HEN OGLEDD, Cranc, Common Objects and a duo with John Butcher. He has worked with the following artists: David Sylvian, Jenny Hval, Derek Bailey, Sofia Jernberg, Lina Lapelyte, Pat Thomas, Simon H Fell and Will Gaines.
For the last ten years Davies has been closely associated with the pioneering composer Eliane Radigue performing seventeen of her pieces. She composed OCCAM I for Davies in 2011, the first in an ongoing series of solo and ensemble pieces for individual instrumentalists in which a performer’s personal performance technique and particular relationship to their instrument function as the compositional material of the piece. New pieces for solo harp have also been composed for him by: Christian Wolff, Carole Finer, Philip Corner, Phill Niblock, Ben Patterson, Alison Knowles, Mieko Shiomi and Yasunao Tone.
In 2008 he collaborated with the visual artist Gustav Metzger on ‘Self-cancellation’, a large-scale audio-visual collaboration in London and Glasgow. In 2012 he was the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists Award, he was a Chapter Associate Artist (2016-19) and in 2017 he received a Creative Wales Award. He is a co-organiser of the NAWR concert series in Swansea.
Supriya Nagarajan is a UK based vocalist/composer who creates cross- cultural cross-genre concept driven immersive music work. She has toured the globe and created work for festivals like the hcmf//, Ultima Oslo and Iceland Symphony Orchestra. She is a Performing Rights Society/Jerwood composer and an alumni of New voices 2018 Sound and Music. She is the Artistic Director of Manasamitra, a UK based arts charity and a passionate advocate for fair access in the music sector. Apart from Dusk Notes, recent releases were on the Come Play with me and Cafe Oto’s Takuroku labels. Supriya also hosts a radio show on Worldwide FM.
