Midsummer Night

Trevor Mathison is an artist, composer, sound designer and recordist. His sonic practice, centered on creating fractured, haunting aural landscapes and integrating existing music, has featured in over thirty award-winning films. Mathison was a founding member of the cine-cultural artist collective, The Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC,1982-1998), where his body of sonic designs defined and situated for the Collective’s film and gallery installations, including Signs of Empire, Handsworth Songs and The Last Angel of History. Mathison has continued to work with some of his former collaborators from Black Audio (John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul and David Lawson) creating sound design for installations and feature documentaries, including Mnemosyne and The Unfinished Conversation. His latest compositional score features in John Akomfrah’s and Dredd  Scotts’ Slave Rebellion Re-enactment 2019  and Garret Bradley’s award-winning feature America 2019. Mathison has also founded and been active in a number of other experimental sonic groups – Dubmorphology, Hallucinator and Flow Motion. He has also been a pioneer of sound installation work.  His most recent sound performance took place at CAPC in Bordeaux in 2020 where he was commissioned to make a sonic response to Lubaina Himid’s installation Naming the Money.

Photo: Anirhudda Das

Gary Stewart is an an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of sound, moving image and computational creativity. His work examines social and political issues of identity, culture, and technology. Through the application of innovative technologies and practices he is part of a global network of collaborators who are advocates for equality, climate justice and better health through the arts especially those from marginalised communities. Operating through a range of theoretical, fictional, and artistic frames his work traverses media art, experimental music, and research.

Paul Mendez is a British writer. His début novel Rainbow Milk, an Observer Best Débuts choice, was shortlisted for the Polari First Novel Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction and a British Book Award (Fiction Début). He has written for, among others, Vogue, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, The Face, the London Review of Books, the WritersMosaic and the BBC. He is currently adapting Rainbow Milk for television, while reading the MA in Black British Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Aniruddha Das is an experimental electronic musician and sound artist focussed on exploring the relationship between rhythm and noise. Using principally the medium of sampling, his emphasis is on minimalism, repetition and fragmentation in sound. Under the moniker of “Dhangsha,” he has performed in the UK, Europe and Colombia and released on a number of underground labels. He has collaborated with artists Trevor Mathison and Gary Stewart for over ten years as an auxiliary member of their project “Dubmorphology.” Aniruddha is currently a commissioned participant of the AHRC funded initiative “Exploring Cultural Diversity in Experimental Sound,” based at the University of Greenwich and examining the relative lack of Black and South Asian practitioners in experimental music and sound art in the UK.

Kate Shortt studied at Guildhall school of music in cello, andadditional Jazz studies in singing/piano. Her work in varying genres include pop/jazz/contemporary/Fado classical and theatre. Pop artists include Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran, Gary Kempof Spandeau Ballet and the band Take That. She is a former member of the Austrian based piano trio ‘Line 3’ performing the works of Austrian composer Norbert Zehm. Kate has played regularly with the Northern Lights Symphony Orchestra and has worked for the London Symphony Orchestra as assistant animateur leading education workshops. She performs her own one woman show ‘Shortt and Sweett’ with original material. Herdebut poetry book ‘Swimming With Labradors’ was recently published by Book Printing UK www.kateshorttmusic.com