We're delighted to finally be able to announce this year's Boom Artists.
For the next 6 months Hannah Fredsgaard, Marcus Joseph, Joshua Le Gallienne, Simone Seales & Rylan Gleave will be making use of our Boom development scheme to explore, research and develop their practice focusing on unconventional spaces and sites, including the outdoors and the digital realm.
Hannah Fredsgaard
Hannah Fredsgaard is a Danish-born Oxford based composer, songwriter and audio producer and podcaster with a passion for cross arts collaboration and storytelling through sound and music.
She is driven by a curiosity towards stories and sounds that shape who we are, and how we relate to our surroundings. Hannah is also inspired by moments of imagination and potential in the mundane like a left behind shoe at a train station, a peculiar rhythm in an old nursery rhyme or a surprisingly singable line from the newspaper. Hannah’s work engages audiences in unconventional ways by picking out the strange and charmed in the everyday through captivating stories that activate people’s imagination.
hannahfredsgaardjones.com / Instagram + FB: @hannahfredsgaard / Twitter: @HFredsgaard
Marcus Joseph
Marcus is a musician and spoken word artist and his sound can be described as a warm fusion of Jazz, Reggae, Hip-Hop and Contemporary Music. He is developing the Jazz Paradigm, an immersive VR experience that weaves together graphic novel aesthetics and video game interactive narrative with themes of freedom, oppression and creativity through storytelling, music and spoken word. Marcus already performs in his own virtual Jazz Club in AltspaceVR, a club where people from around the world can visit, meet and listen to jazz and spoken word performances.
Marcus was commissioned by 2Funky Arts in October 2021 as part of Black History month and Still I Rise midlands tour to create a performance theme that expressed his own experiences of the turbulent times shaped by Black Lives Matter and/or the disproportionate impact of Covid-19. His debut album Beyond the Dome was released earlier this year on the Jazz Refreshed label.
marcusjosephsax.com / Instagram + FB: @marcusjosephsax
Joshua Le Gallienne
Joshua Le Gallienne is a non-binary British artist exploring the materiality of acoustic sound in an artistic context. Through sculpture, installation, and performance, the artist stages intimate experiences that explore the relationships between sound, physical materials and environmental phenomena. Since 2012, Joshua’s work has been regularly exhibited and presented in the UK and internationally; operating primarily outside of a traditional gallery context. In 2019, Joshua was the recipient of The Auxiliary’s Sonic Arts Emerging Artist Exhibition Award, and received Sound and Music’s Francis Chagrin Award in 2020.
Their work is unmediated and mostly undocumented, in line with this the artist has no website or online presence.
Simone Seales & Rylan Gleave
Simone and Rylan’s collaboration is improvisation-based, with divergent sound at its core. Intersectionality, neurodiversity, race, sexuality, and transness are integral to their practice, and they want to create live performances in diverse and unusual spaces as a way of exploring Queering music, gender, physicality, ritual, and how their trans bodies are in space.
Originally from Florida, Simone Seales is a Glasgow-based cellist who completed their postgraduate studies at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2021. They focus on free improvisation (both tonal and atonal) and devising music for theatre. Simone is passionate about exploring sound, how sound can reflect emotional states of being and how emotions are embodied. Their creative influences come from Black feminist leaders such as Audre Lorde, Assata Shakur and Angela Davis. Within Simone's creative work, they centre Blackness, sexuality, intersectional feminism and anti-racism.
Rylan Gleave is a Leith-based composer and vocalist whose musical practice involves mending the unfeigned gaps in his classical voice study with the healings of imaginative neuro-/gender-divergent kinship. Re-emerging as a composer/performer, his work explores the instrumental qualities of his late-breaking trans-masc voice through queer autoethnography, and autistic-specific notation. His compositions have been praised as ‘haunting’ by The Herald, and ‘rapturous’ by The Scotsman, who named him ‘One to Watch’ 2021, describing him as ‘one of the brightest lights in Scotland’s new music scene’.
simoneseales.com / Instagram: @simone.cello / FB: @seales.cello
rylangleave.com / Instagram: @rylangleave / FB: @rylangleavecomposer / Twitter: @GleaveRylan
OCM is a PRSF Talent Development Partner and Boom would have not been possible without them.
Banner Image: Piano Migrations by Kathy Hinde, photographed by Farrows Creative