Scalp is a new music ensemble based in Sydney on Gadigal land, comprised of emerging composer-performers and ardent members of Sydney’s experimental music scene. At the outset, founder/director Louis Wishart established this ensemble as a testing ground for composers to explore bold and innovative ideas, distinguishing itself through its exploration of resonance, space, and guided improvisation. Scalp consists of a rotating lineup of composer-performers, meeting regularly for workshops of new works to cultivate a strong dialogue between composer and performer. 

About Louis Wishart
Louis Wishart is a composer and musician whose sound integrates free improvisation aesthetics, informed by behavioural ecology and historical linguistics, with fixed forms and materials. Louis’ music is continually engaged with the generative capabilities of human error, blemish and defect - constantly playing on the threshold of voluntary and involuntary action to generate both fixed and aleatoric mutations in form. Louis curates each Scalp program, regularly pairing canonic works of new music against new premieres by emerging Sydney composers. Having recently completed a residency at Bundanon, Louis will present a new work based on his onsite research. Following the premiere of the first of these works with Scalp at 21 Shepherd Street in July, based on the generation of a bird call and echolocation within aleatoric forms, this concert will premiere a new work based on spectral and computer analyses of various native cicada, cricket and bird field recordings. 

This piece will be paired with Canadian-British composer Cassandra Miller’s captivating work “Perfect Offering”. Miller’s work incorporates a unique practice of meditation-based uncontrolled singing to understand melody and repetition from a deep-tissue perspective. She uses these vocal exercises in tandem with creative transcription processes to transform pre-existing musical sources (from both within and outside the classical tradition) to magnify their expressive, personal, or fragile qualities. “Perfect Offering” is an arresting post-minimalist piece that groups the ensemble in spatially distributed pairs, imagined here as bells, each with their own isorhythmic tolls around the audience. With a wholly selfless treatment of drones, pulsating chords, and wispy melodic fragments, this work and many others of Miller contain a simplicity and repetition that is “uncalculatedly beautiful” and “leaves you almost desperate with gratitude”, according to Alex Ross of The New Yorker.