Concert: From the SPARC Studios

As part of the 2026 SPARC Symposium, City St George's doctoral composers Laura Selby, Pantea Armanfar, Günseli Naz Ferel, Bea Hebron, Kristian Skårbrevik, William Stokes, and Maisha Patodia perform with the SPARC Lab immersive loudspeaker system.

Free to attend, but space is limited. Please register in advance.

Please note, separate bookings are required for each Symposium event. To see all events (27-31 May 2026), please visit the Symposium overview page.

Programme:

Laura Selby
Sonic Contamination - A Meditation

Sonic Contamination: A Meditation is a guided, multisensory listening performance that asks: how can we become more consciously connected to the non-human and the microbiomes at the foundation of our ecologies? And can deeper care for our mutual contaminations begin through listening?

Exploring the sounds of non-human worlds from moss to soil-based organisms, mycelia and bacterial maelstroms, celebrating their interconnected microworlds. Presented in 16.1 ambisonic format, accompanied with macro filmography from the field recording sites, the work portals listeners through different scales of species and being. Crafted from Laura’s extended field recording research and body of work: Sonic Contamination, this is an iteration of an early piece designed and created for the Tate Modern Lates event, June. 2023.

Kristian Skårbrevik
Performing Ecologies

Performing Ecologies explores presence and environmental attunement, an awareness of and responsiveness to one's sonic surroundings. Much of the material was created during artistic residencies at Mottaket, Ålesund, in 2025, and the composition integrates field recordings of urban and natural surroundings with layered guitars and electronics. The piece employs slow tempos and pauses that invite both the performer and listener to slow down and attend more closely to the sonic environment. Rather than masking ambient sounds, the music creates a space for them, positioning environmental awareness as a potential restorative practice. Performing Ecologies proposes that attentive engagement with sound can cultivate a deeper sense of connection with our surroundings and the present moment.

Skårbrevik's artistic practice is at the intersection of sound art, site-responsive composition, and guitar performance. He is drawn to how spaces and locations shape creative processes, and how cross-artform collaboration generates new forms of listening and music making. He is currently completing a PhD in composition at City, St George's, University of London, exploring site-responsive and ecological approaches to composition and performance. Skårbrevik has performed with artists such as Pauline Oliveros (USA), Christian Wolff (USA), and Michael Duch. As a composer, he has composed music for film and choreographers such as Anderson Carvalho (NED), Katiana Pena (BR), Maria Sundby, and Einy Aam Sparks.

Günseli Naz Ferel
One’s Whirling Selves

Brought together with field recordings and spoken word poetry, this piece is a lament for displacement, repeatedly attempting to remember, locate, and reclaim a sense of home and belonging in a world and a country, changing rapidly. The sounds foraged throughout Turkey include dances from a dervish lodge in the city of Yalova, a rattle and excerpts from the Istanbulite poet Nilgün Marmara’s collection of works ‘Kağıtlar'.

pantea
Simorgh

Simorgh began as a site-specific sound installation for the Scala staircase at Tabakalera in San Sebastián, unfolding over a thirty-day cycle as a sonic calendar. Each day introduced the voice of a different bird—real, extinct, or imagined—drawn from archival recordings, migratory traces, and speculative reconstructions. Developed using a generative Max/MSP system, the work combined processed environmental textures, birdsong, ambient layers, and live or imagined audio streams from migratory routes, diffused across a multi-channel setup spanning three levels of the building.

For the SPARC symposium, Simorgh has been reconfigured as a 20-minute ambisonic composition. This version condenses the original material into a continuous form, layering bird calls from archives, live streams, and speculative sources to trace migration, seasonal movement, and disappearance. While more focused in duration, it retains the installation’s attention to birds as markers of time and ecological change, and to listening as a way of engaging these shifting environments.

Bea Hebron
Spiderwebs

Spiderwebs plays with sonic instantiations of my text score Please Joyn. It is an experimental, multimodal, multilayered account of practice, foregrounding and reflecting on performances during Klangraum 2025. Music is framed as a taking place, as a ‘gathering together of the threads of life’ (Ingold, 2010). What is gathered, what threads do we weave, what do we return to again and again? Reciprocities between the score and song work come into focus, with joy positioned at the heart of it all.

Bea Hebron is a singer-songwriter, composer, producer, writer, and researcher. Her musical practice embraces both experimental and popular music traditions, working at the intersection of songwriting and verbal scoring. Her focus rests on process, reciprocities, unfinishedness, and embodied knowledges; and her work deliberately embraces contamination.

William J. Stokes
East Coker 1

This extract from the acousmatic East Coker series constitutes part of a research project exploring arithmaphonic composition; reconsidering volume as a raw compositional material. The piece uses the natural volume of a human voice reading an extract from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets as an axis against which to calibrate the amplitude of the playback, with dynamic vignettes of electronic sound entering and leaving the frame around that sonic constant. Some sounds are barely there, some slalom around the voice as an equal and others are confronting in their loudness, swamping the voice entirely.

William J. Stokes is a British artist and producer. Stokes’ compositions and soundscapes are often suspended between noise, lyric, ambience, melody, drone and rhythm, with a particular focus on the guitar and modular synthesis. A Visiting Lecturer at City St. George's and a columnist for Sound on Sound magazine, he is currently researching the use of volume as a musical tool and arithmaphonic compositional techniques. He has made three critically acclaimed albums as a member of the avant-pop trio Voka Gentle (“hard to classify and even harder not to love” -Uncut) and has variously collaborated with the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne, Animal Collective’s Panda Bear, Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom and more.

Maisha Patodia
Fall theme for Stardew Valley

Fall Theme for Stardew Valley was made for my Video game music module this year. The composition explores the way in which animation composers may use elements of nostalgia to provoke comfort and peacefulness in cosy games, a genre pioneered by Stardew Valley. Generally, as a composer for animation, I have tried to re-contextualise elements of cartoon and video game soundtracks from my childhood, including things like Oswald, Mickey Mouse, Tom and Jerry, etc, for modern animation contexts.

Maisha Patodia is a final year student at City St George's on the BSc Music, Sound and Technology course. A part of her practice is in composition for animation, which is what her project showcases tonight.