This time last week I was preparing for a concert at The Luleå Kulturen Hus in northern Sweden, as the culmination of my time on the PRSF New Music Incubator programme.

The programme creates an intensive collaborative environment between ten UK musicians and ten Swedish musicians. The first leg of this was in the UK and the second in Sweden, concluding in a number of performances or sound-art pieces.

Here is a recording of the piece I performed with Anna and Luke:

[audio: https://www.mrunderwood.co.uk/audio/Slukanna_LOW.mp3]

Link: www.mrunderwood.co.uk/audio/Slukanna_LOW.mp3

I love the subtlety of the playing in this. Sadly it is a little lost against the background noise of lunch at Kulturen Hus.

Note: I performed a further piece with Stellan Stefan and Anna but my part was mainly as a sound technician, so I will let them present this piece.

As someone who had collaborated intensively often before I was keen to see what being given this opportunity on a more professional basis would bring about. It turned out to be an amazing experience both in terms of exploring and developing my own practice, and meeting a group of wonderful people that I feel I can discuss and develop new works with. It also opened my eyes to international opportunities, which is something I had been rather blinkered about previously.

The key now is to stay in touch with the participants and make some projects happen. I am lucky to have been working already on a project called “One Water”, run by Jonas and Annika, for which I have designed and built a water instrument with my new partner in such things, David Morton. Here’s a sneak peak of what it sounds like.

I have made plans to work on some further string drone and electronics pieces with Luke (and hopefully Anna). This excites me greatly as Luke really seems to understand the subtlety of playing and dynamics required to get the most out of drone pieces, emphasising their scale.

I am also formulating plans with Patrik Jarlestam for ORE to play in a number of fascinating sounding acoustic spaces in Sweden. As this forms a major part of what we are interested in I very much look forward to exploring the possibilities of this.

This is a great start but in fact I’d love to eventually work with everyone involved. Yes that might be a bit pie-in-the-sky but I always have been an optimist.

Oh and on a personal note, I felt far less out of my depth this time, after a period devoted to developing my music etc. Most positive!

I would like to thank the PRS Foundation for making this happen. Thanks also to all of those who looked after us and made it work day-to-day. Huge thanks to the participants, who I count amongst my friends now. Special thanks to Capsule for putting me forward for this wonderful opportunity.

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As an aside: I loved Sweden. I was lucky enough to spend some time in Stockholm, working on “One Water” and then I took the night train up to the north. Fantastic scenery! On the Wednesday I had a bit of time in Stockholm and I started my day in a café which had a book on street photography in it. This reawakened my love for such things and I spent the rest of the day snapping away. Here is a gallery of the results: