concerts+ composers: Ed Cooper x LSTwo

Premiere of Ed Cooper's new work, REQUIEM, performed by LSTwo, the School of Music's contemporary music ensemble.

REQUIEM is an immersive performance-installation composed by Ed Cooper and performed by LSTwo. Lasting half an hour, the work presents a perturbed scene, comprising anonymous male dummy corpses, gender reveal balloons, poppy petals, and loud speakers playing distorted football chants and hymns. Costumed instrumentalists wander this queerly macabre space, sometimes playing fragments of music by the late producer SOPHIE, at other times documenting the scene with the phones, or even remaining unsettlingly still. REQUIEM, then, sits uneasily between a piece of its namesake and an insincere necromantic ritual.

Ed Cooper is a composer and writer based in Leeds, UK. His compositional practice takes many forms, from solo repertoire to performance-installations, large-scale choral works to electroacoustic pieces. These are often disquiet in character, frequently comprising heartbeats, field recordings, and distant, half-forgotten melodies. As such, he invites disruptions between interiority to exteriority in his music, thinking of bodies as existing as and at their own thresholds. He is currently studying a PhD at the University of Leeds, supervised by Scott McLaughlin and Martin Iddon; this is fully funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, through the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities.

La Decapitation de saint Georges - Bernat Martorell