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PRE-RELEASE. NOTE THAT THIS ITEM WILL SHIP ON MAY 19TH

Michael Begg Releases ‘WITNESS. Ambient Chamber Works 2020-24’

New Music Scotland Award winning composer and sound artist Michael Begg announces the release of ‘WITNESS. Ambient Chamber Works 2020-24’, a collection that brings together five years of work exploring sound, science, and the environment. This compilation includes highlights from Begg’s collaborations with scientists, experiments with environmental data, and residencies with the European Marine Board, Friends of the Scott Polar Research Institute and the Ocean ARTic Partnership.

The album features selections from the WITNESS series, released as waypoints during the COVID lockdown, as well as pieces from ‘Light Water is Black Water,’ ‘Sounding The Ice Factory,’ and the forthcoming ‘Out of Whose Womb Comes the Ice’.

In this five year long development of Begg’s signature ‘data composition’ process we encounter earth monitoring satellites, earthquakes, ionospheric lightning strikes, the clean night air of lockdown, receding Arctic ice, mutated migrations and currents, collapsing glaciers, the cycles of deep time and the collapse of predictable weather cycles. We find a new music that speaks to our growing solastalgia that is true to science and faithful to a convulsing world.

WITNESS includes collaborations with Clodagh Simonds (Fovea Hex), Ben Ponton (zoviet*france), and the Black Glass Ensemble.

The collection features live recordings and alternative mixes, and the first preview of new work arising from Begg’s two month residency in Antarctica as the Friends of the Scott Polar Research Institute’s first musician in residence.