La Mer with Scapino Ballet Rotterdam
For Nanine Linning's new production La Mer, premiering 9 October 2026 at Nieuwe Luxor Theater in Rotterdam, I've written some new pieces, Measure of the Sea, that sit alongside Debussy's score of La Mer. Barbara Hannigan conducts and sings with Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, moving between the podium and the stage as twenty-five dancers perform around her. Linning's staging sets Debussy's Romantic ocean against its present reality, tracing the sea from a symbol of mystery to something more fragile and damaged, with Yuima Nakazato's costumes and Heleen Blanken's video design building the world around it. It's been great to work with this team again, developing the piece from an initial version created with the Boston Ballet. This time with the extraordinary dancers of Scapino.
Maze Festival
MAZE, the collective of six composer-performers I'm part of, dedicated to breaking down the hierarchy between composer, score, musician and listener, organises its own festival every so often, and this year's is 24–25 October at Splendor Amsterdam, titled Book of Returns. The theme is memory and dreams, running through everything on the programme, in concept, score and performance alike.
I'm presenting a performance installation version of my piece Fundaments and Variants, alongside new and ongoing work from my fellow MAZE members: Anne La Berge's continuing projects, a new transducer-and-coil piece from Jasna Veličković, and a project by Dario Calderone built around the group collecting and distilling shared dreams into a score. We're joined by Silvia Tarozzi and Deborah Walker, presenting their project Canti on remembered Italian work and folk songs, and together with Julia Eckhardt, the Dutch premiere of Éliane Radigue's Occam Delta #3.
The festival also revisits two scores that shaped MAZE from early on: Peter Ablinger's Book of Returns, whose modular DIY score plays through collisions of different listening modes, and our new release Shuffle, based on Christian Marclay's card-game score, the same piece MAZE opened with at Holland Festival back in 2013.
Seismism for TROMP
My piece Seismism is the compulsory work for the third round of the TROMP International Percussion Competition, taking place on 23 September 2026 at Paterskerk in Eindhoven. It translates daily seismic activity from the USGS earthquake database into an open notation for solo percussion, pages accumulate day by day into a score that maps global tectonic movement, performers choosing consecutive pages and reading them against a live drone generated from the seismic data itself. What makes this round, titled "Postcards to the Future," unusual is the format: all ten competitors perform the same piece, spread throughout the church. I'm very curious to hear how the ten participants interpret the score in their own way.
We Are The House at the Holland Festival
After its Kyoto premiere, We Are The House comes to Amsterdam, where Tomoko Mukaiyama's piece opens at Muziekgebouw on 13 June 2026 as part of Holland Festival. Same promenade staging, same cast, including my two new pieces Body Politics and Now I Am Ready to Tell.
With Quatuor Bozzini and Andy Moor in Montreal and Toronto
A short but full and fun trip to Canada in June. In Montreal I mentored young composers at Quatuor Bozzini's Bozzini Lab, before joining the quartet myself alongside guitarist Andy Moor for a concert at Suoni per il Popolo on 23 June, at La Sala Rossa. We opened with Hypnokaséta, for string quartet, guitar and electronics built from dreams I had during the first months of lockdown in 2020, then closed with a Rebetika set, a while since we have played it, Andy and I reworking early twentieth-century Greek diaspora songs.
Two days later we brought Rebetika to Toronto, supporting The Ex at Cafeteria on 25 June.
Elsewhen — new album with Futuro Ancestrale
The second album from Futuro Ancestrale, Elsewhen, is out now on Unsounds (also on Bandcamp). The band: Giuseppe Doronzo, Andy Moor, Franck Rosaly and, joining this time, myself, builds on where the first record left off, putting ancestral instruments in dialogue with electronics. The group is led by Giuseppe, who composed several of the pieces on the album. A couple of tracks carry specific references: Scindone takes its name from an old Apulian pagan prayer, Faló from a Chadian fire rite evoked by the kakaki. Mostly, though, it's nine tracks chasing a kind of duality between the ancient and the electronic.
Ekhos Trio in Bologna
A new work, Subtractive Fields, written for the Ekhos Trio - Kristia Michael (voice), Claudio Jacomucci (accordion) and Giuseppe Doronzo (baritone saxophone, Iranian bagpipe) - was premiered on 7 May 2026 at Teatro San Leonardo in Bologna, as part of AngelicA 36. The piece sits within a wider evening titled "Ecological Sonic Memories," a set of premieres by the trio alongside a new piece by Claudio F. Baroni and improvisations by the trio. The trio explore sonic footprints and ecological memory through this unusual instrumental combination of voice, microtonal accordion and reeds. You can watch the performance of the piece here.
Klei with Schweigman&
I was brought in at the last moment to write music for Klei, Boukje Schweigman's new performance with visual artist Zoro Feigl, which premiered on 15 May 2026 at Kwekerij Steck in Utrecht as part of Spring Festival. I composed the score together with Zeno van den Broek and Gemma Luz Bosch, who also built the ceramic instruments used on stage. The piece immerses three dancers — Goda Žukauskaitė, Sjaid Foncé and Niels van Heijningen — in ten tons of clay and water inside a circular basin, with HIIIT musicians Vitaly Medvedev and Mei-Yi Lee performing live alongside them. It's a raw, physical piece about our primal bond with earth. You can watch a clip here.
Maze performs Primordial Lift
Ensemble Maze performs Pauline Oliveros's Primordial/Lift at the Minimal Music Festival, Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ. Arranged and performed in a performance of this seminal piece of Pauline Oliveros where we used 4 subwoofers to create a warm sine tone bed for the piece. The players translate bodily processes such as cell division, circulation and nervous activity into sound as the sine tone climbs from 7.8 to 13 Hz over 45 minutes. The second part settles on a sustain tone, asking performers to imagine transformations from the atomic to the cosmic.
We Are The House in Kyoto
We Are The House, a new interdisciplinary work directed by Tomoko Mukaiyama, receives its world premiere at Kyoto Art Center on 21 and 22 March 2026. The piece explores bodily autonomy and self-determination, taking as its starting point the activism of physician Rebecca Gomperts around global access to abortion. It grew out of a ten-day salon held in Kyoto in June 2025, in which Dutch and Japanese artists and activists examined themes of abortion, #MeToo, queerness, patriarchy and family. My contribution was the creation of a number of new pieces for Tomoko, Body Politics and Now I Am Ready to Tell, and a reworking of Dress Code from La Mode.
Isles and Rivers in Munich
The Isles & Rivers project met in Bergson, Munich for some workshops and concerts This is a group that that has been meeting the last few years that is made up of: Sokratis Sinopoulos: Lyra, Keyvan and Bijan Chemirani, Zarb: Saz, Yannis Kyriakides: live electronics, David-Maria Gramse: violin, Rebecca Beyer: violin, Patrick Sepec: viola da gamba, Giorgi Kiknadze: double bass, Andreas Arend: Theorbo, Elisa Erkelenz: Curation and dramaturgy. The programme included two works of mine Knowing Nothing & The Island Remained Silent as well an improvisation with Keyvan Chemirani.