Songs from the Reactor
Songs from the Reactor was a collaboration between my dear friend Geoffrey King and I. We were both searching for a new work that would highlight an emotion rarely touched in vocal music: grief. The want to try and capture this process in music drove us to spend the next few months working on this set of pieces for voice and piano.
The Reactor: a book about grief and repair
What initially attracted me to Nick Blackburn’s book The Reactor was that he did not shy away from the complex and non-linear ways we experience grief. His ability to show how are brains hyper fixate on seemingly random things as we process large life changes seemed to click with my own experiences. It was a authentically unedited take that made me think that an audience would be able to experience the process together without having to have a dramatic event to start the cycle.
“After the sudden death of his father, Nick Blackburn embarks on a singular, labyrinthine journey to understand his loss. How do you create an existence when all you can see is a void? The Reactor is a memoir about absence and creative possibilities, assembled like the pieces of a puzzle.
Through philosophy, music, fashion, psychology, art and film, Blackburn travels a vast panorama of ideas and characters to offer an entirely new exploration of grief. This is a book about looking for and finding chain reactions and human connection - a work of enduring fragmentary beauty.”
You can purchase Nick’s work here
Recording
Songs from the Reactor was initially recorded over a week long period in St. Mark’s with Geoffrey King and Mark Rogers. Given that the nature of the subject, this recording set up allowed us to fully emerge ourselves in the emotions and try to come up with authentic interpretation that would help up to pinpoint the exact emotions we wanted to convey in the music.
These recordings were used alongside live performance during the pieces premiere during the Royal Academy of Music’s Students Create Festival.