Emma Margetson

Contemplations gathers nine works that Emma Margetson composed between 2014 and 2022, almost all realized at the Electroacoustic Music Studios of the University of Birmingham and the last at the University of Greenwich. She describes the album as one of introspection, charting a decade of work with sound, from objects to places and from feelings to experiences. Several pieces were written for 8 or 16 channels or in ambisonics and are presented here in stereo.

The passing of time runs through the whole record, which opens with Tick, made from the sounds of a metronome, and closes with Elapsing, about memories that feel recent and are already fading. Between them, Abstracted Objects reuses coins, foil, cellophane and bubblewrap recorded in a workshop with the Barber Collective, and received a special mention at the Métamorphoses competition in 2020. Water Waves won the Excellence in Sound Art & Sound Design Prize at the klingt gut ! Young Artist Award in 2018, and Cimbaal takes close-up recordings of a suspended cymbal to other worlds.

Isochrone combines a bicycle recorded at close range with the 426-metre Elbe tunnel in Hamburg and draws on a short poem by Atticus. Distorted Illusions, a prize winner at Ars Electronica Forum Wallis in 2019, moves between field recordings and close-up sounds like a series of dreams. Sketching Froanna, commissioned by the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, responds to Wyndham Lewis’s sketch of his wife, using chalk on paper, blue noise and electronic sounds.

Born in Derby in 1993, Margetson studied with Annie Mahtani and Scott Wilson at the University of Birmingham, completing her doctorate in 2021. She is Senior Lecturer in Music and Sound at the University of Greenwich and co-directs the Loudspeaker Orchestra Concert Series.

CD-R edition in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 24189, 2024.