ANAM Set 2025 Composer: Work Title and Instrumentation to be announced.
This ANAM Set commission was generously supported by the Anthony and Sharon Lee Foundation
About the composer:
James Rushford is an Australian composer-performer, whose work draws from concrète, improvised, avant-garde and collagist musical languages, staking out an idiosyncratic stylistic space that has been described as ‘electro-acoustic experimentation with a beating heart’ (Boomkat) and ‘haunted Jacobean ASMR’ (The Wire). Investigating the creases, cracks, and folds in traditions ranging from early music to new age, Rushford’s work subtly exaggerates seemingly liminal aspects such as atmosphere and the bodily presence of the performer until these take on a weight equal to musical elements such as pitch, rhythm and timbre.
In recent years, Rushford’s solo work has been guided by his theorisation of sonic images, particularly the shadow, which has inspired pieces as diverse as an hour-long companion to Federico Mompou’s Música Callada (See the Welter, for solo piano, 2016) and a sumptuous translation of the play of light across flat surfaces into synthetic sound (The Lake from the Louvers, 2020). Rushford has longstanding performance practices on piano, synthesizers and electroacoustic devices, and portative organ, bringing to all of these a delicacy of touch and a harmonic sensibility in which unorthodox tunings coexist with influences from fin de siècle Impressionism, the 20th century avant-garde, and many strains of popular music.
As a composer, James has been commissioned by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Glasgow), Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Neon (Oslo), Speak Percussion (Melbourne), Ensemble Vortex (Geneva), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Ensemble Offspring (Sydney), Decibel (Perth), Melbourne International Arts Festival, Norway Ultima Festival (2011), Unsound Festival (New York 2014) and Liquid Architecture (Melbourne).
As a performer, he has presented work at STEIM Institute (Amsterdam), Issue Project Room (New York), GRM Présences Electronique Festival (Paris), Super Deluxe (Tokyo), Blank Forms (New York), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Send and Receive Festival
(Winnipeg), Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw), Only Connect Festival (Oslo), Adelaide Festival, MONA FOMA and the Tectonics Festival. He has also performed as a soloist with the Krakow Sinfonietta, Australian Art Orchestra, and collaborated with Michael Pisaro, Annea Lockwood, Klaus Lang, Eyvind Kang, David Behrman, Tashi Wada, and artists Ryat Yezbick, Haroon Mirza, O.B. De Alessi Michael Salerno and Dennis Cooper.
James has ongoing collaborative projects with Joe Talia, Golden Fur (with Sam Dunscombe and Judith Hamann), Ora Clementi (with crys cole), Oren Ambarchi, Kassel Jaeger, Anthony Pateras, Will Guthrie, Graham Lambkin and Francis Plagne.
His music has been published by a variety of international labels including Unseen Worlds (US), Blank Forms (US), Prisma (Norway), Another Timbre (UK), Holidays (IT), Black Truffle (AUS), KYE (US) and Shelter Press (Fr).
In 2017, James completed a Doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts.