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Anton van Houten, Erik-Jan de With, Saskia Lankhoorn, Pete Harden, Neil Charles, Sofia Jernberg, Joey Marijs, Mandhira de Saram, Stephen Davis, Matthew Wright, Alexander Hawkins, Michiel van Dijk © 2026 Tessa Veldhorst & Musical Utopias

“The thing about playing the tuba in an orchestra is that you don’t have to play that much,” admitted composer Matthew Wright, who grew up playing the tuba in orchestras and funk bands, “but it’s the best seat in the house. You hear music back to front. The percussion and the brass are loud, so you hear all their detail, and the strings are this kind of ethereal thing that’s off in the distance.”

For the Kent-based Wright, who also improvises using turntables, samplers, and processers – most impactfully with Trance Map, his partnership with Evan Parker – this early realization nurtured a sensibility leading to the creation of immersive works that mix composition, improvisation, and technology. Cracked Glaze (False Walls) is a case in point, as it utilizes notated material – “dot music” is his good-humored term – improvisation, and Wright’s real-time sampling and processing immediately fed into surround sound, all of which he remixed for the CD.

Wright’s collaborators on Cracked Glaze represent various facets of his work. Ensemble Klang, an ensemble of mostly Dutch new music virtuosi, was an early champion of Wright’s compositions. Spheric Totemic is a Wright-instigated, flexibly configured improvising group with, on this occasion, Mandhira de Saram, Alexander Hawkins, Neil Charles and Stephen Davis. Sofia Jernberg, whose Musho with Hawkins was one of the brighter lights of 2024, is new to Wright’s constellation.

Historically, the conventional wisdom among exponents of freely improvised music is that the larger the group, the more apt the music will be muddied. It is a yardstick that is also prevalent among practitioners of contemporary composition. Individuality – of the improviser, of the composer – is more difficult to assert in or through a crowd. Although there are more than a dozen musicians heard on Cracked Glaze, there is no nebulous sprawl or complexity for complexity’s sake. Abstraction is tethered to figuration, the spine of the piece being a descending line that repeatedly submerges and reemerges, giving the interactions of voices clear relationships.

“In a lot of my written work for ensembles there is a central concern that tends to last a long period of time, an idea that will give the piece structure. I’m really interested in music being a kind of terrain that you can hear through and around, so that when you are listening, you are experiencing a kind of ‘visual’ situation. I guess this goes back to my work with vinyl records, because records make music a physical surface, where you can place the needle anywhere in the terrain of the music.

“In the improvised work, I don’t want to be the guy that says to improvisers, ‘this is how it goes.’ Improvisation, in a free context, is about distributed leadership. It’s about this beautiful situation of people saying, ‘the music could go here’ or ‘I hear the future of this music in what you’re playing,’ and the kind of listening that leads to those sorts of situations.

“Having the opportunity to work with a group that is mainly readers – Ensemble Klang – and a group that is mainly improvisers – Spheric Totemic – and Sofia Jernberg, gave me the opportunity to do something I haven’t done much of in my music, to have a spine that is unfurling but is always there. It doesn’t necessarily always have to be the main focus of the piece, but it will always be there. It will structure time in a certain way; improvisers can do whatever they want to do, and the music will be as much about them as it is the spine. I was really interested in having a sort of ‘object’ in the space of the improvisation. It’s almost like in the visual art world, where you have people moving around in a gallery but there’s a sculpture there. It’s in the room with you.”

Another virtue of Cracked Glaze is that it is the type of work that initially seems to come out of nowhere. It smacks of singularity. However, Wright’s backstory reveals that he did not come out of nowhere, as he has a pedigree linking him to England’s most consequential institutional incubator of experimental music, as well as its most venerable, living exponent of improvised music. Both associations largely account for how Wright’s disparate interests – several of which were common among Gen Xers in their formative years but were delayed in being assimilated into experimental music – were shaped into a mature aesthetic, and yielded in Cracked Glaze an arguably definitive statement.

“My experience, first of all, was writing music and playing in brass bands and funk bands and small improvising groups with friends,” Wright recently explained. “But I also liked writing chamber music for people who would take it away and play it somewhere else. I might not even be there for the performance. This background took me to study at the University of Huddersfield with the Professor who set up the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Richard Steinitz. I was very lucky. It was kind of random. He was my composition teacher. So, I was very lucky to have experiences like knocking on the door for a composition lesson and Richard Steinitz saying, ‘Ah, Matt, I can’t possibly teach you right now, but meet Karlheinz,’ and the door opens and there’s this world-famous composer from another generation that I had read about, but never dreamed I would meet.

“Contemporary classical music was a big part of my education, but I DJed as a kid. I was really interested at that point in the ‘80s and ‘90s when software, sampling, and DJ technology, was becoming affordable. It started showing up in people’s homes. Contemporary classical music and DJ culture were colliding in my mind when I was a kid. The only kind of formal education I could get was a classical education, along with some jazz theory, but it was largely based on dot music, written music. Then there was this other (non-written) side, like DJ culture and all of the great heritage of Black music that DJ culture is part of, and that was a kind of informal education I studied for myself.

“When I was a real little kid – like 12 or 13 – I made a lot of bedroom productions with a basic computer and turntable setup, really focused on instrumental hip-hop. I started to scratch around then, just watching how it was done on TV. My main inspirations were DJ Premier of Gangstarr, Terminator X of Public Enemy, and Maseo of De La Soul. When I was around 18 or 19, as a student, I DJed for a few parties, playing mainly funk, hip hop, and drum ‘n' bass. Around the same time – 1996-98 – I was in a few pop/funk bands that needed a DJ, so I did a few things with beat juggling and matching the pitch of the horns with turntable scratches, etc.

“In 1999 I DJed for a social event at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and I decided to just play fragments of music that I loved at the time: The Jazz Warriors, Louis Andriessen, Loose Tubes, Squarepusher, Björk. On the basis of that weird mix, I got the call to DJ at Abbey Road for the launch of a music charity, the PRS Foundation, in 2000. That was both a social event and included some (not entirely successful!) experimental scratching. When I moved to Holland to study with composer Louis Andriessen in 2002, I joined a trio with laptop artist Tom Tlalim and saxophonist Keir Neuringer – now of Irreversible Entanglements – and we played a few house parties and small gigs with our own mix of free improv and beat-based electronica. That same year the Huddersfield Festival commissioned ‘Presents from an Edited Then’ which was a 70-minute piece for The Apollo Saxophone Quartet and me DJing, designed for a club venue, again a mix of ‘social’ and ‘experimental’. That’s when I got interested in the worlds of contemporary classical music and DJ culture colliding.”

One of the first projects Wright embarked on was to compose for turntables and to teach classically-trained percussionists how to use them, integrating John Cage’s early work for percussion with the innovations of Christian Marclay and Otomo Yoshihide. “In a piece called Contact Theatre I had literally written out all of the material for notation-reading percussionists”, Wright said of the work. “If you look at a musical stave with the four spaces between the lines, I used those spaces to represent the four spaces on a vinyl record. The space that would be a F in the treble stave, that’s the space on the outer edge of the record, before any musical material appears on the vinyl record. All of the musical material on the record is included in the second space, and then the space at the center of the record was the third space, and then the label itself in the fourth space. You can prepare those spaces, put stickers on them. I would literally write percussion rhythms and they could produce those rhythms by dropping the needle on the record and get a ricochet effect or specify a section of the record I want to be played, say a saxophone solo three minutes into the record. I developed these ‘half-contact’ techniques where the needle sticks like a locked groove, and I taught the basics of hip hop scratching to percussionists, even though the music didn’t sound anything like hip hop.”

Wright then began to assess the proportions of and the relationships between the elements of his aesthetic and how to integrate them in his work. “Cracked Glaze is a collision of all of the above. I have been doing ensemble work and turntable work and installation work, but a lot of my focus is on the work with Evan in mixing and even post-production of the Trance Map material. Post-production is really part of the process, and Evan is very interested in exploring all that. Although Cracked Glaze doesn’t involve Evan, it brings to equal terms all of the sources I work with. There’s some notation written for Ensemble Klang with holes in that notation, space for the improvisation group of Spheric Totemic and Sofia Jernberg. They have start and stop times for the improvising, and they also sometimes have cues for some notation. I’m also mixing them live on stage, taking samples and remixing them and using the turntable as well. Then I take all that material and work on it a little in the studio, not to radically change the piece but to bring out some of the elements that you would hear live but not in a stereo recording. The piece brings together notation, improvisation, and technology, but not as separate forms. They all intersect. That’s where they all join on the map.”

In a roundabout way, the title of the piece speaks to the processes of its creation. It refers to the glazes used in high-fire ceramics that are formulated to crack on temperature; even though they are applied in an even manner, the cracking results in a surface that can be likened to a mosaic assembled with random tiles, with dark, hair-thin spaces between them. Though the results are subject to a unique firing, the experienced artist knows how to promote cracking that is pleasing and avoid cracking that ruins the piece.

“It may be interesting to talk about how jazz standards have worked in the past,” Wright responded to the idea of controlled cracking, and chuckling at the notion that he controlled the gas valve. “An excellent standard is one that can be played in its entirety and feel integrated and beautiful, but it is also a catalyst. It offers itself up to be cracked, to be turned into something new. In some ways, the use of notation to suggest a response is fascinating to me. On a technical level, there are definitely moments where I say to the improvisers, ‘at a certain point you will hear a line and at that point, that pitch, that’s your moment; if you’re improvising, the natural ebb and flow of the group will go to you’. But I don’t say ‘you should crack it’ to them; I say ‘it’s yours’.

“And there’s a third element there, the equivalent of the heat – the processing and the spatialization. I’m taking the feed of everybody, the notated music and the improvised music is coming to my setup, and I’m able to remix it and sample it. I’m an agent in the cracking, too. Whether it is notated or not is not the point, because it’s all going through the same system and being splintered into surround sound. That’s the third element, the sound design is a catalytic element.”

Wright pointed to a poster in his studio of a still influential Japanese textile exhibition he attended in his early 20s. “What I loved about that,” he said, “was that the dynamic shapes of these textiles are very rigid, spatially, but the textiles themselves have all sorts of holes in them. They are almost like fishing nets. I tried to create something similar by creating a structure that’s flexible but has holes in it. If we play this piece again, the melody line and the structure is going to be exactly the same every time and the improvising and the specialization will be different every time. That’s a long-winded way of saying I tried not to over notate.”

Wright acknowledged that post-production, particularly when the work was created in a surround sound environment and is remixed for stereo, creates a distinct experience of the work, and perhaps represents a new iteration of the pursuit of perfection in the studio, exemplified by Glenn Gould. “My pieces are concepts that have a sort of quantum existence,” Wright maintained. “What I mean is that if we are going to present the piece live, then there are circumstances that will be dynamic for the audience in the live space that may not be so dynamic when hearing it at home. In the live space, I’m dealing with surround sound. There are a whole lot of options to try to present that sort of experience in the stereo format. When it comes to making a CD or something online that people will listen to, I consider the domestic setting. I also consider that many people listen to music on the go, with headphones or their phone. You may be walking down the Avenue of the Americas and everything around you is changing, but there’s one consistent thread in the music.

“You have to consider the multiple ways that people listen now. I do hope that people will sit at home to listen to it. In that situation, it’s much closer to reading a book because it’s a solitary experience. You’re sitting with it for 40 or 50 minutes. Wearing headphones creates an interior experience. I really treasure those kinds of listeners and it’s a real privilege when someone spends that time with something that I’ve made with my musical friends.

“In the history of improvised music there have been many vehement statements about the relationship between free improvised music and recording. I totally get that, but I suppose that the question we now have to consider is what happens when you improvise with a recording. We don’t want the karaoke thing! How does the recording come back into the improvised music experience in as fluid a way you would have with another musician with an instrument? An instrument is obviously a technology of its own and the recording is the result of the technology. We need to make sure the technology is as flexible as any other instrument. The other thing I’m really fascinated by in the history of free creative music is the evolution of incorporating electronics. It’s really interesting for me when an electro-acoustic improvised situation might suggest that the music is not happening in the present tense, but in the past or the future.

“The thing I’m really interested in is those previously separated camps of notation, improvisation, and technology becoming one and the same, where there is an equaling out of the three. You’re not relying on one form of expression. And this seems to be causing a real revitalization of the scene, where people are mastering their separate disciplines and are also negotiating with each other. I think there’s more opportunity for creative music because of the dialogue between notation, improvisation, and technology. Looking for the connections between them is the main creative impetus. It’s not paper; it’s not technology; it’s not adherence to one way of making music. It’s about thinking about the connections between the people you’re working with. Saying ‘all of the above’ may be too easy an answer, but it does ascribe equal value to notation, improvisation and technology. These are all zones on the map and they all overlap each other, so the paths between those zones are what I’m interested in.”

Wright’s projects frequently overlap, the post production of one coinciding with the development of another. With summer approaching, Wright was mixing a duo session with Pat Thomas that has the flavor of This is Trickster; a Spheric Totemic album, and a Trance Map + recording on which Parker and him are joined by harpist Milana Zaric and Richard Barrett.

The presence of Barrett is particularly intriguing, as he pioneered improvised electronic music beginning in the 1990s – largely through FURT, his partnership with Paul Obermayer – laying groundwork for Wright and others. Additionally, Barrett’s compositions are renowned for testing – and often surpassing – the presumed physical limits of instrumentalists.

Barrett and Wright are part of a trajectory of composers foregrounding technology in their work. An earlier dot on the line, one that is essential but not obvious, is Conlon Nancarrow. The expatriate composer is the inspiration for Wright’s next major work, “Passing Nancarrow.” Wright’s latest project with the Belgian ensemble BL!NDMAN (the exclamation point is intentional) also has Hawkins in a key role. The piece debuts next year, marking 30 years since Nancarrow died.

“The idea of the piece is based around Nancarrow being obsessed with Art Tatum’s playing,” Wright explained. “He sampled Tatum in the form of piano rolls, using technology from a hundred years ago. What we will do is, while Alex improvises in real time, his notes are captured and this will trigger all sorts of reactions from the group. In a way, we turn Alex’s music into a piano roll.”

Wright was partly inspired by the writer and documentary film director Helen Borton’s comment that jazz and blues collide like a “hurricane” in Nancarrow’s music. Replace “hurricane” with “Nancarrow” and you get the gist of Wright’s conceptualization for the recording he is currently mixing – “four hurricanes of all kinds of crazy sounds.” Wright also considered the music of Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, and other exponents of electronic dance music, that influenced him when Nancarrow died in 1997, leading him to include “strange, intelligent dance music in the piece.”

However, the nexus of Nancarrow, Barrett, and Wright, is the consideration of the limits of music humans can create in real time, and how to get to the edge of those limits, if not extend them.

“Nancarrow reached for impossible, post-human music. But in my current work, I don’t have an artistic interest in post-human AI. I’ve heard a lot of AI-generated music and read a lot of AI research, and the thing I’m already bored by is that AI can do almost anything. Like a musician that can play everything and just won’t stop playing to give space for others, AI doing anything and everything is boring to me when you don’t hear inspired choices and you don’t hear the human labor or the human need for considered space in the music. But, I’m open minded. I just haven’t heard anything that inspires me yet. Back to the human level, in Alex’s piano playing, there is that reaching beyond what is supposedly humanly possible, to reach a new vista for what is possible.

“You can say that, for his times, Nancarrow was making a post-human kind of music, but we should remember that he sat there, punching holes. So, I don’t hear a sort of pre-AI in his music, a piano that can do anything, but the blood and the hours of Nancarrow sitting maybe six months to create an explosive two minutes. I want to know how humans feel when they hear music and when they make music. If that is aided by technology, the idea is that the technology helps musical thinking like an instrument helps musical thinking. My interest in technology is the same as Alex’s interest in the piano, there’s a tradition of human tool use there that in a sense heightens the human listening experience if done successfully.

“Another thing I like about Nancarrow was that he was true to his beliefs, which is why he left the US for Mexico City, which resulted in him working in relative isolation. He just got on with it. A few people had experimented with the player piano before, but he made it his own. I appreciate that you can hear the edges in music and you’re OK with not being able to know everything beyond that edge. I guess the difference between the scene we have now and Nancarrow’s situation is that we can go to the edge together in a collaborative spirit.”