How can we craft new ways to navigate the world as the tangible impact of anthropogenic climate change accelerates? One of the huge challenges for music will be adapting to a world where air travel no longer seems justifiable. Dublin-based new music group Kirkos have taken the logistics of their slow travel to Huddersfield, with the extra time, expense and change of internal rhythm it necessitates, as a starting point for this new devised piece. From there, the adventurous experimentalists leap into a sonic and spatial exploration of collecting and reusing, rest, energy transfer, interspecies entanglement and collective grief.

Additional elements of this piece, including artistic documentation of the journey to the festival, will gradually become available at www.kirkosensemble.com/beginners-guide

Credits: Produced by hcmf// as part of The Current Climate; supported by Culture Ireland and PRS Foundation Beyond Borders

Commissioned by New Music Dublin, sound and hcmf//

Kirkos is funded through Arts Council of Ireland Arts Grant Funding and supported by Dublin City Council

Kirkos is a new music group from Dublin, Ireland, as well as the operator of Unit 44—a DIY venue in Stoneybatter with a radically open approach to programming. We focus on trying to develop the ecosystem that thrives at the fringes of Irish new music and high-concept performances. Threading the line between experimental music and contemporary classical music, we rarely do straightforward concerts, preferring to incorporate every part of the audience’s experience into our thinking about music. Work devised collaboratively and influences from theatre, visual art and performance art are a big part of what we do. Unit 44 is part of a DIY movement making up for the appalling lack of affordable cultural space available in our city. Booking open to artists from all genres and backgrounds, and we try to give the space away for free wherever possible. Since 2012, Kirkos have given 200 premieres, encompassing most of Ireland’s leading composers. As a young ensemble, we are most proud of our work with newly emerging composers, and has given many irish composers their fist performances and commisions. 

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Sebastian Adams (he/him) (b. 1991) is an Irish composer and performer. He founded Kirkos as an undergraduate student and his artistic practice has been enmeshed with it ever since. His projects include a string quartet performing in the sea as the tide rises around them, an interactive program that turns Twitch chat streams into music notation, and a largescale project “Stolen Music” comprising nothing but uncleared and unauthorised audio and video samples. He has been widely commissioned and performed in Ireland and in places including Vienna, Graz, Paris, Marseille, Montreal, Cologne, New York, Potsdam, Antwerp and Görlitz. He studied composition in Dublin (RIAM), Vienna (mDW) and Paris (IRCAM). As a performer, Sebastian has created solo projects, premiered many solo and chamber works for viola, and enjoys working closely with composers on their new music. He also occasionally performs early music on viola and gamba. He is particularly active as an improviser.

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Composer Robert Coleman’s current work draws from numerous fields such as soundscape studies, site-specific art, field recording, and community and participatory arts. In 2019 he completed his Masters studies at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague with Yannis Kyriakides and Diderik Wagenaar and having also previously studied architecture his work often features spatial concepts and metaphors as frameworks for the composition process. He is currently a PhD student at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Belfast focusing on Ecological Sound Art. He has been commissioned by Crash Ensemble and New Music Dublin, the National Concert Hall Dublin, Irish National Opera, the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Tallaght Community Arts, violinist Larissa O’Grady and others. Highly active in artistic direction he is a founding member and performer with Dublin based experimental music group Kirkos and in 2023 he founded the School of Wild Listening, a platform for the discussion and dissemination of ecological sound art. Its aim is to promote an understanding of the living world and the current challenges we face through open and accessible listening and creative sound events. 

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Yseult Cooper Stockdale enjoys a career of unusual variety. Her interests range widely from experimental performance and the championing of new music, to working with every orchestra in the ROI as well as performing frequently as a highly-regarded chamber musician. Favouring more intimate ensembles, recent exciting projects included several tours with the Irish Chamber Orchestra, (working with artists such as Jorg Widmann and Kristian Bezuidenhout), and two performances at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival ( ‘22 performing Wingform by Barry O’Halpin, with Crash, and returning the following year with Kirkos, to perform twice with self-created works). She also toured, thanks to the National String Quartet Foundation, with the Spero Quartet, Ficino Ensemble, alongside the Vanbrugh, and most recently with the Ora Quartet. Other artists she has collaborated and performed with include: Bell X1, Caimin Gilmore, Kojaque, Anna Meredith, Welsh National Opera, Evlana, Southbank Sinfonia, Musici Ireland and Bastard Assignments. Yseult has been a member Kirkos since 2013 and has performed countless premieres, including many solo cello works

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Jane Hackett is a violinist and mixed genre performance artist specialising in classical and contemporary music. Her Arts practice is centered around empathetic artistic research, cultural and societal observations and furthering accessibility within the music sector. From an extensive musical training (BA and MA degrees in solo and chamber performance), Jane’s career spans from classical concert settings with orchestras and ensembles (including National Symphony Orchestra, Irish Chamber Orchestra, RTE Concert Orchestra, Irish National Opera, ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna, London Concertante, Wexford Festival Opera and with Musici Ireland, Vanbrugh Quartet, Camerata Ireland and under conductors Maxim Vengerov, Gianandrea Noseda, Nathalie Stutzmann, Leonard Slatkin, Julian Rachlin) to creating and directing multi-faceted concerts and projects combining classical music with various other forms of art. 

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Horn player Hannah Miller grew up in Ireland, received her Bachelor’s degree from Finland’s Sibelius Academy and graduated with a Master’s degree from New York’s Juilliard School, where she was awarded with the William Schuman Prize for outstanding achievement in music and leadership. Hannah is currently Principal Horn with the Irish National Opera Orchestra, a member of the Irish Chamber Orchestra and a Trialist with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. She also performs with the Wexford Festival Opera Orchestra, RTE Concert Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, and is a former member of the Verbier Festival Orchestra in Switzerland and the Kuopio Symphony Orchestra in Finland. As a member of Kirkos since 2012, she has been featured in many of their concerts and series over the years performing a wide range of experimental works. Her dedication to new music also includes performances with Crash Ensemble, Le Concert Impromptu and Ulysses Ensemble in recent years.

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Joan Somers Donnelly is an Irish artist based between Brussels and Dublin, with a collaborative practice that moves between performance, visual art, writing, and organising. Previous work includes a human choir for cows; a piece for sea swimmers; an interactive fantasy about the politics of housing in Dublin; a video essay about social spaces of gig economy workers; and performance interventions for lamp posts, zoom calls, U-bahn stations and apartments. Joan studied Drama and Theatre Studies at Trinity College Dublin and the Freie Universität Berlin, and in 2021 completed a Masters of Fine Art (Autonomous Design) at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. She has also trained through workshops and intensive courses in physical theatre with DAH Teatar (Belgrade), Butoh with Minako Seki (Berlin), dance theatre with Michael Keegan Dolan (Dublin), and choreography at SNDO (Amsterdam). Her practice is primarily concerned with examining existing social structures and creating not-yet-existing ones, using live situations as a testing ground for experiments in relating.