The SET ENSEMBLE
“Stopcock”

Founded in 2010 in Oxford, the Set Ensemble is dedicated to the performance of experimental music and contemporary composition. All of the members of the ensemble are also composers and they often write for one another, using the ensemble as a testing ground for new ideas, developing and rehearsing pieces together. This process is a collaborative endeavour with the score acting as one material amongst many, directing or shaping actions within a complex field of activity.
This disc contains six such compositions by Sarah Hughes, Bruno Guastalla, Patrick Farmer, Dominic Lash and Paul Whitty, the scores for which are all text- or instruction- based. Running the gamut from tonal instrumentation to fluxus antics, sometimes even within one work, this collection refuses to sit tidily within one strand of contemporary music, reflecting the broad influences and practices of the ensemble’s members.
This album was released in conjunction with the fourth issue of BORE. BORE was founded in 2013 by Sarah Hughes and David Stent and publishes scores that are primarily text-based, but may encompass any form of notation or instruction intended for the realisation of musical performance, staged events, texts, images or objects. The fourth issue of BORE collects a number of scores by members of The Set Ensemble, including Angharad Davies, Rhodri Davies, Patrick Farmer, Bruno Guastalla, Sarah Hughes, Dominic Lash and Paul Whitty.
A CD of etudes for buried and exhumed audio tape.
Through its focus on process and materiality, Bias opens the practice of sound ecology beyond the acoustic to consider the audibility of the chemical composition of soil. From scraps of muddied media buried across three sites in Austria, Greece and Italy, Lami crafts a series of melancholy studies which seem to question the inevitable legacy of human culture and industry in the geological strata.
Edition of 150 CDs packaged in oversize 7” sleeve, with 16 page risographed booklet featuring accompanying visual works by Lami and a commissioned text by Francesco Bergamo.