Works

Immersive Dartmoor Folktales (Schneidau/Hurley/Priest, 2025)

 

Following on from Sara and Lisa’s Chasing Crockern show, which toured the South West in 2025, we have been exploring the use of immersive audio as a means of connecting audiences with the landscape, communities, and stories of Dartmoor.  We have deepened our deep listening practises with Jason Singh, as as well as gaining training in 360 audio from Tim Dollimore at The Media Workshop in Devon. I’m really excited to see where this project goes next.

Alluvial Matters (Sarah Blissett/Kerry Priest, 2024)

 

Interactive alchemy performance with Sarah Blissett, investigating tin metallurgy on Dartmoor; in geology, in history, in psycho-geography.

We have been melting down lead-tin alloy toy soldiers into water to create micro sculptures. Known as Bleigiessen in Germany, molybdomancy is the practice of melting metals over a flame and using the result to predict your future. The ritual of melting toy soldiers to create new forms is an alchemical practice of renewal and communal healing from the extractive, colonial, industrial past and imagines a better, less polluting future.

Alluvial Matters was developed at an artist residency at Dartington Hall in 2023, and will be installed at Gallery 333 in Exeter in September 2024. We have performed scratch iterations at SOAK at the Leadworks in Plymouth, and virtually for the Spoken Web conference in Calgary, with Lucinda Guy at Soundart Radio.

 

Anarchists’ Singles Night (Bishopsgate Institute, 2023)

 

 

“Join us for an unforgettable and utterly regrettable night of poetry, comedy & chaos as we get all loved up at Bishopsgate Institute.

This is a ‘singles night’ with a twist, and open to absolutely everyone. Expect silly songs, stunning looks and spectacular spoken-word, as we send up the cesspit that is love, and inject a big dollop of fun, queerness, and anarchy into the world of dating.

Drawing on the archives, we’ll bring surprising stories to life, and explore the themes of love, sex and sexuality, getting the audience involved with some silly games and prompts. You’ll write your own anarchic dating profile, play along with our version of Blind Date, and come together to laugh, scream and celebrate love in all its forms.

This event will combine poetry with comedy, DJing and drag. Plus just a splash of bad erotica. Featuring Kerry Priest, Bopa Rhys, Chris White & Edward Tripp.”

 

The Hardest Journey (Braithwaite/Priest, Royal Opera House/St Pancras Station, 2022)

 

Libretto for a micro-opera for Royal Opera House and Casco Phil orchestra.

This was a collaboration with the composer, Anna Braithwaite. The libretto was inspired by verbatim interviews with women with hidden disabilities in Folkestone. It looked at the internal and external factors affecting people’s mental well-being at train stations.

This work was part of Europalia, a cross-European project for creating new site-specific operatic works for major train stations. In the UK, it was curated by Royal Opera House and Curated Places and the works were performed by Jette Parker Artists, including the soprano Siân Dicker.

I Wanna Be (In Center Parcs) (Royal Opera House/St Pancras Station, London 2022)

Libretto for a micro-opera for Royal Opera House and Casco Phil orchestra.

Inspired by the broken clock in St Pancras Station, I Just Wanna Be (In Center Parcs) (Taylor/Priest) explores concepts of time perception through an arguing couple who sing a duet at differing speeds.

This work was part of Europalia, a cross-European project for creating new site-specific operatic works for major train stations. In the UK, it was curated by Royal Opera House and Curated Places and the works were performed by Jette Parker Artists.

It was revived in 2023 with new orchestration, for Wilderness Festival, Oxfordshire.

 

 

Mirror (NMC Recordings 2022)

Electronic sound poem based on automatic writing informed by nature, the unconscious, and the geological, mythological and archaeological layers around me in a specific woodland location.

I visited the same patch of land for a month and later went back to and recorded parts of the resultant poem in situ.

The final piece, Mirror, was released by NMC recordings, as part of their Big Lockdown Survey project. It was also played on BBC Radio 3 and formed part of the radio documentary, On the Trail of Joan Lyneham on Resonance FM.

 

Bone Ritual (Union Corner, Plymouth Uk 2019 and Phonic FM, Exeter 2023)

Music Theatre piece based on an interactive sculpture. Bone Ritual was originally commissioned for the Midnight Sun event and has subsequently been played in various locations 2019-2023.

I woke at dawn on the 21st June 2019 and wrote poetry to capture the moment of the summer solstice. I then went to Dartmoor and collected objects to add to the ceremonial sculpture. For the evening performance, I played the objects, including a sheep‘s skull, catkins, pine needles, rocks and bones and read the poetry.

 

Lucid (Ferreira/Priest 2022)

An opera exploring polyamory and altered states of consciousness. This was a collaboration with the North American composer, Beatrice Ferreira, who has subsequently held a residency at Nonclassical and has been a Britten-Pears fellow at Snape Maltings.

Lucid is a queer feminist twist on the story of the Marquis D’Hervey de Saint Denys, who used Lucid dreaming techniques to fulfil his sexual fantasies. It premiered at Milton Court, London, with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s MA program.

 

The Assisi Machine (21 radio stations worldwide, 2018-present)

The Assisi machine is an onoing radio series. A major preoccupation in the work is the electronic uncanny. It has so far had three episodes commissioned over a five-year period and works as a testing ground for whatever I’m into at the time. Themeatically, I would say file under: Speculative, Folky Mysteries.

Sonically, the episodes so far have explored how notions of time in dramatic gestures impact on the listener, as well as bioacoustics, and whimsical ideas like the music of the spheres.

Much of it draws on communal workshops I have run at Soundart; experiments in polyphonic poetry and electronically-enhanced spoken word.

 

Forces (Minack Theatre 2021)

Forces is a stage drama for a youth cast and contains sections of polyphonic verse where nature is represented as a dawn chorus.

It was commissioned by the Minack for their New Writing Festival and performed in 2021.

 

On The Trail of Joan Lyneham (Plymouth, 2020)

 

Pulse, Dissipate, Disrupt: On The Trail of Joan Lyneham is an audio essay made for FIMTEC, Resonance FM and Plymouth Art Weekender. It was first broadcast 20 August 2020.

This piece was a documentary about Jodie Saunders’ Joan Lyneham project, a project to reconstruct the ideas of a forgotten female sound pioneer from Plymouth. I invited some of the musicians who had taken part in the project to an experimental polyphony workshop where we explored her ideas further.

The polyphonic choir has become a permanent fixture and we became Dartington Radiophonic, an experimental spoken word choir and has subsequently made several works for radio based on layering voices and electronic manipulation of the voice, using contemporary composition techniques.

 

Installation: Blackbird, Gulls and Surfer (Medellin, Colombia 2019)

Polyphony can be a way for the human to entangle itself with the more-than-human, as we become part of the dawn chorus. Blackbird, Gulls and Surfer was part of a transnational project of field recordings and responses to place which combined the hyper-local with the hyper-global. 2500 visitors heard the installation at the Fiesta del Libro y la Cultura, Colombia, in 2019.

 

Installation: Fingle Gorge (Medellin, Colombia 2019)

Surround sound installation presented in Medellin, Colombia, as part of the Fiesta del Libro y la Cultura.

Fingle Gorge is an attempt to connect with the hidden layers – mythical, prehistoric and Mesozoic – in the ancient woodland near my home where I walk every day. All the sounds are made entirely from the human voice, manipulated by various digital effects. It is a part of the overall area of my work of deep ecology, drawing together inner and outer landscapes.

 

Tin Moth (Various locations, 2018-present)

Improvisations/electronics/drones.

Tin Moth is circuit bending band. We play homemade instruments. We repurpose the detritus of modernity, bending circuits and turning ping-pong bats into banjos. We scavenge the moors for bones and the beaches for driftwood. Tin Moth began as radiophonic explorers working out of Dartington Hall’s Soundart studio where they improvised live on air on a weekly basis.

Recent performances include Islomga Festival of Sound (Plymouth), Music is Murder (Exeter) and Amok @ Artefact (Birmingham).

 

Full List of Plays and Librettos

  • A.W.O.L. (Rehearsed reading with Moveable Type Theatre 2023)
  • Libretto for ‘The Hardest Journey’ (Braithwaite/Priest) for The Royal Opera House’s Jette Parker Young Artists. This was a site-specific work for St Pancras station performed by Casco Phil and JPYA on 8th March 2022.
  • Libretto for ‘I Just Wanna Be (In Center Parcs)’  (Priest/Taylor) again for the Royal Opera House, Casco Phil and Jette Parker artists at St Pancras. London, 2022.
  • “Forces” (Minack Theatre, 2021). A dystopian verse play for children set in a time of climate crisis. Written as part of the Minack’s Emerging Playwright program.
  • Documentary, ‘DNA Unravelled’ for Soundart Radio
  • Radio drama, “Robyn Hoode: A New Telling” for Soundart Radio.
  • Radio work: ‘Rain’  for Stellaria Media on International Women’s Day
  • On The Trail of Joan Lyneham”, a docu-drama commissioned by FIMTEC and broadcast on Resonance FM, Source FM and Soundart Radio.
  • “Excavation” Collaboration with Alice Armstrong for the Sonic Tag project. Broadcast on Source FM 2020.
  • “Fingle Gorge” sound installation for Fiesta Del Libro y La Cultura, Medellin, Colombia, 2019.
  • “The Bells of Canongate” (Radiophrenia 2020). An experimental mockumentary.
  • “The Assisi Machine” syndicated to 21 countries on the Radia network in August 2018. Radio drama with verse elements and custom-made digital effects on the human voice.