Dublin Sound Lab presents a programme of Irish premiers, including three new works written especially for this performance by Francis Heery, Jaki Irvine and Alessandro Massobrio’s new Music Current Festival commission. This seemingly eclectic programme shows the results of extended collaborations combined with video and virtuosic interaction. Three modern multimedia and electronic music “classics” for soloists form the skeleton of the programme: Simon Steen-Anderson’s hypnotic Study for String Instrument #3, and Johannes Kreidler’s Bow – both of which are visually witty commentaries on the concept of multimedia composition and interaction – and Martin Matalon’s masterfully sonorous Traces V for clarinet and computer.

Francis Heery’s Towards a Soteriological Theory of Bog Bodies (for piano, synthesiser and electric guitar) and Alessandro Massobrio’s, Calanchi, (for piano and electric guitar) are, in a way, sister pieces. Both were composed for this concert and purposely for Izumi Kimura (piano) and Shane Latimer (electric guitar). And both make use of extraordinarily detailed instrumental sonic explorations that reveal an astonishing sensability of sound and precision workmanship, in both composition and performance.

Jaki Irvine’s Re_sett_ing_s (for mixed chamber ensemble and live video/VJ) is quite literally a resetting of her recent two-person show of the same name, with Locky Morris at The Complex, Dublin. The artist John Graham described that exhibition as, “a panoply of looping images and sounds; a discursive array of interacting elements that, while tightly constructed, feels enjoyably lawless.” Here the work is literally reset, amplified and projected with the forces of flute, violin, piano and drum kit, and revels in its self confidence and tightly controlled lawlessness.

“Dublin Sound Lab is doing an important job for those in Ireland who remain passionate about music in the post-war avant-garde lineage and who rarely get the opportunity to hear such ‘difficult’ music performed… …flying the flag in Ireland over the past decade for European modernism.” [Liam Cagney, Journal of Music]