The orchestra is a microcosm — society in a petri dish. The perfect laboratory for figuring out our thoughts about the pressures and possibilities of the throng. Drunk on Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, an ecstatic hymn to the multitudes within us and without, this night will look at how music and art has taken on multiplicity and our overloaded present.

Most excitingly, a newly constituted LCMF Orchestra, co-founded and conducted by RNCM junior fellow Jack Sheen, will premiere two new LCMF commissions from experimental performer-composers Neil Luck and Elaine Mitchener, who will push the orchestra to its limits.

We begin, however, at the very beginning. Genesis in digest. No sooner has matter and light been belched up by Chaya Czernowin's extraordinary slowed down-explosion, Day One: On the Face of the Deep (2017), originally written for the Ensemble InterContemporain for their 40th anniversary, now receiving its UK premiere, than man has barked us back into darkness in Gerald Barry's The Destruction of Sodom (2015) — scored for eight horns and two wind machines — a world premiere performance.

Work — god’s punishment to man — is ennobled and indicted in Claudia Molitor and Joseph Kohlmaier’s Die Gedanken Sind Frei (2018). To perform this piece we welcome back Musarc, who are transformed into a whistling, chanting, earth-shovelling labour force. In Julius Eastman's The Holy Presence of Joan D'Arc (1981), receiving its UK premiere at the hands of Apartment House, you get a sense of coagulation as the cellos buzz around each other, huddling then jostling then elbowing their way through the score. The extraordinary Swedish improviser-composer Sofia Jernberg will sing the Prelude.

The digital world is a permanent crush. An acoustic analogue to this cacophony is to be found in David Jackman's Georgina Cries (1971), originally written for the Scratch Orchestra, tonight performed by Musarc.  

Whitman's statement of abundance — ’I am large, I contain multitudes’ — was a declaration of interior complexity and contradiction. Literal self-replication is the subject of Annea Lockwood’s Gone! (2007), in which a piano spontaneously gives birth, before our eyes, to another.

Exemplifying this sense of inside teeming are the multimedia collages of Klein, one of the most extraordinary electronic producers of her generation. Through voracious sampling and a dada approach to construction, Klein will be presenting a new multi-disciplinary commission at LCMF 2018 in collaboration with the artist and set designer Club Couture and Overt Corperation.