‘To commit to the bit is to play it straight – that is, to take it seriously. A bit may be fantastical, but the seriousness required to commit to it is always real... That’s what makes the bit funny: the fact that, for the comic, it isn’t.’
– from Females by Andrea Long Chu

Where would we be without the trickster? Shapeshifter, border-crosser, mischief-maker, lord of misrule, god of the in-between, catcher of contingency, vandal, joker: they are our guide, our patron saint, our aesthetic saviour. For our 10th anniversary we turn to them: Reynard, Eshu, Coyote, Raven, Hermes, Loki, Brer Rabbit, Anansi. Call them what you will. You shall know them by their fruits.

And look what gleaming tools they possess for tripwiring reality. Through nearly 50 premieres and new commissions, exploring pranking, trolling and committing to the bit, obstinacy and obstruction, deception and cheek, shitpost modernism and omnicringe – via AI movies, pantos, a monotone symphony, a noise opera and the last sounds Plato heard – LET’S CREATE will celebrate the trickster spirit in music, art and film.

Let our Reynards shepherd you to the sunny uplands.

Read music critic Eduard Hanslick’s response to our 10th anniversary programme.

LCMF was founded in 2013 to provide a home for the promiscuous music lover. Since then we’ve presented nine critically-acclaimed multidisciplinary festivals and premiered over 100 works. Artists who we have commissioned and hosted, or whose works we’ve premiered, include: Cosey Fanni Tutti, Julius Eastman, Cerith Wyn Evans, Roscoe Mitchell, Pauline Oliveros, Mica Levi, Lina Lapelytė, Tony Conrad, Klein, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jennifer Walshe, Yvonne Rainer, Charlemagne Palestine, Elaine Mitchener, Rebecca Saunders, Glenn Branca, Moor Mother, Ed Atkins, Annea Lockwood, John Giorno, Laraaji, Timothy Morton, Bhanu Kapil, Toby Jones, Nkisi, Gábor Lázár, Maryanne Amacher, Cassandra Miller, CA Conrad, Christian Marclay, Joan La Barbara, Fatima Al Qadiri, Morton Subotnick, Maggie Nicols, Gerald Barry, Katalin Ladik, Rashad Becker, Tyshawn Sorey, James Ferraro, Anne Bean, Ragnar Kjartansson, Pan Daijing, Robert Ashley, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Sophia Al-Maria, Michael Finnissy, Mark Leckey. 

In 2016 we curated the world’s first retrospective dedicated to the work of composer Julius Eastman. In 2018 we founded the LCMF Orchestra, dedicated to commissioning work by composers who’d never written for the orchestra before; to those whose work rarely gets heard in Britain; and to ambitious, spatialised orchestral pieces. 

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‘For it was Hermes who first made the tortoise a singer.’
– Hymn to Hermes

The first artist to refashion a found object was the divine trickster Hermes. Waddling from his mother’s cave, the baby godling spied a turtle and turned it into a lyre; he chopped off its legs, scooped out its flesh, cast strings from its entrails, wired up its shell and started strumming.

The mythical tricksters are all retoolers: scavengers, benevolentburglars, filching food and light and ideas. ‘Sometimes it happens that the road between heaven and earth is not open, whereupon trickster travels not as a messenger but as a thief, the one who steals from the gods the good things that humans need if they are to survive in this world’ (from Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World).

The trickster is the guide and patron saint of LET’S CREATE, the London Contemporary Music Festival 10th anniversary edition. And in our opening event in partnership with Camden Art Centre, we bring together two artists who embody the trickster’s foraging spirit.

In Jack O’Brien’s installation The Reward, the centrepiece of his exhibition, two pirouetting industrial staircases, swaddled in stockinette, lie side by side as if curled up in bed. Around this suspended couple, Laure M. Hiendl’s new commission, Chronochromatic Variations III, will play out, courtesy of three musicians from the Octandre Ensemble.

What you will hear is late romantic landfill: a string trio by Anglo-Irish drunk E.J. Moeran (1894-1950) that’s been cut up, spliced, looped and stitched back together. Like with O’Brien’s work, we witness, in the words of writer Dominic Johnson, a ‘binding, squeezing, penetrating, stuffing, bulging, shredding’ of the source material, until it too becomes another pirouetting sculpture – but of sound and time.

Hermes’s grandfather was Cronos, the Greek god of time. And Hiendl, in the word ‘Chronochromatic’, appears to be toying with him in this work. Moeran isn’t the only thing being repurposed: time has become timbre.

The result is what Hiendl – borrowing from the philosopher Lauren Berlant – calls ‘an animated still life’. An uneasy, stuttering suspension of sound and metre that hints at the familiar shapes of English pastoralism but skews them to uncanny purpose. You feel cradled and caressed without there being any justification for it.

The trickster’s reward – hypnotic as it is – is never a simple gift.

‘Transcendental Cringe is when something is so bad it tears a hole through the fabric of spectacle to reveal a pure imminent truth. You are not a $ubject. Can you feel the stillness of the universe, the stillness of others?This is what genesis looks like. Do you really think this song is about you?’

— Barrett Avner, ‘Finance Punk/Omnicringe Manifesto’, Covidian Aesthetics

The opening night of this 10th anniversary edition of LCMF features a type of work that cannot be performed and mustn’t be performed – though unconscionably it is performed every year. That’s right: I’m talking about our new panto. Once the epitome of popular European entertainment, the panto has since retreated to these shores and now squats proudly in our theatres during winter, the Millwall of art, one of the most reviled forms in history.

Tonight, composer Adam de la Cour reunites the panto with one of its closest and not much less despised relatives: experimental music. The mother of these two slippery worlds is the same: the vaudeville spectacles of the Edwardian age. (On 17 January 2025 at the Wigmore Hall we present the missing link: the world’s first experimental music, Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori, will be heard in Britain for the first time since 1914, when this noise orchestra was forced to battle it out with sundry variety acts at what was then a music hall, the London Coliseum).

De la Cour’s new Groyne ‘n’ Goosed, inspired by the Garbage Pail Kids, brings together the cream of London’s fractious experimental music scene, including vocalists Lore Lixenberg, Patricia Auchterlonie and Sarah Parkin, composers Neil Luck, Alwynne Pritchard, Matt Rogers, Andy Ingamells, Cameron Dodds and Alan Witts, clarinettist Vicky Wright, pianist Mark Knoop and percussionist Angela Wai Nok Hui.

The night starts, however, with a truly forbidden art: Philip Corner’s During This Concert the Hall will be bombed – or blown up (1969). Writer and artist Dean Kissick will present the UK premiere of this Vietnam-era text score, and after each subsequent interval two more: An anti-personnel CBU-Type cluster bomb unit will be thrown into the audience (1969) and one Corner wrote especially for this festival As soon as I finish speaking this hall will be struck by an intercontinental long-range rocket.

The guiding spirit of this LCMF – perhaps every LCMF – has been the figure of the trickster. And if there’s something that unites the mythical tricksters – Coyote and Èsù, Hermes and Loki – it is the intrepid interloping instinct. In this vein we will witness noise artist Russell Haswell’s first foray into opera. Emerging from the lineage of the mould-breaking operas of Robert Ashley, the truth is as elusive as ever – an absurdist sci-fi work ‘set in today’s murky future’ – features the experimental choir Musarc and Haswell himself on electronics, and takes on ‘spam, the cost of living crisis and world war three and other current topics’.

At the heart of the night Johnny Chang and Catherine Lamb present some newly uncovered fragments from the mysterious composer of the early middle ages, Viola Torros, who specialised in composing and performing on some of the first lute-like instruments:

‘Some were perhaps similar to the rabab, and others similar to the modern day instrument which is, perhaps, her namesake. It is unclear whether she was the initial inventor, or whether she was friendly with a highly developed ... unknown maker(s). Regardless, she certainly is one of the earliest known composers to have written for such modern-like bowed string instruments ...

At some point v. Torros seems to have disappeared from the cultural centers she found herself initially drawn to. It is believed she settled further north, most probably into the foothills of what is now considered the Alps. It is here where archeologists have discovered musical, written documents (in a peculiar notation), embedded under layers of stone, which could only be attributed to her.’

As part of our 10th anniversary celebrations, we’re celebrating the London experimental music scene with new work spread out over the four nights by a number of key figures, young and old. Wednesday sees composer Laurie Tompkins team up with saxophonist Sam Andreae on The Feelmouth Greeny, where omnicringe and shitpost modernism meet. ‘Sounds strain under duress,’Tompkins writes of his musical practice, ‘looping their way through scenes of grubby presence, not-quite riff, mouldy echo, and swollen bombast.’

And we end with a trio of artists whose commitment to the bit is unassailable. Derived from the past 70 years of text-score history, A Glimpse of the Art Basel is one of the works that make up Jennifer Walshe’s The Text Score Dataset 1.0 (2021). Here AI – the quintessential trickster tool: a dredge to plunder our collective memory, a vast immaterial net to catch contingency – was used ‘to “breed” new text scores by feeding in pre-existing compositions by artists:’

‘I don’t view the scores in this booklet as written by me. I view them as products of a community – of a shared avant-garde imaginary in continuous dialogue with itself, which has its roots in John Cage’s classes at the New School for Social Research in the late 1950s and stretches all over the world today. Throughout the project, my role has felt much closer to that of folklore collector than composer.’

We’ll hear the first of four mysterious phone calls that the artist Matt Copson has compiled specially for LCMF, and electronic producer aya – ‘an actual person from off the Pennines’ – who is the 44th aya listed on the online encyclopaedic music listing site Discogs, will play with the music of the 43 ayas that precede her.