‘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.