“A lot of the time I decide what materials are going to be in the piece as my initial starting point. The rest is just layering and transforming them.”
Imogen Davey
Imogen Davey is a composer, sound artist and flautist based in London. Her compositional work explores the relationship between acoustic and electronic media specifically influenced by visual material, glitch, layering and field-recording collection. Having studied classical flute at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Imogen was appointed Junior Fellow in both flute and composition studying under Matthew Kaner and Paul Newland. Working also with sound installations, Imogen’s work has been shown internationally at Piccadilly Lights in London, The Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, Fed Square in Melbourne, COEX K-POP Square in Seoul, the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin and esc medien kunst labor in Austria. Alongside her compositional career, Imogen also performs in multiple ensembles including Trio Farben — alongside Georgia Russell and Heather Brooks — who were selected for the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme in 2024, as Chamber Ensemble in Residence. She is also part of electronic duo snake_case with Callum Murray where they explore the convergence of art, sound, and technology in the digital age.
On 10th July, Imogen’s latest commission ‘Lustre’ will be premiered at Cheltenham Music Festival by Violetta Suvini and Dominic Stokes, alongside work by Ben Nobuto and Jasmine Morris. Ahead of her premiere, Georgie West sat down with Imogen to discuss geological processes, trinket making and collecting, AI takeovers and brain eating amoeba…
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Georgie/PRXLUDES: You have a multi-faceted practice that involves performing, installation work, digital media and acoustic composition. Can you tell me about the musical lines of inquiry you are interested in such as exploring texture, space, and the interaction between acoustic and electronic sound and how these different facets translate throughout your practice?
Imogen Davey: I think the way I compose is always centred around finding specific sounds I like and interest me, then working out how I can use them in a piece. It’s the same whether I’m writing for acoustic instruments, electronics, or a combination of the two. I like discovering sounds and then bringing them together to create what I can best describe as an audible collage.
In a lot of my early pieces, especially for acoustic instruments, I struggled to fit in all the ideas I had in one piece and I always had this feeling that I needed to cram in every idea I came up with for a piece into it. However, now in my more recent works I’m definitely approaching things in a more minimal way. That partially has come from writing pieces for the same people or instrumentation again.
I think what connects everything across the different areas of my practice is this interest in the boundary between sounds: that moment where something stops being one thing and starts being something else. A lot of my work sits in that space where the audience isn’t quite sure what they’re hearing, whether something is processed or natural, human or machine. I find that uncertainty really compelling, and I think I’m always trying to find it regardless of what I’m writing for. That’s also why the different things I do don’t feel that separate to me.
Whether I’m performing live, making an installation, writing for acoustic instruments, or working on something audiovisual with snake_case, the questions I’m asking are the same. It’s just that the format changes what’s possible. An installation lets you work with space in a much more literal way and you have more influence over the context that people will view and hear your work. Making audiovisual miniatures that mostly just exist on social media platforms, you have much less influence over how people will experience that; maybe they’re scrolling with sound muted. They’re also more likely to be mindlessly viewing your work than if they’re hearing something you’ve written being performed by instrumentalists in a concert setting. The context that people will experience my work in is maybe the thing that changes the way I approach writing the most — but the underlying thing I’m interested in is always the same.
You completed a BMus in classical flute at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 2022 and Junior Fellowship for flute and composition in 2023. How do you feel this classical background has shaped you as a musician and, as a multi-media artist does it inform the way you work now?
I’ve played the flute since I was 7 and it’s always been a huge part of who I am. The reason I even got into making electronic music was because I had to choose two electives in my second year at Guildhall. I decided that one of those would be electronic music because I thought it would be useful to learn how to properly record myself playing the flute. I then started messing around in Logic Pro X and just went down this crazy rabbit hole pretty much accidentally. It was also in the middle of the covid lockdown and I was living alone, so I spent all my time making these terrible electronic pieces using mostly stock plugins because I had no idea what I was doing! I also started live processing my flute, and was having so much fun making it sound completely alien to any flute sound I’d heard before.
I’d always thought flute had to be this super serious thing because that’s just a product of being trained classically. That’s not to say that I regret the traditional classical music education I’ve had — I think that’s still been really valuable to me and I’m still really involved in that world — I just think something clicked in me when I realised I don’t just have to stick to one thing. I realised that if there’s something I’m interested in I can just do it; that’s kind of the approach I have now.
When I first started at Guildhall I was so used to feeling this constant pressure to follow rules and do things to appease other people. But when I started messing around making electronic music, it was probably the first time in my life where I felt completely free of those external pressures; I was just doing it because I found it really fun and exciting. I just had this drive to learn anything about it that I could, and I did that through watching YouTube tutorials and from my friends giving me nuggets of wisdom every so often. It really felt like a thing that I was doing on my own and just for me.
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You also perform in multiple acoustic ensembles such as Babette, Symphonica Orchestra, and Trio Farben. Can you tell me about your composing process for acoustic ensembles? I’m thinking about your piece ‘Proximity’ for Standard Issue, which is receiving its second performance at Spitalfields Music Festival on 4th July…
I’m really lucky that a lot of the acoustic music I get to write is in a way that feels really collaborative. Especially with my trio, it’s already so lovely to play with two of my closest friends, Georgia and Heather. We’ve been playing together for over 7 years so when we play together we know exactly what each other is thinking.
Writing ‘Proximity’ for Standard Issue was really fun. It had its premiere at Hundred Years Gallery in January. I love writing for strings, so when they asked which duo of instruments I wanted to write for I knew it had to be violin and cello. ‘Proximity’ started out as lots of small sketches that explore the relationship between the two instruments. I was experimenting with material where the two instruments are treated as a single entity, and material where they’re quite opposed. We had a workshop where we went through all the sketches and I would call out “go to sketch 3 — okay, now violin to sketch 1, but cello stay on sketch 3” which was a really freeing way of working in the room with them. I eventually formalised this for the piece, but I thought a lot about the possibility of leaving it more open.
What does your compositional process look like? You are often influenced by layering, subtlety, transformation, opposition and integration and you also look at the mundane. I’d be interested to know what your first steps are when you approach a new work?
I like to think about a concept or a title usually very near the beginning. Especially when there’s a tight deadline, I want to lock that down first; and it is usually one word. I always start with ideas or snippets of sound that I know I want to use and then I work out how they fit together.
Writing acoustic pieces for Trio Farben feels really special because I’m composing for a combination (flute, viola and harp) that I know really well — but also a combination that’s not written for anywhere near as much as a string quartet for example. The harp can do a lot and is sometimes challenging to write for, which is why a lot of composers are quite scared of it!
Some of the most interesting things in my pieces for the trio have come out of messing around in rehearsals. For ‘STRATA’, Heather started singing into her harp as a joke; there’s this hole in the back that you can’t see as an audience member, and her voice just started resonating inside it like this insane reverb. That ended up in the piece, and I think she’s regretted it ever since because she has to do it every time we perform it now! The piece is to do with rocks and geological formations and the movements move through more agitated sounds like banging the harp strings, other unusual sounds, and then melodies in canons which reflect the layers of stratum.
Around three years ago I’d been making a lot of music for other people’s visuals, and my social media felt like a collection of other people’s work because of it. I love writing music to fit visuals that have already been made — I definitely find myself gravitating towards sounds I might not usually use because there’s something in the visuals that calls out for something specific. But in the middle of that time, I wanted to try a more self-contained approach where I was in complete control of everything. That’s why I started the ‘Commonplace Miniatures’ series, where I set myself the challenge of the pieces being really short (even as short as six seconds and the longest being half a minute). I wanted to make the audio really quickly (often I’d challenge myself to start and finish it in under an hour) and then make the visuals. It was a way for me to have small concepts that I could try and take far in a short amount of time. Things that interested me were things that people often overlook like pigeons, escalators, worms, trains, airports.
Something that influences my compositional language hugely is collecting. Ever since I was young I have been collecting things: ribbon, string, paper, shells, rocks, trinkets. I would spend my pocket money on these mini fairy and mermaid statues. For Christmas once I actually asked Santa just for boxes to put all the things I collect inside. It’s the same now, I still love collecting things, I’ve not changed! I also make a lot of my own trinkets with clay, and make little figurines; and turn the rocks I collect into jewellery too. Georgia and Heather joked when we had our Britten Pears residency — we were on Aldeburgh beach, and they laughed about how I was going to weigh the car down with the amount of rocks I was bringing back with me!
The way I approach writing is the same, really. But instead of collecting trinkets, I’m collecting sounds either through my own field recordings, sounds I spend ages finding on websites like freesound, instrument techniques I’ve heard in other people’s music or ones I reuse from my past pieces, or specific chords I like. I find sounds I want to use and then repurpose them to work within the context of whatever piece I’m writing. That’s where this idea of layering and transformation happens. A lot of the time I decide what materials are going to be in the piece as my initial starting point. The rest is just layering and transforming them.
Your work ‘Visitant’, for string quartet and electronics, was commissioned by Komuna Collective recently and premiered at Horse Hospital — can you tell me about how you put the piece together?
I’d had this idea about writing a piece inspired by spirit boxes for about two years before Komuna Collective asked me to write a piece for them. I went through this phase where I was really obsessed with watching these TikTok videos of people cleaning graves. They’d have what’s called a spirit box [ed. also known as a “ghost box”] next to them, which is essentially a radio that scans different frequencies — so you basically just have this white noise sound coming from the radio with these tiny snippets of things. The TikToks would have subtitles on the screen that would imply that the spirit of the person’s grave they were cleaning was talking to them.
I just found this whole aesthetic really fascinating; it’s the same as watching these ghost hunting programmes at 1am when you’re in a hotel and you find yourself watching something that you’d never usually put on. I find it super interesting that the people in these programmes are so convinced that they’re contacting spirits or ghosts. So this whole idea was something I’d been sitting on for a while to use in a piece but hadn’t got round to it or found the right time to use it. But when I started writing a piece for Komuna I just knew this would be the perfect time.
It is quite repetitive, and uses cycles of chords providing a stability for the electronics to sit on top of. The electronics are very glitchy and exist fairly separately from the acoustic ensemble in this piece. I often use live electronics, but this is fixed media — which maybe created this separation too, as in live settings I usually like audiences to not know what the original source is and the manipulated sound. Oliver Bradley-Baker made an incredible video to accompany the piece, which added to its eerie, liminal feel.
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The installation Viatrix’s Odyssey was created for NXT Museum’s UFO — Unidentified Fluid Other exhibition in Amsterdam, stayed for 15 months and toured in many other countries. Can you tell me more about that world?
My sister Harriet is a 3D artist and AR creator, and we’ve been making things together for a long time. Their work is rooted in questions about what it means to be fluid and human in a digital world, and they create these incredible avatar characters. We’ve been collaborating for long enough now that I have a really strong sense of what sounds will work with their visuals, and they have the same instinct in reverse. We have this shared language that’s built up over years.
For ‘Viatrix’s Odyssey’, Viatrix is one of Harriet’s characters that they created as an “Unidentified Fluid Other” to guide visitors through the UFO exhibition. The work had two distinct sonic layers. There was around an hour of music that played on loop in the entrance of the museum. It was the very first thing visitors heard when they arrived, which was a really interesting challenge to write for, because you’re setting the tone for someone’s entire experience before they’ve seen anything. Then there were five transition rooms, each with its own video and around two minutes of audio that would loop as Viatrix led visitors between different artists and spaces. The poetry and voiceover in those transition rooms was written and performed by Julia-Beth Harris, who also wrote the exhibition title itself. Everything was very glitchy, textural and layered. There’s lots of organic foley-type sounds, water drops, processed found sounds, that same collecting and repurposing instinct I was describing earlier. At each new stage the sounds return slightly differently, so the soundtrack evolves alongside the visitor’s journey through the space.
You are also part of electronic duo snake_case — can you tell me about your work with Callum Murray and what you are both interested in as performers?
Callum and I first started working together because of my sister, actually! Harriet wanted to make a video game for an exhibition where the music would be central to that and would require lots of code. At the time, Callum was super into coding, and Harriet asked if he wanted to also do this project alongside the two of us. This was for Energy Drinks and Bisexual Lighting, at HOLON Berlin. That was about three years ago and we’ve been working together ever since. I think it was a very natural progression for Callum and I to work together though. We’ve both been making similar music for a long time and have really similar tastes; we’ve always asked each other’s opinions on our own projects, so taking that further into a duo project was going to happen at some point.
With snake_case, we’ve always been really interested in making audiovisual work. Our own live audiovisual show is something we’ve been developing for a long time together now and it’s been in so many different forms. I think when you make both audio and visual art that are completely dependent on one another and triggering each other, you get this creative feedback loop where the audio influences the visuals and the visuals influence the audio. They’re so heavily interconnected now, I think one without the other isn’t nearly as impactful.
Our most recent work was ‘dark site’, which was an installation at Hypha Studios Gallery 2 as a part of the PLAYFORM exhibition, curated by Resonant Ground. Our focus for this was on the post-human world, thinking about what would happen in an AI takeover. We focused on things like what AI might store about humans. It was super interesting because one of the most common things that are likely to be stored are spam emails, surveillance videos, and Amazon reviews like “I love this dog food, my dog was really overweight and now he’s lost so much weight!” — and this was put into the visuals.
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You also have an upcoming co-commission for Violetta Suivini at Cheltenham Festival on 10th July. Can you tell me about how the piece is going and what we can expect to hear?
The piece is called ‘Lustre’ and it’s for violin, viola, and electronics. I’ve written quite a few pieces for Violetta now and I love writing for her because she’s so open to whatever I throw at her. I think it helps that we have pretty similar tastes in music and so many shared interests. Violetta has a great eye for aesthetics.
When I first wrote for her, I wrote this piece inspired by brain-eating amoeba. I’d seen this YouTube video about how if you swim in stagnant water there’s a chance that brain-eating amoeba can enter your nose, and once you’re infected it’s almost certain that you will die from it. It’s pretty horrific really. But that kind of gruesome, visceral, scientific imagery is something that always fascinates me. I think most of the pieces I write are really influenced by the natural world, and the uncanny, unsettling dreamlike liminal spaces.
Violetta asked me to write a piece for her and Dominic Stokes (viola) for Cheltenham Festival. She gave me full creative freedom and said something like “I love your music, I trust you completely to do whatever you like, but also if you want anything specific laid out then I can tell you some things”. It’s kind of a dream request for me! The title ‘Lustre’ comes back to my obsession with collecting rocks and gem stones. I think it’s crazy that you can find a rock on a beach that you just usually overlook and think nothing of; and then when you actually think about it, this rock could be millions of years old. My mind can’t really comprehend that. And the fact that some rocks just look so intricate, with these crazy patterns on them, and that’s all nature. It blows my mind.
‘Lustre’ describes the relationship between light and the surface of a crystal, rock or mineral. It implies radiance, gloss and brilliance. The piece I’m writing is inspired by that. The string parts are very sustained and centre around this repeating chord progression that feels almost medieval. And the electronics are really sound designy. There’s lots of glitchy textures, ASMR-type sounds that tickle your brain, glassy sounds. I love making this top layer of glitches in my electronic pieces. It’s like when I make a clay trinket and it looks a bit dull, and then as soon as I glaze it in resin it becomes this shiny thing that has a wet look about it. That’s how the glitchy layer in my electronics feels to me.
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Imogen Davey’s new commission ‘Lustre’ is being performed at Cheltenham Music Festival by Violetta Suvini and Dominic Stokes at 11am on Friday 10th July – learn more and buy tickets at:
And Imogen’s piece ‘Proximity’ is being performed by Standard Issue at Spitalfields Festival at Rich Mix, London on 4th July:
Learn more about Imogen and her practice:
