How an experimental music festival shifted Toby Anderson’s perspective as a composer
written by Toby Anderson, composer and cellist
I thought about all the endless hours I spent applying for endless early career schemes. What if I had spent that time actually just making music, live in the air around me, rather than on a page? I was a good enough cellist to make something convincing, and I owned all the equipment I might need. I realised the only thing standing in my way was myself. A horrific finding.
Toby Anderson
Losing my Mind at BOUNDARIES Fest
For most of my life, the city of Sunderland held very little meaning. That was until I met my Mackem1 now-husband Michael in 2019. We met at university and made a dialectical pair: me posh and southern, frivolously studying music, and never once questioning my right to be in Oxford; him not-posh and northern, usefully studying PPE and very aware that he knew no-one else from Sunderland in our entire year. I liked Messiaen and Poulenc; he liked Donk.
The first few contemporary classical gigs I tentatively took him to did not result in transcendent moments of Pauline conversion; rather they mostly ended in me feeling a little embarrassed of what I had just shown him. A particular gig involving a vibrating dildo on piano strings was met with raised eyebrows and bemusement, him later remarking that he was titillated by the “Oxford and art of it all” but had felt no real connection with the music.
Subconsciously, this established itself in my impressionable young mind as a conviction that contemporary classical music only really functioned amongst small groups of overly educated people with too much time and cultural capital. Should it be tested by the Real, rough and no-nonsense spirit of the regional working-class North — quintessentially expressed in my twink boyfriend — it would be revealed as frivolous, essentially Southern, and only possibly enjoyable to a very exclusive group of culturally elite losers.
Of course, I am no longer nineteen, and I am proud to say I have expanded my mind and no longer think in such unchic and rigid binaries. Twenty minutes looking into DIY, experimental, and noise scenes across the UK can convince you that there have always been regional, working-class currents feeding into the culture of new music in the UK. That being said, the largest and wealthiest institutions in the contemporary classical establishment are overwhelmingly based in London. Knowing about the Gateshead DIY noise scene doesn’t change the fact that when I leave my cosmopolitan bubble and converse with my unimpressed father-in-law about my work, I get the sense that until I’m making serious money, what I do kind of ceases to be real.
Thus, the scene is set for my brother-in-law, J████2, to invite Michael and I to an experimental music festival in Sunderland, called BOUNDARIES. The festival lasts two days and is spread across three venues in the city, none of which could be described as a concert hall. J████, now an architect, spent his youth in a mildly successful post-punk band part of a wider scene in Sunderland. J████ talks of this band scene, the most successful breakout act being The Futureheads, with great nostalgia and a kind of civic pride. His attitude extends to BOUNDARIES, which he believes evinces an essentially Mackem appetite for experimental and avant-garde music. He hopes that the festival will ignite a kind of revival of the spirit of his band days, a hope ostensibly shared by Graeme, the organiser of the festival and J████’s friend from the scene.
J████’s wife, C████, thinks the whole thing is thoroughly ridiculous. She attended the festival once a few years ago, listened to twenty minutes of someone making music by tearing up pieces of metal into a microphone, and promptly vowed never to return. When I asked her about it, she said “I’m not interested in listening to something that sounds like shit.” Tricky to argue against that. The two make a fun microcosm of the whole issue. J████, who so deeply believes in his city’s sense of musical identity, in the way experimental sound can create culture, create community. C████, who doesn’t believe in experimentation as an end in itself and is very hard to impress.
And so I left work early on Friday afternoon, boarded a train to Sunderland and readied myself for a weekend staying with J████ and C████: a weekend where I would listen to some truly crazy sounds, be profoundly inspired, and enter into an existential crisis around who I am and what I do.
FRIDAY
Michael and I arrive late to the first night, missing the first two acts — a bad start to my journalistic career that I try to ignore as we rush through the city centre to get to the first venue. It is 9pm on a Friday night but the streets are near deserted, all empty shop fronts and silence. Eventually, we arrive at the venue, PopRecs — a café/bar/live music venue that specialises in vinyl mixing. Inside it feels like Hackney but the pints are a fiver. On the wall is a trans flag next to a Palestine flag next to a huge black panther (the Sunderland AFC mascot) with ‘FTM’ written on it. In the context of the trans flag next to it, I assume this is some cool-as-fuck transmasc thing, but then Michael informs me that FTM actually stands for “Fuck the Mags” (the “mags” being Newcastle United).
We find J████ standing by another poster that says “People NOT Profit” and he’s buzzing about the act we just missed. We have a few minutes to catch up before the next act begins. He says he hardly knows anyone in the venue (a rare occurrence for him) and is excited by how this implies a lot of people have travelled to Sunderland for the festival.
Rhodri Davies comes out to play Celtic harp with a contact mic and guitar pedals. As he begins his first piece, I survey the crowd, and like any good journalist I partake in some amateur demography. At an estimate, 80% are men, of that maybe 90% are aged 30-55, and of that 100% are wearing baseball caps. It is as if Café OTO installed a transit beam. I strain my eyes a little and conclude that I can’t see anyone who is visibly non-white. I, slightly self-consciously, adjust my own baseball cap and pay closer attention to the music. He keeps doing these very loud bisbigliandi with a lot of distortion which becomes an overwhelming texture; it’s really cool that so much noise is being made by such a stereotypically “dainty” instrument. The hat guys all have their eyes scrunched and are slowly nodding their heads. After a while, my ears tire of the homogeneity of pitch — I’ve never really been into drone music — but then he gets out a tuning fork and I’m all excited about the prospect of some microtonal stuff. Disappointingly, he just starts hitting the harp with the fork.
Next is Aja Ireland, the night’s headliner. She does crazy hard-style techno cunty avant-garde pop stuff, and I’m interested in seeing how well she gels with the hat guys. Michael is very excited. Hilariously, she had put on her Instagram story earlier that day: “so excited to do my first ever gig in NEWCASTLE!”… The less said about that the better.
Aja comes out in a huge coat and fiddles with the decks that now occupy the stage. Once everything is working the coat comes off and she’s in an alien latex kind of get up with a crazy wig already perilously high on her forehead. I already know her music, so I just enjoy the fun insanity of it. The hat guys have to really up the pace of their scrunched-up-eyes nodding and then they’re all quite shocked when Aja leaps off the stage and starts writhing about on the floor. The hat guys make room for her but mostly stand still in a little circle around her trying to make their nodding look encouraging. Throughout all the writhing, both Michael and I are very stressed to see that her wig is riding higher and higher up her forehead. Clinging to each other we watch as it very nearly flies off before she notices and pulls it back down, thank God.
At the end of her live set, she goes back to the decks and shouts out to the crowd: “now it’s time for some improvised techno!” I’m intrigued and excited as to what on earth that could mean; but then she just starts DJing. It’s really good techno and the venue have turned the volume up impossibly loud. It has none of the gentrified polish of a lot of London raves, and after a slightly tentative start the crowd eventually comes with her. She’s projecting videos of tooth-based body horror behind her but it all feels fun and silly rather than overly serious. Pretty soon we’re all dancing crazy. One guy in a full-on 2012-chic fedora(!), long neck beard and refractor sunglasses starts breakdancing and a little circle forms around him.
After Aja’s set, J████ is completely thrilled and infatuated. “I’ve never heard techno in Sunderland like that,” he says while we queue to buy some merch. Aja is a comparatively big name for the festival, and J████ frames her descent onto Newcastle Sunderland as a wholesome injection of excellence into the city. In the queue I overhear a loud Mackem voice say “probably one of the maddest things I’ve ever seen” and a posh southern voice say “how good was that? Like so heavyyyy.”
We all head back to J████’s house, him yapping away about how cool Aja was, how good her vibes were, and I felt good. I was sure I had a great weekend ahead of me. There was something special in the energy of the room. As much as I had been titillated by the moments of camp: the wig nearly falling off, the fedora guy, the army of hats bobbing up and down in unison etc. I think we had all collectively experienced something on a more profound level. We had all been connected by music that was weird and fun and unexpected. We had all opened our hearts to something new together, and though we had arrived alone we left as a community.
SATURDAY
Saturday began with an urban soundwalk organised by a sound artist called Tim Shaw. (Fans of the much-maligned Chris Chibnall era of Doctor Who will understand why this was already very funny.) We met at the Sunderland City Hall, newly built as part of a huge programme of investment around the river Wear. There were about 15 of us who had signed up for the soundwalk, and we were all huddled in our big coats around Tim who handed out some over-ear headphones and a receiver pack.
We began the walk. Tim would hold up various mics as we sheepishly made our way from the City Hall to the town centre. In our headphones we heard a kaleidoscopic fracturing of the sonic environment, with various delays bringing random noises into focus. As we entered a shopping centre, the volume of sound and detail almost became overwhelming. He had a mic that could detect electronic currents, and he would hold it up against things like cash registers and streetlamps, flooding our ears with a kind of glitchy pure tone.
I, who had attended lectures on “sonic urbanisms” at university, was having a brilliant time. It was inspiring thinking about the city as a vibrational architecture that reflects its history and culture just as much as the physical environment itself. At one point, Tim put a contact microphone on a bin and we stood solemnly around it attracting the confused stares of onlookers.
After the walk, I asked Michael (who alas had not taken the same “sonic urbanisms” course as me) what he thought of it. To my pleasant surprise, he loved it. Hearing the hidden web of vibration that entangled every object in the city, a city so integral to his identity as a person, was deeply moving for him. Later, when we recalled the scene at the bin to the rest of his family, my joy sank a little as they laughed away about how silly we were, listening to a bin like that.
In the afternoon there were a few acts in a large kind of formless room in the City Hall. All of them were excellent, thrilling, and inspirational, and yet by the end of the afternoon I was feeling gloomy and deeply existential. We started with Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh, an Irish violist who played on gut strings with various electronic effects exploring the rich resonances of the instrument. All she had was a viola, a DPA, and a laptop and she was making this incredible sound world. “Maybe I should be doing that?” a voice inside me whispered sinisterly.
Next up was Dawn Terry who opened with these huge accordion drones, and I settled into what I thought would be a gentle minimalist set. When she started talking and singing about trans violence, being murdered, and pulled out a machete, I reset my expectations and locked in. The set was dark and harrowing, and one of the most powerful and arresting musical experiences I’d had in a while. Similarly, all she had was a mic and a laptop and my gay tendency to try and make everything about me again led me down a path of thinking“Could I be making meaningful art right now with just the tools I already possess?”. My latent anxiety deepened.
The next two sets only cemented my existential crisis further; the first being an incredibly talented electronic artist called Konx Om Pax making dazzling audio-visual piece and the second being a truly Deleuzian free-improv noise band called Sly & the Family Drone, headed by what Michael described as “the black lodge version of Jack Black from School of Rock”. As Sly began flinging cymbals onto the ground and smashing a dynamic mic onto a table, I was drawn in and completely bowled over by the sheer musical vitality of what was going on around me. In comparison, my own musical essence seemed frightfully and embarrassingly pedestrian.
As Michael and I had dinner, I found myself well and truly in the throes of what happens when a composer-non-performer spends too much time around composer-performers. I thought about all the endless hours I spent applying for endless early career schemes. What if I had spent that time actually just making music, live in the air around me, rather than on a page? I was a good enough cellist to make something convincing, and I owned all the equipment I might need. I realised the only thing standing in my way was myself. A horrific finding. I took a deep breath and silently resolved then and there to change my bio from “Toby Anderson is a composer” to “Toby Anderson is a composer and cellist”, hoping that would manifest in me rediscovering some of that creative vitality/immediacy I had just witnessed.
But even a rash and unrealistically optimistic resolution, so often my ticket out of any existential slump, could not improve my mood. As I glumly ate my tacos and drank my margarita, I couldn’t help but wonder, was the composer-performer becoming the only feasible way to be a composer? Is the world of composition schemes, prizes, publishers, commissions, and cushy teaching positions a sinking ship? Was I overly invested in a way of being a composer that soon wouldn’t exist?
I’m ashamed to say that my first journalistic endeavour had been completely derailed by my favourite pastime of thinking and worrying about myself. After dinner Michael and I made our way to The Minster, an old church with dim coloured lighting and gentle projections on the ceiling. Felicia Atkinson was first on, and she began delivering a set of soft electronic drones, meditative piano and her whispering sweet nothings in both French and English. I drifted off to sleep.
Waking up to the sound of applause, I realised I had slept through the final two artists. It seemed I didn’t have the journalistic pluck to last the festival out.
SUNDAY
I spent the train journey back to London ruminating on the weekend. I had seen seven artists, most of which had not been from Sunderland; I had seen zero people who were visibly non-white; I had heard amazing sounds, all composed/improvised by the person performing the music; I had heard myriad things I wanted to include in my compositions, but felt it slightly fraudulent to do so; and tangled with everything I had felt the friction of being a middle-class southerner in a working-class northern city. Indeed, I felt the friction of being a middle-class composer-non-performer being immersed in the musical worlds of many working class composer-performers. The fear with regional experimental music festivals is that the same collection of artists and audiences are transplanted into the city for a few days only to return to their metropolitan centres without so much of a trace. It’s impossible to know to what extent this was the case with BOUNDARIES, but it seemed that for the Mackems I know and love, the festival is viewed with real hope and pride. Even C████’s derision of it is tinged with tender feeling.
Since going to BOUNDARIES, I endeavoured to write a piece for solo cello and electronics that I would then perform — it still remains unfinished. The writing process involved hours of improvising with both my instrument and the electronics, occasionally landing on something that really worked. It certainly felt more glamorous than being hunched over Sibelius. I kept writing things that I couldn’t play, and while to be humbled is a gift, the gap between my technical ability and my compositional ambitions ground the piece to a halt. It seems being a composer-performer wasn’t as simple as it looked.
Since going to BOUNDARIES, I also found out I got onto Britten Sinfonia Magnum Opus, so I guess the universe is telling me not to give up on my scheme-centred compositional life entirely.
Speaking of… you can come and see my first piece for the scheme, called ‘LoveMaxxing’, at Milton Court at 6pm on Friday 17th April!
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Toby Anderson is a composer and cellist working across experimental instrumental and electronic music. His work explores queer poetics in sound, drawing on affect theory and transplanting subcultural musics into contemporary concert practice.
Toby studied at Oxford University with Martyn Harry and the Royal Academy of Music with Helen Grime and Hans Abrahamsen, supported in his studies by the Countess of Munster Musical Trust and Vaughan Williams Foundation. Toby’s music has been performed by the Riot Ensemble, the London Sinfonietta, CHROMA Ensemble, the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, the Nash Ensemble, and Duo Intesa in venues such as the Tate Modern, Wigmore Hall, Sheldonian Theatre, and Duke’s Hall. Recent residencies include Creative Dialogue in Helsinki, Britten Sinfonia Magnum Opus, and JAM on the Marsh Opera Writing Residency.
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