KINGS PLACE’S EARTH UNWRAPPED: SIRENS FOR A WOUNDED PLANET
Mercury Prize nominated singer-songwriter Sam Lee, composer and producer Gazelle Twin and sound artist Jason Singh are Artists in Residence
Premieres and commissions from Erland Cooper, Raquel García-Tomas, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Josephine Stephenson and Julia Wolfe
Highlights include a weekend of deep listening curated by Daniel Pioro, Folk Weekend inspired by birdsong and new Soundscape installation from Alice Boyd, The Sound of King’s Cross
Artists include Alice Coote, Andrew Staples, Aurora Orchestra, BBC Singers, Carice Singers, Laura Cannell, Mary Bevan, Manchester Camerata, Nicolas Altstaedt, Olivia Chaney, Piatti Quartet, Sacconi Quartet, Soumik Datta, The House of Bedlam, Voces8 and more
Kings Place announce the first wave of events for Earth Unwrapped, the latest in its award-winning year-long series starting in January 2025. Sub headed Sirens for a Wounded Planet, the series brings artists together to explore our relationship with nature and the eco-system, plant life and ornithology, the climate crisis, activism, protest and more, through music and spoken word.
Earth Unwrapped is the seventeenth in the Unwrapped series at Kings Place, which has become renowned for creative programming; its 2019 series Venus Unwrapped, which celebrated female artists, won the Royal Philharmonic Society Award in 2020 for Best Concert Event and Series.
Sam McShane, Artistic Director of Kings Place, said: ’Connecting with the earth and nature is critical for our wellbeing, especially in this digital age. The arts have always played an important role in communicating complex social challenges and we are so very lucky to have some of the world’s finest and passionate artists to tell important narratives surrounding our everyday life on Earth. Throughout this year, we invite our audiences to come together, join our community to listen, learn and be inspired.’
Artists in Residence – Mercury Prize nominated singer, arranger, folk song interpreter and passionate conservationist Sam Lee features as one of the Artists in Residence for the series. Sam’s work as an artist has broken boundaries between contemporary and traditional music and the assumed ways folk song is appreciated and is also a change maker in the industry as a co-founder of Music Declares Emergency, a Featured Artists Coalition board member and works with leading environmental charity EarthPercent.
Sam begins his residency with a special day of events in March entitled Meeting is a Pleasant Place, exploring the relationship between nature and kinship. He performs his beloved album Songdreaming in the elegant acoustic of Hall One, as well as a special event celebrating the hollow oak – also in Hall One – a room made entirely of one tree ‘Contessa’, a 500-year-old German oak tree. Producer and author Tom Mustill presents his whale song soundbath in Hall Two with the d&b audiotechnik Soundscape system, and there will be a special film reflecting on the impermanence of life and nightingale song by Emergence Magazine [15 Mar]. He returns in September for The Great Harvest Feast, where audiences are invited to join Sam and invited guests to celebrate the traditions of harvest time, culminating in a musical feast to welcome in the harvest season through song.
Gazelle Twin – moniker of UK composer, producer, singer and visual artist Elizabeth Bernholz – also features as Artist in Residence for Earth Unwrapped. Her ever-changing, identity-warping personas based on powerful, emotional themes has driven her output and many collaborations, including work on studio albums, soundtracks, art installations and more. She presents three special projects as part of the series, starting with a recreation of her We Wax. We Shall Not Wane installation during the opening weekend, featuring a pre-recorded narration by Maxine Peake [18 Jan], the final London performance of her latest critically acclaimed album Black Dog, and concluding with a new show specially created for the series using the d&b audiotechnik Soundscape system in Hall Two.
Sound artist, nature beatboxer, producer and DJ Jason Singh completes the Artist in Residence line up for Earth Unwrapped. His ongoing exploration of nature, interspecies interactions, voice, technology and cross art form collaborations with musicians and wildlife experts feed into a wide range of multi-faceted projects in the UK and internationally. For Earth Unwrapped, he continues his long-running connection with the natural world with a series of events beginning with a live soundtrack to the 1929 silent documentary Drifters about Britain’s North Sea herring fishery [17 Jan], followed by Moon Scales, an immersive large-scale, multichannel sound installation consisting of eight spatialised soundscapes set around a suspended replica of the moon [17 May]. He concludes with a new audio-visual project as part of the Jason Singh Quartet that tells the story of the extraordinary polymath Jagadish Bose, whose work as a physicist, biophysicist and botanist changed the world [19 Oct].
Classical highlights – The Sacconi Quartet and Festival Voices open Earth Unwrapped with a rare performance of Terry Riley’s Sun Rings, celebrating Riley’s 90th birthday in 2025 and the first London performance of the work in over 20 years. Utilising audio recordings of NASA’s Voyager I and II, the 10-movement suite questions humanity’s place in the universe [16 Jan]. The Ligeti Quartet also celebrate Riley with a performance of his seminal work Cadenza on the Night Plain and the premiere of a new arrangement of Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band, presented through the d&b audiotechnik Soundscape system [8 Feb]. Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble Theatre of Voices present the UK premiere of a new work by Julia Wolfe (a Kings Place commission) alongside Nigel Osborne’s The Tree of Life, inspired by his work in Lebanon with Syrian children in refugee camps [28 Feb], and Erland Cooper presents the world premiere of his new work The Peregrine for small ensemble, inspired by J.A. Baker’s book of the same name [5 Dec]. Cellist Nicholas Altstaedt joins the Carice Singers for an evening of old and new music – including premieres from Raquel García-Tomas and Josephine Stephenson, as well as music from Galina Grigorjeva and JS Bach – that questions our relationship with an increasingly threatened environment [13 Dec].
Virtuoso violinist Daniel Pioro joins forces with Manchester Camerata for a never-heard-before interpretation of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, interspersed with newly commissioned poetry by Sir Michael Morpurgo read by the writer, actor and comedian Stephen Fry and preceded by Caroline Shaw’s The Evergreen, launching a new release on the Platoon label [18 Jan]. Pioro also curates a weekend of deep listening entitled Time Unravelling, Sound Unfolding, a Kings Place commission inspired by Pauline Oliveros’ concept of deep listening – audiences are invited to actively listen and explore emotional states via the music of Bach, Oliveros, Tenney and a new commission in collaboration with Valgeir Sigurðsson [14-15 Jun]. Oliveros’s music also features in a concert from The House of Bedlam and soprano Juliet Fraser, which pairs her To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation – written in the aftershock of political upheavals of 1968 – with Larry Goves Crow Rotations, performed in-the-round and enhanced through the d&b audiotechnik Soundscape system [7 Nov].
Aurora Orchestra – Resident Ensemble at Kings Place – present a year-long exploration of Gustav Mahler and his fascination with nature, starting with a performance with the BBC Singers of his ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’ (‘I am lost to the world’) from his Rückert Lieder, alongside Fauré’s Requiem and works by Kim Porter and Britten [31 Jan]. They later perform Mahler’s musical homage to the natural world, Das Lied von der Erde, with Alice Coote and Andrew Staples, as well as Lili Boulanger’s D’un matin du printemps and Jean-Féry Rebel’s Les Élémens [5 Apr], and return to perform Iain Farrington’s chamber arrangement of Mahler’s Symphony No.4 and Richard Ayre’s No.42 In the Alps, joined by soprano Mary Bevan [4 Oct].
Kings Place’s Resident Quartet the Piatti Quartet present a programme that takes a contemporary look at our relationship with nature and the English landscape – centred around the poet Alice Oswald, the quartet perform works by Joseph Phibbs, Imogen Holst, Thomas Ades and Britten, with narrations from actor Alex Lawther [22 May]. Voces 8 join forces with the Carducci Quartet for The Lost Birds, an evening paying tribute to bird species driven to extinction by humankind [19 Nov], and the Solem Quartet present an evening of music that contemplates and mourns Earth’s current condition, with works from Hildegard von Bingen, John Metcalf, Nick Martin, Meredith Monk and Max Richter [29 Nov].
Folk highlights – Kings Place’s annual Folk Weekend this year looks to the ornithological world, with performers from across the contemporary folk scene including Eliza McCarthy, Martin Simpson, Chris Wood, Miranda Rutter and Rob Harbron, and The Wilderness Yet celebrating and shining a spotlight on all things avian, from new songwriting to musical dialogues with birds [25-27 Apr].
Olivia Chaney – in whose music the quest for how to live peacefully alongside the Earth is ever present – performs Modern Myths & Pastorales, a solo show of both new and old material focusing on ancient pastorale to urban iconoclasm [17 Jan]. Mari Kalkun performs music rooted in Estonian and Võru traditions from the heart of the Estonian forest [24 Jan], and The Rheingans Sisters present apocalyptic songs that contemplate the dystopian modern era in contrast to the natural world [10 May]. Folk ‘grande dame’ and eco-feminist Peggy Seeger joins the Earth Unwrapped line up for her last ever live London concert, alongside her sons Neill and Callum MacColl to celebrate her illustrious career and present a final new album [6 Jun].
Contemporary and Jazz highlights – Musician, sound artist and audio producer Alice Boyd creates a new soundscape installation for Earth Unwrapped, entitled The Sounds of King’s Cross, immersing audiences in the vibrant sounds of King’s Cross’s urban green spaces and weaving the natural ambience of the city with the voices of those who care for these cherished spaces [5 Apr]. Boyd also performs with her ensemble in Hall Two, sharing their latest music inspired by a trip to the Cairngorms retracing the steps of legendary nature writer Nan Shepherd [5 Apr].
Laura Cannell presents her latest album, an offering of contemporary minimalism to polymath Hildegard von Bingen, considered by many to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany [1 Feb]. Hayden Thorpe (Wild Beasts) collaborates with best-selling author Robert Macfarlane for Ness, an adaptation of his 2019 novella of the same name – the work is a poignant and cinematic response to cultural conversations surrounding the environment [7 Feb]. Aga Khan Music Award winner Soumik Datta presents Borderlands, weaving sarod, personal stories of migration and cinematic textures in surround sound through d&b Soundscape [16 Mar], and Norwegian drummer Terje Isungset returns to Kings Place with his quartet featuring voice, ice harp, ice horn, iceophone, ice percussion and ice bass, made during Isungset’s annual Ice Music Festival in Norway and crafted using only natural frozen ice from the lakes [Nov – tbc].
Tickets for the first wave of Earth Unwrapped events are on general sale via the Kings Place website here. Further events will be announced in due course.