Wednesday 1 July 2026, 7.30pm
Ailie Ormston is a Scottish composer and musician making electronic music and music for ensembles. Ormston’s work often explores timbral abstraction, temporality, assemblage and improvisation. In 2025, Ormston produced new works for prepared electric guitar and various speakers as part of a commission from OVER/AT, which toured across the highlands of North West Scotland and was subsequently released as an album, Impressions on and of guitar. Over the years, Ormston has performed at KRAAK, Counterflows, Tectonics and LSO Saint Lukes. They have worked collaboratively with Tim Fraser on It Changes (bison; 2022) and Finlay Clark on Sunflowers Face The Sun (33-33; 2020), and released a solo album of works for tape, guitar, cello and double bass, Frames that lean, pictures that roam (Akashic Records; 2025). Earlier in 2026, Ormston premiered new work for string quartet and tape, written for and performed by New York’s JACK Quartet as part of their JACK Studio programme.
We’re very happy to have been working with Ailie to present three nights of music comprising solo performances, works for ensembles and new collaborations.
PROGRAMME:
Laurie Tompkins - "That Death" performed by
Laurie Tompkins
Ailie Ormston
Lene Tassin
Oliver Pitt
Jamie Westoby
Flynn McHardy
Martin Arnold - "Tifty’s Annie" performed by
Regan Bowering - unpitched percussion
Laurie Tompkins – synth
Ailie Ormston – electric guitar
Lene Tassin – 3-string harp, tape player electronics
Arthur Bickers – banjo and sampler
Jamie Westoby – keyboard
Flynn McHardy – electric guitar
Oliver Pitt – duduk and toy guitar
Finn McLean – acoustic guitar
Allison Cameron - "R" performed by
Ailie Ormston - electric guitar
Finn McLean - acoustic guitar
Jamie Westoby - keyboards
Allison Cameron - "H" performed by
Ailie Ormston - electric guitar
Finn McLean - acoustic guitar
Arthur Bickers - banjo
Laurie Tompkins (b.1990) is a UK composer, performer and co-founder and co-director of the Slip label.
From scores for samples, instruments and voices he creates a grabbable music that dreams and confounds. Bodies, things, words, and sounds strain under duress, looping their way through scenes of grubby presence, not-quite riff, mouldy echo, and swollen bombast.
His spring 2022 discs for Entr’acte, 33-33 and Hyperdelia are a thick, unruly soup of keys and computer with pianist Eliza McCarthy; a desperate suite of consoling, tanked songs with takes from Jess Hickie-Kallenbach, Teresa Winter, Gwilly Edmondez and videos by Joel Wycherley; and some dilated rotten soul with Eliza and Ashley Paul.
Laurie helms Slip, which has released music by Yeah You, Mica Levi, Julia Reidy, Bass Clef, Object Collection, ilgendo, Chaines & Competition, Old releases of his own include ‘Ample Profanity' (2018), with cellist Oliver Coates; 'Heat, War, Sweat, Law' (2016); and 'Exorcise' (2021), as Yes Indeed with bassist Otto Willberg, justly hailed as “proper, mad scones” (Boomkat).
Performances: Café Oto, Aldeburgh Music, Spike Island, Harp Art Lab (Harplinge) and National Sawdust (New York). Commissions: House of Bedlam, Daylight Editions, LSO Soundhub Scheme, ddmmyy and 840 series. Radio: specials for NTS and Resonance FM and a session with Adam Bohman recorded at Maida Vale studios, broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
