Laura Hyland
She/Her
Laura works with sound & music to explore Nature and our place within it. She lives on the south coast of Wexford with her daughter. She began her musical life as a singer-songwriter with a zeal for experimentation, and gradually expanded her horizons over the years to embrace the more abstract areas of contemporary music & sound art. Her music has been described as “exhilarating in its refusal to conform” (Clive Bell, Wire Magazine), and “A singular, defiantly independent voice.” (Cormac Larkin, Irish Times). Current work includes a metal sound sculpture project, Sounding Seams, an experimental folk band, Clang Sayne, an improvising choir, Wildsong Ensemble, and a contemporary classical composition, Sleep Piece for Julia.
Sounding Seams is a playful exploration of Pythagoras' 'music of the spheres' hypothesis, and its ensuing themes of order, chaos, wonder, and our place in the cosmos, viewed through the prism of metal forgery, heritage and sound. It began when the Irish National Heritage Park in Laura's home town of Wexford invited her to make work in response to the archetype of the blacksmith. Taking inspiration from Pythagoras' alleged encounter with a blacksmith circa 600bce, she disappeared down a rabbit hole of cosmic esoterica and the harmonic series, resurfacing periodically over the following years with 3 live performances, a battery of 40-odd DIY chimes, an EP of songs composed & recorded with these chimes, and a giant permanent chime sculpture at the park. The title refer to Pythagoras' conviction that if the mystical properties of harmonic order are intrinsic to crude metal, hewn from a seam of the Earth, then they must also apply to the cosmos at large, and everything within it.
Laura founded Clang Sayne in 2008 to explore her ‘songscapes’ (composed songs, elastic enough to honour the imagination of those who play them) with improvising musicians. There has been a rolling cast of players joining her under this moniker since its inception. The current line up includes Laura (compositions, voice, chimes & guitar), Carolyn Goodwin (clarinets, voice) and Matthew Jacobson (drums, voice). She has released two critically acclaimed Clang Sayne albums: 'The Round Soul of the World' (2017) and 'Winterlands' (2009), with a third release, Sounding Seams EP coming out on June 6th, 2024.
Wildsong Ensemble is an improvising choir which Laura founded in 2022 in the belief that singing, vocal-harmonising & art-making are innate, and that we need more spaces in our world to explore these joyful & vital phenomena together. Operating on a no-auditions policy, anyone with an interest in singing and the arts is welcome to join. Wildsong Ensemble meet weekly to sing and to devise their own work for performance.
Sleep Piece for Julia (for ten-piece ensemble: vln, vla, vcl, db, gui, pno, perc, trmb, clar, flute) is an exploration of sleep, based on both an impressionistic expression of lulling her infant daughter to sleep in the early months of her life, and a scientific analysis of what happens in our brains as we sleep. Commissioned by Crash Ensemble for their 2021 Crashworks program, and premiered in the National Concert Hall in Dublin during the New Music Dublin 2023.