SAM SLATER
MUSIC FOR SHARDS (DEMOS 2026)

I’ve been developing a collection of pieces with Kieran for Shards, written for nine to twelve spatialised voices and synthesizer. We’ve been passing the music back and forth for a while and have arrived somewhere that feels exciting, so this seemed like a good moment to share the first demos.

The project began as an exploration of writing for a larger vocal ensemble and bringing choral forms into contact with contemporary vocal processing—a space I wanted to explore further. Traditional choral writing sits alongside bright chorusing, pitch processing and cyclical synthesis. I want the music to feel slightly cross-eyed: one eye looking backwards and the other fixed forwards, with the listener caught between the two. I’m less interested in making the choir sound pristine than in putting its austerity under pressure, against synthesis that is colourful, unstable and slightly broken.

Each piece begins with a programmed system from which the synthesizer and vocal parts emerge as parallel streams—different outputs of the same compositional machine. The texts come from an eighteenth-century Enlightenment work that asks how much of human thought and feeling can be understood as the product of a machine-like system within the brain, and whether anything like spirit or soul exists beyond it. It’s a question that has become difficult to avoid again.

These two pieces are part of a group of five already written, with more to come before we record the album properly. The current demos use a single multitracked voice to sketch out the larger vocal world, occasionally supplemented by other instruments. Ultimately, the work is intended to be performed live by nine to twelve singers surrounding a central synthesizer and a cello, with the voices spatialised and processed in real time.

I think it could become something deeply beautiful and quite unusual. It’s ambitious, but the shape of it is already there—and I really want to make it happen.