SAM SLATER
MUSIC FOR SHARDS (DEMOS 2026)

I’ve been developing a collection of pieces with Kieran Brunt for his vocal ensemble 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.

The texts come from an eighteenth-century Enlightenment work that speculates about human beings as computing machines and asks whether there is something uniquely human beyond the grey matter. It feels like a question we are returning to now.

That question also shapes the compositional process. I build programmed systems that generate the synthesizer and vocal parts simultaneously, with each voice emerging as an individual output of the larger system. The text is set so that each voice seems to be asking whether it is a machine or not.

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, quite substantial 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 it’s already beginning to feel like the kind of music I’d be excited to bump into, whether on record or live—which is ultimately my benchmark.