Bennett - The Wilderness Voices (Belfast, 2026)

Ed Bennett - The Wilderness Voices

Sonic Lab, Sonic Arts Research Centre, 12th March 2026

Ed Bennett is a composer who some might associate more with loud and often dissonant contemporary music, mainly with his large scale orchestral works and in genre defying experiments with his Decibel Ensemble, but those are just one side of his efforts to express the themes and ideas that he has for his music, and there is another side to his work that can be just as effective, adventurous and experimental in an altogether quieter more meditative minimalist register. Reflective maybe, but still with an unsettling edge that gives you pause and refuses to let it simply slip over you.

We saw two sides of the composer's range recently in two works with a similar environmental theme both related to the sea. Premiered at the Brilliant Corners Festival in Belfast in 2025, All Earth Once Drowned with poet Cherry Smyth and the Decibel Ensemble managed to simultaneously celebrate the power, beauty and wonder of the sea while expressing anger at the catastrophic impact of environmental waste on this precious resource of nature. On the other hand a recording of Strange Waves in 2023 written for eight cellos, field recordings and electronics, the cellos all played in a multi-tracked recording by Kate Ellis was a more meditative piece drawing you into the sea, so to speak. Ed’s latest piece The Wilderness Voices uses a similar soloist layering technique, this time with the voice, supplemented with electronics.

Where Kate Ellis' cello was perfect for the rhythms and variable moods of the sea, the layered singing of mezzo-soprano Michelle O’Rourke brings an essential human element to the sentiments that form an integral part of the subject and mood of the new piece. As the composer explained in the introduction to the world premiere performance of the work, The Wilderness Voices started out with an environmental theme - clearly something that is foremost in the minds of many artists at the moment - but the death of his father at the time of composition played a part in how the piece developed. In the case of Kate Ellis on Strange Waves, the Covid pandemic lockdown made it easier for one musician to play all the parts, but there is also something surely of it being a matter of why seek more than one musician when you can have the best play all the parts? In the case of The Wilderness Voices there is a similar thought of why use more than one singer when Michelle O'Rourke can do it all herself. It's probably more a case however that the nature of this new work is very much more related to personal sentiments that can only be expressed by the human voice, or indeed an array of single human voices seeking to, well, presumably find a way out of the wilderness.

That's certainly more of a challenge to get that across in a 'live' performance, but it was one that Michelle O'Rourke proved capable of controlling to impressive effect. And there could hardly be a more suitable sound environment for the premiere of the work than the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen's University in Belfast, with its superb custom-built acoustics and speaker system capable of integrating the voice and electronics. Composed as a six-part 40-minute piece, the first section consists of gently introducing you into the sound world of a live vocalisations with a few echoing pre-recorded layers. The piece develops across each of the six parts, a low subsonic electronic boom introducing a drone like electronic backing in the second part, integrating and building with the layers and echoes of the multiple tracked voice recordings triggered by the singer.

Perhaps the layering of elements in Brian Irvine's musical-theatre piece Where We Bury the Bones was still in my mind from a performance at the Lyric Theatre the previous evening, but there seemed to be a similar searching quality to the work using considerably fewer elements, seeking not necessarily to reconcile the various layers of the voice, but to find a connecting theme that allowed all of them to co-exist and express itself in a way that words alone would be inadequate to describe. Gradually however, midway through the piece, a phrase formed from the vocalisations; "I am here now". Not an answer, not a revelation, but an acceptance of the only essential truth that one can say for certain about anything, that you are here now in the present.

There is comfort in that thought, but - how can I say this without sounding like I am denigrating the work? - you could almost see it as a meditative piece that brings you to place of self-awareness of being here and now in the present. Being Ed Bennett however the purpose of The Wilderness Voices is not to take you to a comfortable soothing place, and the fact that a piece of experimental contemporary music can be described as beautiful need not suggest that it is in any way compromised. The subsequent section may find that rhythmic pulse of affirmation, but soon the voices start to lose their coherence again - at least as far as words and rhythm are concerned - and the electronic interference takes over to a level of dissonance that comes close to feedback. Low feedback that eventually subsides, the emotions checked, a reassertion of control, the work ending with the formation of a new realisation and truth that needs to be similarly confronted and accommodated, the single word 'you'.

External links: Ed Bennett, Queen's University Belfast

Irvine - Where We Bury the Bones (Belfast, 2026)

Brian Irvine - Where We Bury the Bones

Dumbworld, 2026

Sinead Hayes, John McIlduff, Megan O'Neill, Stephanie Dufresne, Cristian Emmanuel Dirocie

The Lyric Theatre, Belfast - 11th March 2026

Where do you start? The last time I began a review with those words was in my years as a film reviewer having just watched a screening of Terrence Malik's film The Tree of Life. It was less a sense of bewilderment at what I had seen on the screen than a question provoked by the film's extraordinary scope and ambition. A bewildering overreach for some, utterly sublime as far as I was concerned, I saw it as an attempt by a visual artist to put across something that is impossible to put entirely into words alone. For similar reasons it seems an appropriate way to start a review of Where We Bury the Bones, a multi-disciplinary work created by Dumbworld team of John McIlduff & Kate Heffernan with music composed by Brian Irvine who, with an orchestra and a singer, have a few more tools at their disposal to approach a challenging subject.

The title has ominous connotations for the people of this island and I imagine it evokes similar horrors for people in many other places that have seen war and violence in recent decades, and indeed in the world today. That's not what the piece is about, although it could certainly be seen to be a part of it, as the work starts with the discovery of various artefacts during an archaeological dig in Kilkenny, one of which is a bone. One of the first considerations is to identify whether it is a human bone and to look for any signs of trauma, indications of an injury or violent death, as that would be the beginning of a story, a way of building a picture of a life. As an archaeologist René, in an onscreen message, considers that there are limitations on how much scientific enquiry can imagine, and wonders what an artist would make of such material. That's the beginning of Where We Bury the Bones.

Well, that's one starting point but we may actually need to go back further than that. Where indeed do you start to consider the circumstances that lead to an ancient bone being found in this part of the world? A narrative description has already set the scene, considering the historical formation of the valley, building up a picture through our understanding of the geology, chemistry, behaviours and patterns in nature, the valley hewn by ice and shaped by the flow of the river, but there is more than one starting point here, there are layers of history and the flow of time has also contributed to the picture. These are marked out by a number of musical and theatrical layers including a sung voice, technical and historical data feeds, dramatic presentation, a music score played by an 8-piece orchestra, dance movements, and a live projection of an actual scale model of the landscape in question.

"Where do you start?" I admit does apply to some extent with grappling with understanding what the work is about. Where We Bury the Bones started as a commission for the Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2025, the work stemming from the questions that arise with the discovery of a single bone unearthed during archaeological excavations in Kilkenny’s Abbey Quarter. So the work is 'site specific' in a way, but evidently it has a much wider remit and perspective, so is indeed hard to know where to start. As a work of many layers, there are similarly many layers and ways to approach the work. Words are just one way, but that alone can never be entirely sufficient even if Megan O'Neill, dressed in white, appears to give voice to the bone itself. Interacting with the other elements however, how the music speaks and how bare technical facts meet with lived human experience - past, present and looking to the future - allows the viewer to piece together their own story and indeed their own part in the story.

The past is evoked in snatches of traditional Irish music, some the on-stage orchestra interacting with an on-screen musician, the present with the creation of a skateboard park that is overlaid on the site. On a voice-over, some of the skaters testify to its importance to the here and now, a place where community comes together but also a place where new stories are made and another layer of history and archaeological mystery may be laid down for the future. The scope of what is brought together over the running time of one hour is tremendous and Brian Irvine's music has a large part to play in creating that environment, creating the musical landscape to bring it all together. As a composer Irvine has never been tired down to a single style of music but uses whatever instruments and means of expression are necessary for any given work. His score for this work has a 'voice' without telling a ‘story’, the theatrical chamber orchestration reminding me of Louis Andriessen, but with a directness and purpose of its own, anchored in the landscape in its unearthing of people and history but liberated in the flow of time; past, present and future layered. 

There is no narrative line to tell you any of this. Where We Bury the Bones doesn't rely on theatrical conventions or familiar musical reference points or motifs, it doesn't settle for fitting it to preconceived ideas or tell you what you should be taking away from this. It does what it should do which is to let the medium determine the best way of getting the ideas across, building a picture, allowing the multi-disciplinary elements to create their own connections as well as creating the space for the individual in the audience to place themselves within it. If you come out of seeing an production wondering what it was all about, that is much better than having answers handed to you. In the case of the scope and ambition of what this work is about, answers would be impossible anyway in an hour-long performance, but it does nonetheless give you everything you need to think more deeply about our place in this world for a long time afterwards, along with the realisation that we take too much of it for granted.

External links: Dumbworld