Dáire Toal Lightpiece

If different colours occur at different frequencies, it follows that we might be able to hear them and make music. Lightpiece is about chromaticism in both senses, and looks at the colour that is all around us. I took the frequencies at which we perceive different colours, usually measured in terahertz, and translated those to hertz within the range of human hearing. From that, these seven pitches formed a slightly wonky scale, and I paired these up with moments of chromatic brilliance from around London.

Emily Plumb Metropolitan Circus

Metropolitan Circus is a composition that captures the relentless motion and vibrant chaos of urban life. Drawing inspiration from the brass and driving rhythms of big band with the rawness of rock music, the piece evokes the constant flow of traffic and the unpredictable pulse of a crowded city. Layered melodies collide and intertwine like vehicles at a busy intersection, creating a sense of urgency and controlled disorder, alongside the occasional nod to Stravinsky rhythmic displacement. Yet there are moments of release looking at a busy city from the safe haven of the sky and the cathartic escape to rural life.

Rhani Mahabir-Stokes Das Sporadische Ballet

Das Sporadische Ballet was inspired by Oskar Schlemmer’s avant-garde artistic dance the Triadic Ballet. Set against clips from Oswell Blakeston and Francis Bruguière’s film Light Rhythms, the dancer is both silhouetted and lit by undulating projected patterns that bring to life the minimal, geometric movements. Musically, the score jumps between rigid rhythmic patterns and looser jazz sentiments. The use of polymeters and uneven phrases helps to create the ‘sporadic’ nature of the piece, and the broken tape effect helps to conjure the sound of early 20th century recorded music.

Krzysztof Zubek Rock Through Water

Rock Through Water is a short study of abstract forms created by the movement of water over rock. Aiming at a pure abstraction, the film is composed of close shots which detach meaning from object, inviting a new way of seeing. The score, composed entirely of music performed by The Bauhaus Strings, similarly creates a uniform yet constantly shifting abstract texture out of the natural sound of the string ensemble, creating a dynamic interplay between visuals and sound. The film was recorded in the Lake District, with the chosen subject of rock demonstrating a crossover point between the natural environment and human activity in an area where the mining and quarrying shape the landscape seen today.

Caitlin Heaphy Rushing

For this project, I wanted to create a film that captured the feeling of the music I’d written. I thought it would work really well if I took videos around London, and tried to capture the rush, crowds, and hustle and bustle of London and particularly its buses, and public transport. I’ve used a combination of shots of my feet walking on and off the bus and in crowded areas, still shots of traffic and people walking by, and shaky shots of the city as I walk around.

Aiken Anderson A Citadel of Barbicans

As with many of my Bauhaus works, I have gone for a more olden look. Inspired by Hollywood and Disney golden age composers Paul J. Smith and Oliver Wallace, the music reflects the intensity in Hollywood films at the introduction, with comparatively lively music afterwards, introducing the more serene scene that is the Barbican.

Helen Oh Ebb and Flow

This film explores the ebb and flow of the Barbican Estate. It focuses on the contrast between its dark Brutalist architecture and the vibrance of people, plants, and the Barbican Conservatory as light changes throughout the day. Through contrasting angles and textures, I look for movement and life within the Barbican, and show that it is not still or cold, but alive and constantly evolving.

Minchan Kwon Overwhelmed

The synopsis of the experimental short film, Overwhelmed is “Pressure makes monsters”. The film tries to capture the essence of overwhelm, a force that twists and fractures clear thought. The film cap- tures the essence of overwhelm, a force that twists and fractures clear thought.

Roscoe Parkinson-Jones Rothko

The work I have created is something that I created after visiting the Tate Modern. More specifically sitting in the Rothko room inebriated and hearing this incredible ambient music. I am still unsure if they were really playing music in that room or whether my overactive imagination got the better of me, but I was so moved by this experience I thought I would make an attempt to re-create what I heard. The creation of my video is then my interpretation of the music I’ve created would be as art.

Jan Tabecki Remember That We Suffered

This piece traces the inevitable passage from innocence into a world shaped by power, conflict, and money. It reflects the fragile moment when joy and love begin to fade beneath the forces that govern societies and lives alike. While composing the piece, I came to feel that its journey mirrors our own: the transition from childhood wonder into the harsher realities of adulthood. As children, we move through the world with curiosity and openness, believing deeply in possibility. Yet with time, the world reveals itself to be driven by systems of power, money, and control, and one gradually confronts the unsettling sense of insignificance within it. Dreams become more distant, and the people once close to us seem to vanish as we continue chasing after what we hoped life might become. And yet, within the ending lies a quiet resilience. Beyond every regime, every conflict, and every illusion of power, what ultimately remains is the self and the human connections we choose to hold onto. The piece closes in reflection: from dancing together at the centre of the world, one is finally left to dance alone. In the silence that follows, a question lingers: was the pursuit of those dreams worth the cost of chasing them so blindly?

Philippa Godsalve Pas de Deux

A rescoring of a section of Pas de Deux, an experimental film by Norman Mclaren for the National Film Board of Canada in 1968. Filmed against a painted black backdrop, two dancers are silhouetted by intense high-contrast side lighting, as multiple overlaid exposures of individual frames trail behind them as they dance. The emotive contemporary score composed by Philippa Godsalve explores themes of temporality, movement and stillness, sound and silence, shadow and light. Influenced by minimalism as well as contemporary composers such as Mica Levi, the music reflects the sparse, surreal and haunting visual poetry of the film.

Emily Overend Without Cripplegate

This video is inspired by St Giles’ without Cripplegate in the Barbican. Old maps and pictures show the church throughout time, and one image features singers in the Barbican Centre. The choral setting hints at the music heard in a church, with some chords influenced by Stravinsky to add a modern twist. Many words in the song are from John Milton’s Sonnet 19: When I Consider How My Light is Spent. Milton was buried in St Giles’ and a bust of him that is displayed in the church appears in the video. The words ‘I heard a voice from heaven’ are from Thomas Morley’s Third Dirge Anthem of the same name, who was the organist at St Giles’.

Charles Curtin In Motion

In Motion was inspired two main concepts, motion and interruption. In this case, groove and repetition behind repetitive shapes and visuals interrupted by harsh stabs of sound and colour, with additional inspiration from modern big band writing. The visuals of the piece are taken from the work of Jordan Belson (specifically Allures), whose works include gradually shifting, live and ‘kinetic’ laser visuals. The relentless bassline and drum rhythms drive the piece and provide a foundation, with layered moving harmonies on top to add to the ceaseless march forward.

Aiken Anderson Life at the Barbican

I approached my work to show my own perception of living by the Barbican estate, in the innovative Bauhaus style. As a student, exploring the Barbican for the first time is overwhelming, with different pathways and hidden staircases that lead you walking in circles. One can get lost very easily: of course that is the point of its architecture, the grandiosity of such an estate, a brutalist dystopian masterwork. Yet in the midst of this great chaos, lies a simple church, St Giles-Cripplegate. It allows for a clear distinction between the modern dark architecture, and the gothic-style 14th-century rebuilt church (originally founded in the 10th century). I use this to add contrast in my work, almost as a struggle between old and new.

Helen Oh One Day

On a sunny spring day, I was on a train in Spain, watching the landscape pass by. The scenery felt beautiful and fleeting, moving faster than I could fully take in, which made me want to capture the moment on video. One Day brings together these moments from my journey. I saw the moving train as a metaphor for life - we’re all heading toward an unknown destination, holding onto the hope that we’ll get to where we want to be “one day.”

Luca Mantero Refurbishment

Luca Mantero and Tegen Williams’ film spanning the time between the original Barbican development models in 1959 and the current work, reflects The Poetics of Refurbishment - which is not a phrase that you see that often. Refurbishment connects us both to memory and to new futures. Thanks to Tom Overton in the Barbican Archive for access to the original films.

Jan Tabecki Boogie Doodle

While writing this piece, I set myself two goals: to represent the contrasts of life, and to translate them into musical language. Musically speaking, the work moves between short, choppy phrases and longer, more sentimental lines, a playfulness touched by awkwardness and an eclectic spirit, sentiment coloured by longing and quiet fragility. I drew inspiration from Boogie Doodle by Norman McLaren. In the film, dots, short strokes, and elongated lines gradually come together to form a larger image. I wanted to translate this visual idea into music. Choppy rhythmic patterns and quirky melodic fragments represent the smaller marks, while broader sections, such as the violin solo, reflect the longer, more fluid lines. Together, these contrasting elements create a kind of musical sketch: playful, fragmented, sentimental, and ultimately reflective of the contrasts within life itself.

Heléna Walsh Attack of the Giant Leeches

Watching a seal get eaten by a shark in a seal documentary = nooo! Evil!

Watching a seal get eaten by a shark in a shark documentary = GO SHARK!

Despite what Kowalski’s original film wants me to think, I’m always going to root for GIANT LEECHES.

Minchan Kwon Wings of Desire

This is a rescore written directly for a scene in Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders. This piece accompanies a pivotal scene in which the angel Damiel witnesses profound human suffering, an old man’s wartime memories, Americans in postwar Germany, and the confusion of being lost in geopolitics. I sought to express Damiel’s agonising detachment: feeling love yet being unable to truly inhabit human emotion.

Odysseas Pantazis Brutalist Utopia-Dystopia

Filmed at London’s Alexandra Road Estate, this experimental short is part of an ongoing exploration of the emotional and architectural presence of brutalist and low-income housing. These spaces evoke a complex mix of admiration, discomfort, and curiosity. Their utopian ambitions still echo through the concrete, even as time has layered them with signs of erosion, community, and neglect.

Owen Nicholson Mandala

Using the original footage of Mandala by Jordan Belson (1953), I devised an improvised piece for guitar, cello and saxophone to be played while watching the images. We recorded this interaction together with the three instrumentalists in the same room. The idea was to sonically interpret the changing shapes and motions on the screen. I then arranged a string accompaniment with the Guildhall Session Orchestra to complete this re-score.

Philippa Godsalve Barbican New Vision

Barbican New Vision explores the materials of the Barbican interacting with natural forces and organic matter. A collage of light reflections in glass and rainwater, blistering paint and mould, stalagmites and stalactites, lichen and moss growing on the rough concrete surfaces. Sounds have been selected for their aesthetic and material properties with electronically processed harp and coarse saxophone textures forming an austere soundscape.

Sam Moss Be More Barbican

I believe life would be easier if we were all a bit more Barbican. But what does it mean to be more Barbican? What can this brutalist monument tell us about our own lives? Make your own judgment, as you watch a video collage made up of footage from the Barbican film archives.

Arthur Underwood Refr4ct

This film, and the score that goes with it, came out of thinking about perspective and light, and how both change depending on how you’re moving. Refr4ct is built from disjointed footage of light on water and light through trees, each split into three states: normal, colour-inverted, and flashing. Throughout the film, these shifts in perspective across image and sound are meant to portray a lack of substance in anything relating to a universal continuity. The score works the same way. A string recording, processed, slowed down, cut and patched together, accompanied by synthesiser, and reversed in places, forming what I’d describe as a non-relativistic view of relativity. No single perspective is given more weight than another. Nothing is meant to feel fixed.

Manish Sanga Whack

For the Bauhaus Festival, I created a video piece that merges two works by Jules Engel (a Hungarian artist of multiple disciplines)—Play Pen and Mobiles— manipulating and stitching them together to respond to changes in the music. I experimented with how shifts in video could bring out subtle details in the sound, making the listening experience more immersive. The music was composed independently of the visuals. It was inspired by the dramatic landscapes of Inverness and the Isle of Skye, and I tried to reflect that atmosphere through the Bauhaus Band. I later named it Whack, to simply the high-impact energy of the piece.

Odysseas Pantazis Berlinus Rhythmus

The film captures the industrial rhythms of Berlin through a documentary lens. My objective was to translate the density of the urban environment into an existential experience, reflecting the complex human interactions embedded within Berlin’s massive, systemic machinery.

Eleanor Lee I had a very ordinary day, it was a spiral

What seems to be the age of artificial intelligence and technology is a period of transition. Techno- optimism. In the end, what we will look for is what is natural and imperfect, with a sense of humanity still in it, things that show the layers of time, layered within our skin, soul, and every breath. When everything has passed, what will remain? I brushed my skin with the drum brushes, tried to breathe the time I was given. We don’t know what waits at the end, but we follow the grain that we feel under our fingertips... With Oskar Fischinger’s film, I hold on to something made by hand, where movement still carries the mark of a human touch. In its spirals and unfolding forms, I found a rhythm that felt close to an ordinary life. I had a very ordinary day, and it was a spiral.

Severin Salvenmoser Barbicanetic Energy

Energy is flowing, electricity buzzing, water dripping through pipes below us, the tubes rumbling in the deep, electromagnetic waves spreading all around us, silent and unseen but essential for our modern way of living. This is a hidden world, partly uncovered for 2 minutes of music. You hear the low booming sound of the tubes passing underneath the Barbican lake, recorded with a hydrophone underwater. Also, the sound of the buzzing electromagnetic noises generated by lights, cables, radio waves or wifi recoded all over the Barbican Centre is included in the electronic track of the piece.

Guy Godivala Wilson LABOUR

LABOUR draws heavily on Igor Stravinsky’s orchestral pieces, relying on rhythmic language. Constructed from rhythmic cells, unpredictable time signatures, and using a disorientating structure, this was heavily inspired by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. I also use Stravinsky’s trademark octatonic scales for its melodic and harmonic information. As I’m normally sat in my bed making weird hyperpop electronic music, I approached this in a similar way, making large midi chunks of chords and patterns and cutting, pasting and layering, focussing on rhythmic priority. The video is edited from Poem Field No. 7 by Stan VanDerBeek, one of the earliest examples of computer animation. It incorporates phrases from A. J. Muste’s poem “There is no way to peace— Peace is the way”, alongside fragmented repetitions of “No More War.” The intense, almost Soviet-like relentlessness of the visuals, combined with the text, led naturally to the title LABOUR.