Ensemble Offspring and Zubin Kanga toured Anna Meredith’s Bumps per Minute for piano and vibraphone in Australia in April 2025. It appears as part of the programme Lumen Machine, alongside four new chamber concertos composed for ‘Cyborg Soloist’ Kanga, presented at Sydney’s Pier 2/3, The Neilson, the Newcastle Conservatorium, Hobart’s Town Hall, and the Princess Theatre, Launceston, from 12-16 April.
The arrangement by Jessica Wells, premiered in 2023, recasts four movements from the eponymous 2021 album, released on the Moshi Moshi label, for Claire Edwardes and Zubin Kanga: ‘Joy Subdivision’, ‘Deep Thought Panda’, ‘Norcanoe’, and ‘Tom Cruise Runs’. As before, the movements reflect "full-length individual musical identities" for each of the dodgem cars that are housed on the track, by turns electrifyingly energetic and eccentric.
With all of the flavour of mid-80s Castlevaniaboss battle, Anna Meredith’s synth-driven, arpeggio-flushed Bumps per Minute was composed to soundtrack a London dodgem car rink for an exhibition in 2021...With a backing track taking on some of the untranslatable parts of the four miniatures, Wells’ arrangements make it performable; a fun and kooky addition that Claire Edwardes and Kanga grinned through.
Limelight (Maddy Briggs) 14 April 2025
Bumps per Minute was originally commissioned by London’s Somerset House, as part of a unique sound art project in 2021. Dodge, created in collaboration with artist Yinka Ilori, saw traditional fairground dodgem rides completely reinvented with the addition of Meredith's interactive musical installation. As visitors raced their bumper cars around the track, each bump, scratch and jolt is tracked by bespoke wireless technology, designed in collaboration with BAFTA-winning interaction sound artist and fellow Somerset House Studios resident, Nick Ryan. The frenetic, random manoeuvres of the cars generated a unique audio-visual composition, resulting in an explosive three-minute sonic display across the courtyard each hour.
In December 2024 the Colin Currie Quartet premiered a new version of Bumps per Minute London’s Kings Place, created by George Barton, for percussion. Barton’s new arrangement puts in the percussion, acoustic elements, and beats that were absent in Meredith’s electronic original, drawing on the frenetic energy of the musicians as they barrel around the battery of instruments arrayed on the concert platform.
On 31 March B’Rock Orchestra performed Meredith’s Anno at the Tongyeong International Music Festival. Nadja Zwiener was soloist in the 50-minute re-contextualisation of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons for violin, strings, harpsichord, and electronics, with the composer at the mixing desk for the work’s South Korean debut. The 2016 piece draws on movements omitted from Vivaldi’s original, whilst also editing and re-naming performance directions in his score. Meredith overlays and surrounds this music with her own electronic compositions and soundscapes. Listen to the Scottish Ensemble recording of Anno here.