Thomas Stone
Thomas Stone
Thomas Stone (b.1979) is a London-based composer focusing on live bass-instrument performance. His work, influenced by tinnitus, ritual, the physical effects of sound and 20th-century composition, is shaped by resonant venues — churches, a water tank, Cornish caves, a ship’s hull.
He uses contrabassoon and sampling devices as oscillators for snare drum, blending acoustic and electronic sources into post-classical/post-techno soundscapes of long tones, dissonance and cyclic rhythms that yield austere, fragile beauty.
Releases: Cloudchamber Recordings, Bloxham Tapes, Sensory Leakage. Praised by Nick Luscombe (BBC Radio 3). Performances at Tate Britain, Serpentine, Whitechapel Gallery, Kings Place and Britten Pears Arts.
Curator’s Notes
For The Judgement Hall Thomas will present a special performance of music from his upcoming album The Shunned Path, the highly anticipated follow-up to 2022's Bloxham Tapes release An Act of Surrender.
"... Stone takes this earth-shattering tone and pushes it to unexpected timbres..."
Rosie Esther Solomon, The Wire 470
Returning to some of his earliest influences of Jerusalem era Sleep and the chamber works of Arvo Pärt filtered through the lens of soundtracks by Mica Levi, The Shunned Path takes coercion as a central theme: Is what we are conditioned not to do of greater significance than what we are led into doing?
Written for contrabassoon with electronics and timpani with syncussion, the work is an exercise in restraint with ritualistic rhythms punctuating slowly evolving, bass heavy motifs; the acoustic set with and against the electronic to create a sound world resting somewhere between unease and serene.