Sarah Angliss is a British composer, multi-instrumentalist and sound historian whose music combines ancient instruments with theremin, Max, electronics and her own robotic inventions. She performs her music live and also composes for theatre. In November 2018 she received an artists award from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
Biography
Angliss began performing in folk clubs as a teenager and studied Early Music alongside a degree in Electroacoustic Engineering. She also has a Masters in Robotics. She performs live with human co-performers and musical automata, machines she has devised and built since 2005 to "give her performance an arresting and uncanny physical presence." She has created music and sounds which blur the line between sound design and composed music for a number of theatrical works including The Twilight Zone, based on the 1950s television series, at the AlmeidaThe Effect at the National Theatre, Once in a Lifetime at the Young Vic and The Hairy Ape at The Old Vic and Park Avenue Armory in New York. She has written and presented the radio showsThe Bird Fancyer's Delight and Echo in a Bottle for BBC Radio 4. In April 2017 Angliss released her solo albumEaling Feeder, described as 'a subtle gem' by Robert Barry writing in The Wire and the "most inventive album I've heard in a long while" by Simon Reynolds writing in 4 Columns. She wrote a short biography of Daphne Oram for the republication of Oram's treatise on sound and electronics An Individual Note. This was funded by a crowdfunding campaign organised by the Oram Trust in 2016. Angliss was a resident artist at Limehouse Town Hall and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Sound Practice Research Unit, Goldsmiths. In 2017, Angliss rearranged the compositions of Bernard Herrmann for a reworking of The Twilight Zone. In October 2018, Angliss began writing a chamber opera, Giant, supported by a Jerwood Opera Writing Fellowship and Snape Music. Giant tells the story of the Charles Byrne, known as The Irish Giant, who lived in fear that his remains would go on public display, against his wishes. The piece blends voices with viola da gamba, clavicymbalum and electronics.
