1-16 Dec: London Contemporary Music Festival 2018

Music, film, dance and more flow seamlessly together at the London Contemporary Music Festival, during the first fortnight of December. Seek it out at venues across London, including Ambika 3, University of Westminster; Second Home, Spitalfields; Bloc, Hackney Wick; and Walmer Yard, Notting Hill.

The festival includes five major new commissions from artists, electronic producers and composers, as well as ecological talks, a club night, dance works, premieres by three generations of female electronic composers, art films, an experimental choral programme and orchestral premieres.

It opens with contemporary composer Annea Lockwood's musical contribution to a symposium on ecology at the Serpentine Gallery (1 Dec). Then comes a series of events combining all the arts, culminating with New Zealander Lockwood's A Sound Map of the Hudson River (1989), which is being given its UK premiere, and a showing of Michael Snow's film La Région Centrale (1971).


Michael Snow used pioneering techniques to make his 1971 film landscape 'La Région Centrale'

In Lockwood's composition, we follow the run of the Hudson river as it winds its way from mountain source to sea mouth, with six interviews available to listen to simultaneously. It will run continuously from 4pm to 7pm.

To create Snow's La Région Centrale, a robotic arm was able to swing and pan across the Canadian landscape in any direction and at any speed. Snow filmed this desolate plateau for 24 hours, allowing the camera to track the landscape, horizon and sky, as if it were surveilling an alien planet.

Ready to dance until dawn (The Death of Rave, Bloc, 14-15 Dec) or to hear some of the boldest new works of the past 30 years (Structural Faults, Ambika, 14 Dec), audiences and participants with an eye and ear for the new will find what they are looking for in this ground-breaking fixture. Now in its sixth year, London Contemporary Music Festival 2018 promises a programme that is richer than ever before.