Conversations by Anna Dennis, Sean Ashton, James Oldham, Anat Ben-David

Conversations is an EP featuring four compositions made with Anna Dennis, James Oldham and Sean Ashton. In Conversations 1 and 4, Oldham and Ashton become discursive instruments: Ben David asks them questions, and their unscripted responses form the basis of the music, engendering its rhythmic pattern. Their voices are heard only intermittently, sometimes echoed by Ben David’s sung quotations of their meandering thoughts, which address how speech is affected by its various social contexts. In Conversations 2 and 3, soprano Anna Dennis and Ben David create sonic dialogues using Robert Schumann’s ‘Herzelei’ and Claude Debussy and Pierre Loüys’s ‘La chevelure’. The recording also captures the conversations they have before performing: anecdotes shared about the prurient innuendo of certain male practitioners – conductors, directors, potty-mouthed maestros – encountered in their respective professions of opera singer and artist

Dr Anat Ben-David explores the freedom of live improvisation combined with traditional methods of musical composition. Her background in experimental theatre (the school of Visual Theatre, Jerusalem) and as a member of electro–punk band and art collective Chicks On Speed, has led to projects such as Kairos OperaArt at the V&A in 2017.