Committee Profiles

Kevin Leomo, Committee Chair

Kevin is a Scottish-Filipino composer of experimental music based in Glasgow. He is interested in silence, fragility, perception, liminality, and working cross-culturally. Kevin recently completed a practice-research PhD at the University of Glasgow, where he now works as the Community and Engagement Manager for the College of Arts & Humanities.

Kevin co-hosts the practice-research podcast Essential Blends and plays in the experimental duo Dronehopper. He is currently working with Scottish Chamber Choir as part of Sound and Music and Making Music UK’s ‘Adopt a Music Creator’ programme. Kevin was shortlisted by the Scottish Section of the International Society of Contemporary Music for World Music Days 2023. He has presented work at KLANGRAUM and participated in Wandelweiser’s Composers Meet Composers 2022.

www.kevinleomo.com

Jamie Macpherson, Technical Manager

Jamie Macpherson is a sound engineer and technician from Scotland. They work primarily with immersive audio and accessibility as a live and post-production engineer, and are passionate about looking at the relationships between sound and physical space and how sound is experienced in the world. 

Jamie is currently working towards starting a PhD in immersive audio as an accessibility tool, and works with Sound Thought as their Technical Manager. They are constantly working to bring sound to people where they are, and keeping live events accessible to all.

Sonia Killmann 

Sonia Killmann is an international composer and multimedia artist from Belgium. As a saxophone player, electronic musician, and audiovisual artist, Sonia has performed across the UK and Europe and has recently been nominated for best electronic artist 2022 at the Scottish Alternative Music Awards. Sonia’s works are largely inspired by composers such as Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Alvin Lucier and explore the relationship between sound and environment through audiovisual soundscapes. More recently Sonia has been exploring Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening concepts and the adaptation of environments in the context of live performance. This includes using audio and visual samples of our familiar surroundings and placing them into unfamiliar contexts, thus playing with perception and imagination. Sonia has been collaborating with dancers and theater makers over the past years. More recently the musician collaborated with Vanishing Point and Imogen Stirling on their award winning show “Love The Sinner” and wrote the electronic score to Jamiel Laurence’s ballet “Read Only Memory” which premiered in Newport in 2022. Sonia is currently also working closely with Cryptic Glasgow as a Cryptic Artist. 

https://sonia-killmann.com

Beth Horseman

Elizabeth Horseman is a musician and audiovisual artist based in Glasgow, UK. She completed a Masters in Sound Design and Audiovisual Practice at the University of Glasgow, after graduating with an MA in Mathematics and Music. Elizabeth has been a member of sound art summer camp Audiotalaia 2018, and worked as artist assist on installations such as Louise Harris’ Visiaurihelix and Clyde-tunnel-based Portal. She has worked as sound designer on BBC and Lux Scotland commissioned film The Land and the Sea. A three-year member of Glasgow University chapel choir and choral scholar, Elizabeth often incorporates choral elements and ideas of ‘aestheticised sound’ in her works with a disposition to include melodic elements in non-melodic pieces.

Beth performs as Pillow Lava, an experimental ambient duo with Danny Igoe – a semi-improvisational, sonic hotspring of field recordings, organic samples, ethereal vocals, spoken word, delay patches, analogue synthesis and lots of reverb.

Melissa Rankin

Melissa Rankin is a composer, sound artist and improviser based in Glasgow, Scotland, working predominantly in the psychoacoustic realm of composition.

She writes for acoustic and electronic forces, both together and separately, in exploration of the liminal space between the two sound aesthetics. This is often carried out in the context of slow developing harmonic material within long-form compositions and with aim to create a deep listening environment. Topics of interest include fragility, intimacy, sentimentaility, and the manipulation of sound perception. She is also fascinated with how sound interacts with space, and explores this in her work through sound and performance installations. 

Melissa gained her undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow and a Master’s of Music at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She is an active committee member of Sound Thought, and regularly involved with the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra

https://melissarankin.com

Steven Myles

steven myles, sometimes music and sound maker. what else? 

i don’t know.  

saying nothing isn’t enough.
but saying anything has this unearned authority. 
and working against it feels like an attention-seeking f u.

i want to say something without pretence but i’m not sure how.

so, look at me BEING a ~creative type~ 
a privileged aesthete and a fucking narcissist, like so many wretched atoms. 
trying to get at something that’s hard to say otherwise. 

Melissa Rankin

Cat Hawthorn is a sound designer and artist whose work explores the connections between sound, the body and technology. Over the past few years, they have collaborated with artists and theatre companies across the U.K. to create sound for live performances and installations. They have just completed an MSc in Sound Design and Audiovisual Practice at Glasgow University.

https://www.cathawthornsounds.co.uk

Andrew Binnie

Andrew Binnie (ANKA AB / sleeper self / absent co-host)  is a Glasgow based audiovisual artist who experiments with synthesised and recorded sound, and virtual 3D spaces from decoupled timelines. Current areas of interest and research include distortions in the space-time continuum, memory devices, subspace anomalies, positronic networks, para-fiction, listening to the zen sounds of chiller cabinets in supermarkets, the visual artefacts typical of mid-90s videogames graphics. The fixed media piece presented for this event is part of a continually developing practice involving low resolution, obsolete 3D visuals ripped from sometime around 1998, working in tandem with processed field recordings and emulated waveforms to create a space that is an other. Thought shapes and sounds. An ocean that just wants to be friends. Dreams that are not your own.