Anna Meredith

Anna Meredith is in her studio at Somerset House with ​“a 5% hangover.” She was at the Proms last night, she explains, as we start our call. Somerset House Studios has been a lifeline offering affordable space for a huge range of visual, musical and artform-defying artists in the heart of the West End for the past decade, and Anna is a big fan. She’s about to move into a ​“more grown-up studio,” but it’s still going to be in Somerset House. 

Taking her back to 2010, when she was a recipient of Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Award for Artists, she’s up front about the impact it had: ​“The moment itself was amazing, one of the best things that had ever happened to me, I couldn’t believe it. And it did lots of things.” Firstly, the money, but equally, the validation: ​“I was at a bit of a cross-roads. I was honest [in the application] about the direction I wanted to go in. I remember worrying that the Awards wouldn’t apply to the kind of music I wanted to make, and I said I wanted to broaden out and try some different stuff, and it gave me the confidence to go for it.”

She elaborates: ​“So much of the work I’d been doing up to that point was reliant on commissions, and I wanted to make my own electronics and that felt like a slightly bonkers idea as it was something I had hardly any experience in.” Not only that, the world of electronica was largely outside the contemporary classical infrastructure of her training and the majority of her compositional work up to that point. It was a world without schemes for young composers, without obvious funding sources, where people ​“just made something without anyone asking for it.” Moving into that space gave her a new appreciation for the energy and fortitude required of self-starters: 

The culture of contemporary classical she describes asks composers to be largely passive recipients of opportunities, interpreters of others’ ideas. ​“The world I was in was quite passive, reacting to a commission or waiting for a commission… [I already knew] I wanted to keep doing commissions but also go beyond that. So many times people come to me with an idea, and it’s so nice when someone asks: what do you want to do?” 

The Award allowed her to experiment, giving her the push she needed to make her first EPs in 2011. I posit that she’s shown herself to be an incredibly versatile creative force. She’s collaborated with myriad artists and made work at hugely different scales for a wide variety of mediums across the world, from events and installations (Bumps per Minute, a soundtrack for bumper cars at Somerset House, Five Telegrams at the 2018 Proms with 59 Productions) to feature film and documentary scores (“I want to do a film a year”) to her two genre-crossing albums, the most recent, 2019’s FIBS, nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. 

But some of it has been about wanting new challenges, combined with a sense that the cultural landscape has opened up and accepted composers like her in new spaces.

Anna Meredith is a composer, producer and performer of both acoustic and electronic music. Her sound is frequently described as ​‘uncategorisable’ and ​‘genre-defying’ and straddles the worlds of contemporary classical, art pop, soundtracks, electronica, installations and experimental rock. 

Her CV includes being Composer in Residence at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, commissions for the First and Last night of the BBC Proms and countless performances and commissions with leading orchestras and ensembles across the globe. Her installation pieces include interactive works for dodgems, lifts, sleep pods and a zamboni ice clearing machine.

She has released numerous albums including Varmints (winner of the SAY Award) and FIBS (shortlisted for the Mercury Prize and named Electronic Sound’s Album of the Year) and regularly tours with her five-piece band. Their live show has been described as ​‘sheer exhilaration’ by the New York Times, and as ​‘a stormy, ecstatic, endlessly danceable thrill to behold…’ by NPR’s Bob Boilen. They have collaborated with multiple orchestras to perform arrangements of Anna’s material for band and orchestra.

Her film and TV scoring work includes Eighth Grade (dir. Bo Burnham, A24), Living With Yourself (dir. Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris, Netflix), HELP (dir. Mark Munden, Channel 4), the BIFA-nominated The End We Start From (dir. Mahalia Belo, Paramount) and TUESDAY (dir. Daina O. Pusić, A24)

She is currently working on her third studio album.