Composer Edward George sits behind a wooden desk in front of a white wall with graffiti.
Edward George. Photo credit: Lee Kirk Fagan

Composer recipient 2023

Edward George is a multi-disciplinary artist, composer, creator and DJ. His compositions confront deep and complex themes that challenge the listener’s preconceptions of music, and he employs innovative musical and text soundscapes, weaving them into his unique compositions to provide a rich context that can be simultaneously comforting and unsettling. Through his current work in radio, Edward is uniquely placed at the forefront of one of the most radical forms of turntablism; new dub turntablism. 

Edward is a founder of the production company Black Audio Film Collective, and of the multi media arts duo Flow Motion, with whom he collaboratively created a range of artworks comprising the installations The Dub Museum, Ghost Dance, Dissolve, Astro Black Morphologies/​Astro Dub Morphologies and Invisible. Additionally, he is a founder of the electronic music group Hallucinator, with whom he produced a series of recordings released by the German record labels, Chain Reaction and Burial Mix, the Italian record label Irma, and the London labels, Chaarm and Finetuned. 

His focus on the medium of radio began in 2019, on the collaborative avant mix show Morphologies (SOAS University of London), the solo music documentary series, The Strangeness of Dub (Morley College London), Kuduro – Electronic Music of Angola (Counterflows), and the dub-based live radio show, Sound of Music (Threads Radio). 

The Paul Hamlyn Award is a perfectly timed gift of time and space. It will allow me to expand my musical practice, develop new recording projects, and further explore the medium of radio through new compositional work. The Award will also allow me the time, space, and place in which to elaborate and concretise my sonic practice through print iterations of The Strangeness of Dub and its evil twin, The Strangeness of Jazz, and to continue my research and writing on the work of Pat Thomas.”

Edward George 

Edward’s Strangeness of Dub series dives into dub, versions and versioning, drawing on critical theory, social history and live dub mixing. He draws on his background in documentary filmmaking to produce music driven narratives framed by critical theory, black and queer studies. A recent live presentation of The Strangeness of Dub’s Dub Housing’, was performed at London’s Café Oto in June 2023.

Examples of work

THE STRANGENESS OF JAZZ 3: ALICE, NINA (SPIRIT I), 2023

Performed by Edward George. 2 hours 18 minutes 52 seconds duration (extract 2 minutes). Commissioned by and presented at Cafe Oto, London.

THE STRANGENESS OF DUB 10: GENEALOGIES OF ROCK AGAINST RACISM, 2022

Performed by Edward George. 2 hours 6 minutes 20 seconds duration. Commissioned by and presented at the Barbican, London.

THE STRANGENESS OF DUB 7: ARCHIVE FEVER, 2020

Performed by Edward George. 2 hours 45 minutes 22 seconds duration. Recorded and presented on Morley Radio, Morley College. 

SOUND OF MUSIC W/ EDWARD GEORGE: LATE NIGHT EDITION’, 2022

Performed by Edward George. 2 hours 23 minutes 43 seconds duration. Broadcast live by Threads Radio, London in April 2022, the extract is a live dub mix of Fugitive Equation by Nathaniel Mackey & The Creaking Breeze Ensemble.