SATANIC PANIC combines three groundbreaking works by innovative composers from the UK and Canada. Combining cutting-edge technology with themes of the occult, cyborgs, ghosts and artificial realities, the programme creates immersive and overwhelming worlds around the solo performer.

‍

Alex Ho’s Cyborg Etudes explores both the history of piano technique and its imagined cyborg future, alongside the postcolonial idea of 'double consciousness'. Using a Genki Wave ring, the pianist is able to warp and expand the sounds of the piano through movement, and control and shape the live-generated video. Ben Nobuto combines the piano, a ROLI Seaboard RISE 2 keyboard and video in a fast-paced and futuristic work.

‍

The centrepiece is Canadian composer Nicole Lizée Satanic Panic, an immersive multimedia experience referencing aspects of this North American panic in the 1980s, focusing around heavy metal music (and its subgenres and microgenres), role playing board games (deemed nefarious by the ‘powers that be’), censorship, the church, book and record burnings, subliminal and backward messages, and more. The work will be set up as a series of short documentary and filmic scenes that extend beyond the 4th wall into the performance and audience. It will feature video, interactive software, practical and digital effects and custom props to enhance the experience. Using her own recreations and reinterpretations of films of the era, she creates a series of virtuosic piano and multimedia studies ranging from the monstrous to the comically bizarre.