Bio

Laurie Tompkins is a UK composer, performer and co-director of the Slip label.

From scores for samples, instruments and voices he creates a grabbable music that dreams and confounds. Bodies, things, words, and sounds strain under duress, looping their way through scenes of grubby presence, not-quite riff, mouldy echo, and swollen bombast.

His spring 2022 discs for Entr’acte, 33-33 and Hyperdelia are a thick, unruly soup of keys and computer with pianist Eliza McCarthy; a desperate suite of consoling, tanked songs with takes from Jess Hickie-Kallenbach, Teresa Winter, Gwilly Edmondez and videos by Joel Wycherley; and some dilated rotten soul with Eliza and Ashley Paul.

Laurie helms Slip, which has released music by Yeah You, Mica Levi, Julia Reidy, Bass Clef, Object Collection, Mentos Gulgendo, Chaines & Competition. Old releases of his own include ‘Ample Profanity’ (2018), with cellist Oliver Coates; ‘Heat, War, Sweat, Law’ (2016); and ‘Exorcise’ (2021), as Yes Indeed with bassist Otto Willberg, justly hailed as “proper, mad scones” (Boomkat).

Performances: Café Oto, Aldeburgh Music, Spike Island, Harp Art Lab (Harplinge) and National Sawdust (New York). Commissions: House of Bedlam, Daylight Editions, LSO Soundhub Scheme, ddmmyy and 840 series. Radio: specials for NTS and Resonance FM and a session with Adam Bohman recorded at Maida Vale studios, broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

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