I have been performing solo since 2018. For me, the solo format offers a unique way of communicating musical ideas, outlining where you are as an improviser and, perhaps most importantly, indicating future directions.
My debut solo record, Flux, was released in 2019, followed by a UK tour including performances at The Vortex, IKLECTIK and YARMONICS Festival. In 2025, I received a grant from Arts Council England to develop new approaches to solo percussion.
This period of research has shaped my current solo work, which explores percussion as an amplified and electroacoustic performance system: a relationship between performer, material, microphone, electronic processing, loudspeaker and space. Rather than treating amplification and electronics as separate layers, I am interested in how microphones, resonance, feedback, proximity and acoustic response can become part of the instrument itself.
In August 2026, I undertook a residency at neimënster in Luxembourg, where these ideas were brought together in performance for the first time. I developed a series of electronic environments that extend resonance, magnify quiet surface detail and respond to changes in gesture and microphone movement. The residency established a starting point for further investigation into how acoustic and electronic behaviours can influence one another in improvisation.
This work now forms the basis of my ongoing solo practice, with further performances and a new recorded project planned for 2027.
Emil played with such delicacy and precision, managing to draw the audience in to each nuanced rub, hit and stroke. Completely at home in the enormous acoustic shell of the Minster, Emil became fluent in the language of the church, responding to its creaks and distant footsteps, and toying with its joyful reverberation - a special moment, when distant church bells invited Emil to duet, provided a spell of glorious harmony with his surroundings both near and far - YARMONICS festival 2019
