Laura Moody

Laura Moody is composer, cellist, vocalist, songwriter and theatre performer from the UK. Her work focuses on storytelling, ritual, the expressive potential of musicians’ physicality and the transformation of spaces through sound, music and movement. She considers all of her work to be theatre of some kind. In her solo work she explores what is possible using only acoustic cello and voice to create songs which draw on hugely diverse influences. She likes to think of these as pop songs but nobody else ever seems to agree with this definition. In November 2014 she released her debut solo album Acrobats to major critical acclaim. Touching fingers with cabaret and performance art, she has since performed this music everywhere from the International Handel Festival to Europe’s largest fetish club.

Most recently Laura composed, and performed in, five consecutive shows for The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe, each of these exploring a different way of reinterpreting the same very idiosyncratic, candlelit space and the function of music and musicians within it. Other recent works include Hildegard Portraits for the vocal trio Voice’s music and light art show Hildegard Transfigured, the seance-like Medium for vocalising, ‘mind-reading’ string quartet, and award-nominated scores for the experimental dreamplay at The Vaults Theatre and the radio drama Mary Rose for BBC Radio 3. In 2017 Parallelist, a collaborative music theatre work with the sound artist Clay Gold, premiered at Aldeburgh Festival. Dealing with telecommunications, isolation and theories of consciousness, Parallelist exists somewhere between music theatre, one-woman opera and installation art and will be touring in the near future.

For fifteen years Laura’s major focus as a collaborative musician was as a member of the innovative string quartet Elysian Quartet, known for its pioneering performances and recordings of contemporary classical, experimental and improvised music. She is a frequent collaborator of Radiohead’s Philip Selway, performing and arranging for his film scores, albums and solo shows. Other artists she has worked with include: Meredith Monk, Bjork, Simon Fisher Turner, JARV IS, Anna Calvi, Antony and the Johnsons, Peter Gabriel and Kae Tempest.