Mia was one of the managers of the LUUMS Composers Collective for 3 years during her Undergraduate and Master’s degree at the University.
Mia Windsor is an experimental musician currently completing a practice-led PhD project at the University of Leeds (with funding from Leeds Doctoral Scholarship). The PhD involves building and improvising with Muta: her mutable feedback instrument that resonates materials and feeds their signals back into themselves and each other via spectral processing.
Mia also makes pipe organ drone music, improvises regularly with various friends using Muta, modified reed organs and her voice, and plays in the art pop band Static Caravan. She is also currently taking on some composition and music technology teaching at the University of Leeds and Leeds Beckett University.
Can you share one key experience in your time with LUUMS that has shaped your musical career?
Putting on gigs at Wharf Chambers through the composers collective allowed me to gradually bridge the gap from the more ‘serious’ experimental scene at the university and the DIY experimental scene at venues like wharf. The DIY experimental scene has been a fundamental part of my life from 2022 onwards. I’ve met so many friends and collaborators through going to experimental gigs there.
What encouraged you to run for the role of the Composers Collective manager?
I cared deeply about the Composers Collective from the get-go. To be able to have a community solely for composers where we could discuss our composition practices, experiment with ideas, collaborate and have access to performers and tech was a dream come true for me. It allowed me to try out all my silly ideas (even the bad ones!) and figure out who I was as a musician. I wanted the collective to continue running so offered to be manager in my second year. I stayed in the role for 3 years.
Was there anything you learned in your work with LUUMS that was unexpected or surprising?
I learned that composers are actually really enthusiastic about collaborating! I think a lot of people imagine composers to be fairly solitary folks, but it proved to be mostly the opposite in the collective. In the first semester of each year (following on from our predecessors) we set the task of writing a collaborative piece with at least one other person from the collective so members could get to know each other. Each year it was met with a lot of enthusiasm and many ideas emerged from it. We did this in the pandemic even (a little later on in the year) but instead with the task of trying to make a collaborative album in a day in pairs and threes, passing files between us. That was really fun!
What was the most challenging aspect of running the collective? What was the most rewarding?
The most challenging aspect was attempting to define what fitted into the collective. In my second year of managing there was a bit of a push from my co-manager to include more pop-music approaches. Though I am by no means against this in principle (I’ve been in an art-pop band for 7 years now!) I wanted the collective to be a space where people who needed the resources i.e. those writing for instrumentalists that we could source or those wanting to experiment with unique technical setups in the concert hall could do so. There are already plenty of spaces for songwriters to showcase and experiment with their work i.e. open mics, bandsoc or just forming a band and booking a practice room. I found this approach took away from those taking the former approach for which there was nowhere else to do so. The current managers now handle this really well, giving new members a general idea of what has worked well in the past and demonstrating that the collective are all for experiments, especially ones that cannot happen elsewhere.
The most rewarding aspect was listening to the pieces that emerged from the collective in concert, especially the collaborative pieces. There is an amazing reed organ duo piece by Joy Ingle and James M. Creed called Woodhouse, 09/11/2021, 9pm that they performed in the winter concert of 2021 that I still think about to this day. The piece involved taking a field recording on their respective streets on 09/11/2021 at 9pm, selecting a cycle of dyads to play on two reed organs, then playing the reed organs alongside the field recordings with certain frequencies boosted in the recordings that matched the dyad frequencies, making both elements then blend together perfectly. I really loved witnessing pieces like this as they felt like unique meldings of ideas that happened because of the collective.
Wharf Chambers.
Do you have a favourite LUUMS concert that you were a part of?
The concert we put on at Wharf Chambers in March of 2022. It was amazing! I used the budget to book the venue and make dinner for everyone during soundcheck. James Creed got the audience to shoot a nerf gun at his guitar, Ben Adamson dipped cymbals in buckets of water, Thomas Carroll did a feedback set and threw marbles everywhere, Dylan Thompson set a tape loop going and then sat on stage and read a book, I did a completely piercing cymbal and electronics performance with Ben which coincidentally led to Thomas introducing me to Sachiko M’s music (who I still love to this day). Lots of people showed up and got completely into it, including those who weren’t typically into experimental music.
If there’s one piece of advice you could share with current members, what would it be?
If you have an idea for a piece, no matter how silly or weird, there is a welcoming space and community to try it out with. Join the composers collective!
Leeds University Union Music Society 