Musicians Dali de Saint Paul and Maxwell Sterling and visual artists Rebecca Salvadori and Charlie Hope created Penumbra from a collaborative process during a series of shared sessions. It was originally commissioned by Outlands and presented in a number of UK art and concert spaces in the spring of 2024.

All events across New Music Biennial 2025 were free.

Events included two performances of the same work and a short interview with the creative team in between the two. This enabled audiences to experience the second performance with greater insight into the creative process.

Dali de Saint Paul is a relentless collaborator and improviser. She is the voice of searing industrial duo Harrga, the female improvising ensemble Viridian, the supergroup Ondata Rossa, and the consistent element in her project EP/64, which ran for 64 live shows, each with a different line-up, and involved over 40 musicians as well as visual artists over a six-year period.

Maxwell Sterling’s multidisciplinary output as a sound producer, composer and double bassist spans regular collaborations. His work creates points of reference between precision sound synthesis and acoustic traditions.

Charlie Hope is a London-born visual artist using light, motion, space, video, and coding to build sensorial images and environments across sound, performance and installation. His work involves crafting multi-textured environments, often through collaborations in a range of contexts.

Rebecca Salvadori is a London-based artist working at the intersection of video art and documentary who has consistently engaged with experimental music, exploring ways to connect the moving image with sound practices, live performance and alternative forms of storytelling. She is the co-founder of artist collective Tutto Questo Sentire.

New Music Biennial is a three-day festival celebrating the best new music across all genres from the country’s most exciting composers – and in 2025, for the first time, it came to venues around Bradford.