With Dr Robert Laidlow, Dr Stephanie Lamprea and Dr David Zucchi.

Messages, Memories, Memes brings together two of the UK’s foremost experimental music performers in a programme exploring myth, fragmentation and playful exploration of sonic storytelling. It features two substantial musical works by King’s composer Robert Laidlow for solo performer and electronic soundscapes.

Post-Singularity Songs is a 25-minute song cycle, setting to music creation myths and love songs from an imagined post-human world. Stephanie Lamprea dives in and out of athletic vocal performance and electronic textures, interacting with her own voice while telling the story of the mythical navigator Pyron. Its text, curated by the composer, draws from conversations with custom-made language models on the topic of creation myths and poetry from the 16th to 19th centuries. Stephanie Lamprea released this collaboration on her recent album Ecstatic Visions, and this performance will be the first in London of that final version.

content is music about the Internet, for saxophonist and electronics. Like the Internet, you can’t keep up with it. It absorbs everything it touches. Nearly everything in the piece is a reference to something else; many of those references are themselves references. It is 100% a joke and simultaneously deadly serious. We hear the reaction before we hear the thing itself. AI-generated memes imagine a world of good-natured disagreements. This is interrupted music, its flow atomised by sponsors desperate to connect authentically with your bank account. Breaking news is pushed directly to your ears. We join stories halfway through, scroll back to understand the start, still don’t quite get the joke. Two sides of the coin are community and loneliness. The music is a feed that is completely cut up, could go on forever; at some point, you just need to pull the plug.

The two works will be introduced by Robert Laidlow. The two very different approaches to storytelling will be explored, and the role of live, interactive, technology in facilitating these approaches revealed.

Spoken Introduction – Robert Laidlow (15 minutes)

Post-Singularity Songs – Stephanie Lamprea (25 minutes)

Content – David Zucchi (30 minutes)

Robert Laidlow is a composer and technologist. His “gigantically imaginative” (BBC Radio 3) music is concerned with discovering and developing new forms of musical expression through the relationship between live performance, advanced technology and interdisciplinary collaboration.

His compositions exploring the intersection of music, adaptive technology and creativity span orchestral, chamber, and solo works. ‘TECHNO-UTOPIA’, commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, and ‘Silicon’, a symphonic-length work for the BBC Philharmonic, explore human music-making in the age of AI and have been featured in the New York Times, the New Scientist, Sky News, Bachtrack, BBC Radio, and international television. Robert’s creative process also frequently involves collaborations with scientists; his orchestral work ‘Exoplanets’, commissioned by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Interfinity Festival with Sinfonieorchester Basel, was developed through collaboration with astrophysicists across the world.
He read Music at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, before studying at the Royal Academy of Music. From 2018-22 he was the PRiSM PhD Researcher in Artificial Intelligence in association with the BBC Philharmonic at the Royal Northern College of Music and from 2022-25 was a Career Development Fellow in Composition at Jesus College, University of Oxford.

Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea is an architect of new sounds and expressions as a performer, recitalist, curator, composer, and improviser, specializing in contemporary-classical repertoire. Trained as an operatic coloratura, Stephanie uses her voice as a mechanism of avant-garde performance art, creating “maniacal shifts of vocal production and character... like an icepick through the skull” (Jason Eckardt). Her work has been described as “stunning" and "sonorous” by The Observer, and “divinely deranged” by the Herald Scotland. An established multidisciplinary artist, Stephanie has collaborated as a soprano and composer with contemporary artist Jesse Jones to co-create Mirror Martyr Mirror Moon, a film presented at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in partnership with the National Gallery in London, and The White Cave, a film presented at the 2026 Singapore Biennale. A prolific recording artist, Stephanie released albums Quaking Aspen, Georges Aperghis' 14 Récitations, Don't Add to Heartache, and Ecstatic Visions to international critical acclaim. acclaim. http://www.stephanielamprea.com/

London-based Canadian saxophonist David Zucchi enjoys a varied career as a performer of classical, contemporary, experimental, and improvised music, collaborating regularly across the UK, Europe, and Canada.

David appears on recordings from NMC, Another Timbre, Delphian Records, Signum Records, Sawyer Editions, and Birmingham Record Company, and his debut solo album of original compositions was released in December 2024 on Toronto-based label people | places | records. Recent appearances as a soloist and chamber musician include Wigmore Hall, Purcell Room, St. John’s Smith Square, Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Edinburgh Fringe, London Contemporary Music Festival, Sounds Like This!, Światłodźwięki Festival (Poznan), Verbier Festival, Vale de Cambra Music Festival (Portugal), and the Glenn Gould Studio. In April 2026, David gave the UK premiere of Tyshawn Sorey’s saxophone concerto, Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith) with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jack Sheen.

With a keen interest in the performance of contemporary and experimental music, David has premiered and been the dedicatee of many works by emerging and established composers. He has performed and recorded with leading UK contemporary music ensembles including Explore Ensemble, Apartment House, GBSR Duo, Octandre Ensemble, and An assembly.
David is the Head of Saxophone at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and works as an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths University and BIMM University.