Finding Gills

Nonclassical pair Nneka Cummins’ Ivor Classical Award-winning finding gills (when they try to drown you) with its remix, finding gills [realms and possibilities]. Commissioned during their nonclassical Artist in Residence programme and premiered by Sinfonia Smith Square in 2025, it marks their first large-scale meeting of fixed electronics and chamber orchestra.

Built entirely from the original source material, the remix pulls apart any sense of orchestral permanence, stretching, warping and reassembling fragments into something fluid and electronic. Drawing on earlier compositions, the piece moves through destruction and creation, letting dissonance, distress and memory gradually open into radiant strings, spiralling melodies and renewal.

The title nods to the Afrofuturist mythology of Drexciya, imagined by Detroit duo James Stinson and Gerald Donald, where descendants of pregnant African women thrown overboard during the transatlantic slave trade adapt to breathe underwater and build a new civilisation below the sea.