Tabula Rasa - Silver Nun (2025)
Tabula Rasa is an electrifying collaborative work by guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Lucy Valentine and Finnish jazz percussionist Simo Laihonen. Hypnotic guitar textures interlock with intense, physical percussion, producing a sound world that is immersive, unstable, and sensorial. The work resists genre alignment, drawing instead on sustained tone, momentum, and pressure, with distant resonances of early psychedelic experimentation and non-Western rhythmic traditions without stylistic imitation.
The material was recorded live in 2021 in a deconsecrated church, where extended guitar lines move fluidly across each piece. In 2023, Laihonen recorded the percussion from his studio in Tampere, Finland, introducing a layered dialogue between lo-fi immediacy and high-fidelity detail. The resulting sound balances contrasting temperaments and spaces, allowing texture and duration to drive form.
Tabula Rasa is a fragment of a musical world formed during the isolation of the Covid period. It exists as part of the ongoing Silver Nun project, which continues to evolve through collaboration, live performance, and process-led composition.
Released on The Crystal Cabinet.
https://thecrystalcabinet.bandcamp.com/album/tabula-rasa
Acrimonia (2025)
Acrimonia is an original lute-based sound work authored as part of an opera currently in development. The project exists as a discrete compositional entity, defined by sustained tonal pressure, controlled instability, and duration-based form. Rather than referencing historical repertoire or adaptive performance models, the work establishes its own internally governed sound logic.
The work centres on the artist’s exclusive drone-based performance technique, developed through extended practice and applied across early Renaissance lute and electric guitar. These instruments are not fused stylistically but placed in tension, using sustained drones, tonal pressure, and controlled instability to unsettle fixed listening frameworks. In Acrimonia, dissonance functions as a structural condition, echoing early moments of musical contention without recourse to historical argument or stylistic quotation.
Acrimonia was presented publicly as a focused excerpt from the larger opera and premiered with Tête à Tête Opera Company. The work asserts authorship through process and execution, positioning historical instrumentation within a newly authored sonic context while withholding prescriptive frameworks, external mappings, or derivative lineage.
The Sounds of the Silver Spider (2024)
The Sounds of the Silver Spider is an immersive sound work and short film developed for Sound Diaries 2024 at Oxford Brookes University. The project documents, in its entirety, the silversmithing process involved in producing a single silver jewellery piece, using a deliberately varied array of microphones and recording techniques. These recordings capture the material, spatial, and sonic responses generated through each stage of fabrication, forming a cohesive auditory account of the making of the silver spider.
This work constitutes a first-of-its-kind experimental sound documentation of silversmithing as an embodied, time-based sonic process, positioning craft practice itself as both subject and method of inquiry.
The accompanying talk contextualises the work through the sourcing of local materials from County Durham, examining how material choice intersects with the region’s industrial history and contemporary political landscape. This framing situates the project within a materially grounded and historically informed practice, foregrounding questions of place, labour, and cultural memory.
The Sounds of the Silver Spider has been presented at Oxford Brookes University (UK), De Keuken (NL), and Foldyard Gallery (UK).
Vault of Heaven (2023)
Vault of Heaven is the multimedia celestial progressive album created using the Mellotron's historic soundbanks to create an auditory world to the accompanying original collage artwork.
The album was released on The Crystal Cabinet December 2023 in limited edition numbers on cassette with matching art book.
Listen: https://thecrystalcabinet.bandcamp.com/album/vault-of-heaven
Exhibitions: Salon Gallery, Margate 2023 (UK) Foldyard Gallery, Berwick Upon Tweed 2024 (UK)
Nuclear Holocaust (2015)
The auditory exploration with just a guitar and a knife into the cessation of all nuance and the sonic obliteration that is attributed to chemical warfare. The research into advances in anatomical and chemical weaponry and its uses in the 21st century lead to the collected 10 track album where all sense of chaos is finally lifted into faint melody. Representing what forms and distills after obliteration?
Nuclear Holocaust was initially released on handmade cassette copies and distributed at gigs over a 4 year period before digital release. The final handmade copy is currently housed in the British Library.
https://lucyvalentinemusic.bandcamp.com/album/nuclear-holocaust