Lisa Busby performing live

Photograph by Danny, Forthwith Festival, January 2018


Lisa Busby is a Scottish composer, vocalist, and improviser based in London [until 2020]. Situated across experimental music, performance art, and pop song, her practice often utilises the found and the prosaic, and manifests in various entangled modes – long-duration and site specific work, video, non-standard scoring/notation, “anti-production” techniques for electronic music, and live improvisation for sound/body. Lisa is one of Sound and Music’s New Voices 2019 Sound and Music’s New Voices 2019 and participates in the Social Acoustics Research Project led by Professors Jill Halstead and Brandon Labelle.

Materially her work has explored in fragments, fringes and collisions of song and noise; artefacts of pop and fan culture, histories and archives; experimental turntablism and expanded usage of playback, samples and loops; and everyday action as/in performative gesture. Instrumentally her specialisms are in voice, turntables, hardware and software electronics, with more recent work incorporating electric guitar and lapsteel. She performs and composes with band Rutger Hauser; is part of The Lumen Lake music collective and record label; and was a member of the art, education, and politics group Common Study based at Somerset House Studios [2018-2020]. She has ongoing sound and movement collaborations with Gabriel Bohm Calles and Lou Barnell.

Lisa has released, performed and exhibited in various solo and group situations internationally including AMOQA [Athens], The Blackwood Gallery [Toronto], Forthwith Festival [Winnipeg], Vetrarjazz [The Faroe Islands], The Royal Institute of Art [Stockholm], Inter Arts Centre and Signal Centre for Contemporary Art [Malmö], Incubate Festival [Tilburg], Optica Festival [Gijon], Tate Modern, The Southbank Centre, The British Library, The Ashmolean, Modern Art Oxford, Wysing Arts, The Arnolfini, Iklctik and Café Oto. She has worked with curators, programmers and promoters including Sisters Akousmatica [Australia], Verkligheten [Umeå], The Surround, Electra, Audiograft, Bristol Expanded and Experimental Film, Oxford Contemporary Music, Saisonscape, Primary and Radiophrenia [CCA Glasgow, Borealis Bergen]. Lisa has released with record labels Adaadat, Seed, and The Lumen Lake, and published scores with Structo and Indestructible Energy. Her writing has been published by Routledge, Bloomsbury, Dancecult, Her Noise and The Quietus; and her work has featured on BBC Radio 3 Late Junction, BBC6Music, and Resonance FM.