Unlimited Impact/British Music Collection Embedded

“In 2016 Unlimited and Sound and Music supported Ailís Ní Ríain to conduct a residency and creative response to the archives at the British Music Collection.

In 2015 she received an Unlimited Research and Development award to create ‘The Drawing Rooms’, a piece which explored strange stories through BSL, film, live contemporary classical music, new writing and live drawing. Ailís is hearing impaired and has been creating work influenced by her experience of deafness since 2007.

Unlimited were interested in building links with organisations working with new music, and we have a nerdy fascination with exploring hidden histories within archives. Sound and Music have been actively reaching out to more diverse musicians through their ‘pathways’ project, a scheme which supports disabled musicians and musicians with a background other than white British, but were keen to do more.

Having uncovered some overlapping priorities and interests we got together to devise a new disability-led project which explored the depths of Sound and Music’s expansive music collection in Huddersfield.

During her time with the collection Ailís delved into the archive and made her own creative responses to the work, creating  ‘Perspectives on the Archive’.“