Jack Sheen

About the piece

Much of Jack's recent music has been predominantly focused on eluding linear narratives in favour of forms influenced by ecology and sculpture, often employing simple ideas such as cycles and stasis alongside questioning more elusive notions such as process, memory, and expectation. 

Phant Heap Render in many ways continues along this path, with each movement built from sections of music that focus in on material; (predominantly) stretching, contracting and bending it in different shapes rather than developing it in a goal-oriented manner.

Sonically, the music strives towards sensual, impressionistic unclarity. It leans towards illegibility, favouring haziness over clearly defined foregrounds/backgrounds, uncertain reoccurrence over exact repetition, microtonally inflected harmonies over equally-tempered pitches. 

This is compounded by the use of the ensemble itself, which in each movement is divided into into smaller groups and soloists that function independent of one another, even performing in different tempi without exact coordination. Music for each section of the ensemble was conceived separately and then superimposed, some following the conductor’s beat and others performing in their own time.

The resulting music functions more like an ecosystem of autonomous, individual musical entities rather than a single unified force. At times, this results in densely saturated textures full of unpredictable counterpoint, even if the sounds themselves are fragile.

Even when the music’s form is stationary, it’s texture is often active, aiming to bring together the seemingly contradictory states of high kinetic energy and deep, glacial minimalism.

Phant – Greek: manifest; show, appear, make appear, make visible, display; root of Phantom – Something apparently seen, heard, or sensed, but having no physical reality; a ghost or an apparition; something which is elusive or delusive; an image that appears only in the mind; an illusion.
Heap – an untidy collection of objects placed haphazardly on top of each other.
Render – to cause to be or become; to represent or depict; to melt down (fat) in order to clarify it; to process (the carcass of an animal) in order to extract proteins, fats, and other usable parts; to process (computer) code into a finished state or image.

More about Jack Sheen

Jack Sheen (1993) is a conductor and composer from Manchester. He regularly works with leading orchestras, ensembles, galleries, and artists on concert and operatic performances, commissions, installations, and interdisciplinary projects. 

Sheen’s music encompasses concert works for orchestras, ensembles, and soloists, alongside immersive performance-installations that disperse live musicians, audio, film, and dancers around large, open, non-seated spaces such as galleries or warehouses, blurring the lines between long-durational composition and sculpture. His recent compositions often exist in both formats. 

2022 saw the release of Sheen’s debut album Sub, a 50’ work for large ensemble written for Octandre Ensemble. Alongside Sub, recent composition projects include, Croon harvest (1490–1562), a sound-installation for the Venice Biennale Musica with Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart; Croon harvest (Serralves) a four-hour work for Casa de Serralves (Porto) for 50 voices and ensemble; complete a trio of performance-installations as part of residencies at PINK Gallery in Manchester’s city centre and Blackheath Halls; and finish his tenure as Carne Fellow at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance, the first ever composer to hold this position. 

He is the Co-Director of London Contemporary Music Festival and Co-Founder of the critically acclaimed LCMF Orchestra.