Liam Taylor-West

Contest entry

Video drive.google.com/file/d/1F26KCKDif5O44aV8mwIhCA0y9J00gO4U/view?usp=sharing 

‘Crossing Paths’ explores random movement and spontaneous decision-making. The visuals and audio are created uniquely each time the piece plays, determined by the behaviour of a group of ‘snakes’. 

The snakes begin in a totally free environment, where each new direction is chosen at random. They try to avoid colliding with themselves, and are only guided by the appearance of food, which leads to them growing in length, and splitting to create new snakes. 

For a snake to get longer it must remember more of the locations it has just visited. It therefore has an increasing awareness of its past, which has an impact on the decisions it makes going forwards. 

As more of the snakes’ histories are revealed, patterns begin to emerge - showing regions where many snakes have been, and others where none have ventured. Individual movements become hidden within a shifting cloud of interconnected pasts. 

Gradually, the snakes’ freedom becomes guided by external influences that set out which future paths are available to them. Increasingly intricate zones dictate the routes snakes must take to reach each other, and it is only through head-on collisions, by crossing paths, that the snakes are able to progress through the piece.

Artist biography

Liam Taylor-West is a composer and audiovisual artist who works primarily with live musicians and new technology. His compositions and artworks are built around the resulting behaviour of large numbers of active elements, often featuring audience interaction and random events. Liam is interested in colour, light, rhythm and movement.

In 2018, Liam received the Ivors Composer Award in the Community or Educational Project category for The Umbrella, performed by the National Open Youth Orchestra. He holds a doctoral degree in composition from the Royal College of Music, in London, and has worked with several orchestras including regular collaborations with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Concert Orchestra. 

Liam's two-volume composition Backdrops is used to underscore the BBC Radio 3 show Night Tracks, presented by Sara Mohr-Pietsch and Hannah Peel, and his orchestral piece A Slow Breath appears as part of the BBC Sounds podcast The Music and Meditation Podcast. 

Liam is an advocate of the use of creative technology in composition and performance, and is a Resident at Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio, in Bristol.