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Anna Meredith.
Anna Meredith. Photograph: Mark Kean
Anna Meredith. Photograph: Mark Kean

Anna Meredith: the proms composer ditching classical music for club bangers

This article is more than 8 years old

She’s a respected composer of classical music. So how did that lead to an album of pop and techno stompers?

The sight of a of 20ft-tall bare bum farting out iPhone messages is about the last thing anyone with jetlag would want to experience, yet Anna Meredith is revelling in it. She is fresh off a flight from the US, where she was teaching Utah’s Mormon Youth Orchestra her piece Hands Free, a body percussion composition that resembles a giant, noisy Mexican wave. But now we’re at the Whitechapel Gallery’s gaudy art show Electronic Superhighway looking at digital derrieres. It’s a fitting setting for the Scottish composer, whose latest musical excursion has taken her away from orchestral works and into uncharted territory.

Swiftly moving on, we watch Hennessy Youngman’s film Grad School, in which the irreverent video critic advises against studying art. “He’s right, isn’t he?” says Meredith approvingly. When she started studying composition, she worried that she would never succeed in the classical field. But now that she has, the 38-year-old is more concerned with dissolving the barriers around it. She has made concertos for beatboxers and performed in a service station, and when HandsFree premiered at the proms, it made her the youngest living artist to have a new piece debuted at the festival.

Eventually, though, Meredith decided that she wanted to explore an area that few classical composers tiptoe into: the pop world. To be more specific, the avant-synthpop and peak-time howlers of her debut album Varmints. She had grown frustrated by classical’s constraints, where months of work can climax in a single performance – and often to a sneery audience. “I don’t want to write music that people are enduring just to get to the Elgar in the second half,” she says wearily. She repeatedly highlights the snootiness during our gallery walkabout – an awareness that safeguards her own compositions. “I’ve got quite a pretentious-ometer running. If there’s ever a more direct way to say something, I’d rather do that. That’s what I’m asking myself the whole time: can you be braver, can you be bolder, can you be simpler?”

You can almost hear that bold and brave mantra permeating Varmints, evoking Jean-Michel Jarre albums, video games, Hudson Mohawke and hair metal. Opening track Nautilus is a mighty brass fanfare that could be Kylo Ren’s coronation music, while Scrimshaw is a joyful cosmic quest that conjures images of a jetpack through the northern lights, and R-Type honours its 80s video-game namesake by charging through intense arpeggios.

Anna Meredith with beatboxer Shlomo. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

What led her to start making majestic bangers? Meredith doesn’t pinpoint any revelations on the dancefloor, only that she “wanted more volume” than the classical world provided. Varmints sometimes evokes techno, but she wasn’t trying to inhabit any electronic genre; she says she rarely listens to music, and never for inspiration. Instead, she writes by visualising concepts such as “a violin made of steel, paperclips [becoming] liquid” or, in the case of Scrimshaw, “seals at a disco”. As she explains, “The writing version of me is not afraid of anything,” which is fortunate, with an imagination trying to coerce her into making music for aquatic mammals under a glitterball.

What Meredith didn’t realise initially is just how pricey producing an indie album would be versus paid classical commissions. As a result, the making of Varmints was usually put on the back-burner as Meredith focused on other bill-paying projects. The process affirmed her respect for acts slogging it out in splitter vans: “It’s made me realise how much support and infrastructure there is for classical music.” Now, she says, her peers “slightly” deduce that she’s selling out. “There’s this assumption that there’s money in pop,” she says. “No – my contemporary art music funds my burgeoning middle-aged pop sensation career!”

She hardly sees herself as a stadium-filling performer (“I wouldn’t know how to leap about and smash my clarinet off an amp,” she laughs) but the increasing grey area between classical and pop music has made it easier for her to lean towards the latter. On the one hand there are artists like Mica Levi and Floating Points using their traditional training to make music that encompasses indie, pop, synthesizers and jazz. And on the other, there is a growing interest in seeing electronic producers perform with live ensembles.

For now, Meredith is adjusting to leading her own small pop ensemble and playing in clubs rather than in auditoriums, which proved a culture shock. After her debut tour’s opening night she asked her record label if it was OK to play the same set again the next day, much to their amusement. “Repetition works in very different ways across the genres,” she says, though Varmints’ insistent brass riffs and screaming crescendos unite those sensibilities perfectly. We part ways. Meredith has to collect the keys to her new Somerset House basement studio (another classical perk, and where PJ Harvey recorded her new album). Another establishment’s foundations will rattle.

Varmints is released on 4 March on Moshi Moshi

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