A Mouth In Search Of A Voice is a new music and multimedia work by composer Jamie Hamilton, exploring the territory between spoken language and musical sound, through the stammered voice.
Working with people who stammer across the UK, Jamie is creating a ‘recorded tapestry’ of stammered voices. Through a series of workshops in North Kent, London, Bristol and online, participants will collaboratively develop material and recordings with Jamie and musicians from Phaedra Ensemble. These recorded elements will then be woven into a larger composition for the ensemble, which will include electronics and a video projection created in collaboration with artist, designer, and creator of Dysfluent Magazine, Conor Foran.
A Mouth In Search Of A Voice asks: how is language changed when traditional fluency isn’t possible? People who stammer navigate speech differently – rapidly rewording, rerouting, reimagining. The project treats this not as dysfunction but as a creative act. By foregrounding the physical qualities of speech, the stammer becomes a liminal space where language starts to break down into sound.
Drawing threads between stammering and unreliable narration, the work traces a network of unlikely connections: Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, in which a trial scene hinges on a moment of fatal dysfluency; Daniel Defoe’s The Storm, one of the earliest pieces of investigative journalism – here reimagined as a kind of forensic reconstruction, assembling contradictory eyewitness accounts of a biblical tempest that devastated Chatham; 16th century theories linking stammering to proximity to water; and new neuroscience mapping the different pathways stammered speech takes through the brain. Coastlines, tributaries, maps, flow; the language of water and navigation runs through the project, connecting bodies, voices and places.
The final work will be premiered by Jamie and Phaedra Ensemble in October 2026, with live performances at two coastal venues with direct links to these source materials: the Historic Dockyard Chatham – where Royal Navy ships were built, and which was ravaged by Defoe’s Great Storm – staged in one of the Dockyard’s historic ship-building warehouses, and Arnolfini Bristol, home city of Billy Budd himself.
A Mouth In Search Of A Voice is commissioned by Cement Fields and Phaedra Ensemble, supported by Arnolfini and STAMMA. It is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Saturday 28 February, 11am-3pm — Arnolfini Arts, Bristol
Wednesday 4 March, 7-9:30pm — Online
Saturday 7 March, 11am-3pm — Arnolfini Arts, Bristol
Wednesday 8 April, 7-9:30pm — Online
Saturday 11 April, 12-4pm — Sun Pier House, Chatham
Sunday 12 April, 12-4pm — Centre 151, London
Saturday 18 April, 12-4pm — Sun Pier House, Chatham
Jamie Hamilton is a composer, performer, multimedia artist and co-leader of Phaedra Emsemble.
He combines sound, multimedia, technology, and words to create music exploring how we listen is linked to our perception of the world. His work combines fragments of disparate elements to tell abstract stories about technology and belief. This often revolves around collaborative devising processes, in which sound acts as an organising device integrating other practitioners.
Jamie’s work has been performed, exhibited, and created in many contexts, ranging from an abandoned grain silo to concert halls and opera houses. His music has been broadcast on BBC1, BBC2, BBC4, and BBC Radio 3, amongst others. He has collaborated with artists such as Elaine Mitchener, Lucy Railton, Silje Aker Johnsen, the author Luke Williams (Goldsmith Prize 2022), poet Caroline Bergvall, and choreographers such as Sung Im Her and Dam Van Huynh.
Past commissions include Eklekto Percussion, Tate Britain, The Place (LSCD), London Contemporary Music Festival, The City of London, the Hong Kong Academy of the Performing Arts (HKAPA), and the National Dance Company of Mexico. In January 2014 he was a recipient of the International Artists’ Development Fund from the British Council with Dam Van Huynh.
