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Resonance 2025: Meet the Artists

From live-coded sound, storytelling and film to traditional West African and Chinese music, diverse musical traditions and personal narratives lie at the heart of this year’s Opera North Resonance residencies which start this month. The five artists selected for 2025 are: LINTD, Christine Zhou, Aayushi Jain, Andrew Barney and Astolayb.

Resonance offers time, space, and resources to exceptional music-makers and composers from Global Majority backgrounds, working in any genre and based in the north of England or the Midlands. It seeks to develop talent by enabling them to spend a week at Opera North with the sole remit of exploring a project of their choice. At the end of their time, the option is given to share the results with an audience. Resonance is a PRS Foundation Talent Development Partner supported by PPL.

Marking its eighth year in 2025, the scheme already boasts an impressive legacy. Several alumni, including Testament, Jasdeep Singh Degun and Abel Selaocoe, have undertaken major commissions for Opera North while also making a name for themselves in the wider musical world. Keisha Thompson won last year’s DARE Art Prize, while THABO was selected to design an immersive sound installation for Leeds Light Night 2024 in the Howard Assembly Room.

Following in their footsteps, this year’s recipients will be exploring issues including diasporic grief, diverse heritages, cultural and linguistic divides, and mythology.

LINTD

LINTD, aka Iyunoluwanimi Yemi-Shodimu, is an experimental electronic composer whose innovative sonic world is both dark and evocative.

Iyun will use his Resonance residency to expand on the processes and sonic worlds of his debut audio-visual album Funeral Rites on Planet Saturn. The album is a meditation on the complexity of grief for the Black diaspora in a post-colonial world. The musical content of the project will involve live-coding sequences, body-percussion and tap dance, with piano and signature vigorous vocals. These sound elements will merge with the choreography, blending movement and sound in a kinetic live feedback loop.

Listen to LINTD

LINTD © Timo Benson

Christine Zhou

Christine Zhou is a composer with interests in Western classical, traditional Chinese folk and experimental styles, using tools such as synthesizers and audio sampling to add texture and depth, and to change the mood and feel of the soundscape as a narrative unfolds.

Christine’s Resonance project is a brand-new found footage documentary film with a live score accompaniment. The work will tell the story of her grandmother, one of the most significant and beloved stars of the Chinese cinema of the 1920s, Zhou Xuan, who made 33 films during a time of considerable social and political unrest. The newly composed score blends live Chinese folk and cinema music and Western classical traditions with contemporary sensibilities, featuring live narration and operatic voice, piano, and Erhu.

Listen to Christine

Christine Zhou

Aayushi Jain

Aayushi Jain is a contemporary folk singer-songwriter from Birmingham. She writes strikingly tender songs which, in her own words, “blend elements drawn from my Indian heritage with abstract symbolism to evoke an atmosphere that is soft, hypnotic and whimsical.”

During her Resonance residency, Aayushi will develop a one-hour performance, incorporating music, poetry, creative British Sign Language (BSL) and lighting, and including contemporary Western adaptations of South Asian songs, such as dohas, bhajans, folk songs and ghazals. Working closely with a BSL interpreter to create innovative, dynamic physical storytelling, a live creative BSL translation of each sound work will bring the visual poetry of the lyrics to life, offering up new interpretations spanning British and South Asian culture.

Listen to Aayushi

Aayushi Jain

Andrew Barney

As a mixed-race Scouser with roots in West Africa, Ireland, the Caribbean and South America, Andrew Barney‘s project ORIGINS is a deeply personal journey in which he seeks to reconnect with ancestral cultures in new contexts by combining music and storytelling in various languages.

Andrew is looking forward to working on an improvised piece during his time with Opera North, culminating in a fusion of styles and instruments, including classical, West African Mande music, Caribbean calypso, Venezuelan and Irish folk. He will also use the West African Griot for dynamic verbal story telling. This will be a personal exploration and cultural exchange which aims to decolonise Eurocentric musical practices.

Listen to Andrew

Andrew Barney

Astrolayb

Astrolayb aka electronic and sampling artist Pranam Mavahalli takes his inspiration from the musicality inherent in Kannada, the language native to Karnataka, India, where his parents grew up and where he spent part of his childhood.

The piece he will be working on echoes the myth of the River Kaveri’s creation: in the story, Ganesha transforms into a crow and knocks over a water pot, which leads to the birth of the river. Taking this concept of disruption giving way to creation, Astrolayb will place the story within the context of contemporary electronic music, sampling fragments of Kannada speech, and converting them into MIDI to generate unexpected melodies. These samples will also be transcribed using Western notation, allowing the piece to be performed by traditional Western instruments — such as strings and saxophone — alongside synthesizers to give diverse colours and textures to the work.

Listen to Astrolayb

Astrolayb

From January to April, each of these artists will be given free rehearsal space for a week in Leeds with a grant to cover fees and costs, and support and advice from technicians, producers and other specialists. They will also be given the option to give a work-in-progress performance at the end of their residency.

The Resonance scheme has been made possible by Opera North’s membership of the PRS Foundation’s network of Talent Development Partners. The UK’s leading funder of new music and talent development, PRS Foundation supports organisations working at the frontline of talent development with a broad range of individual music creators. This reflects PRS Foundation’s commitment to supporting composers and songwriters of all backgrounds and genres through direct investment or by helping organisations which nurture artists and promote their music.

Opera North is a PRS Foundation Talent Development Partner supported by PPL.

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