The Way We Blend is a platform for artistic experimentation. It is a place for community building, collaboration, peer support and resource sharing. The first project it hosts is the podcast Essential Blends – a practice-research podcast. To stay in touch with us, sign up to our newsletter:
Essential Blends is a practice-research podcast hosted by Adriana Minu and Kevin Leomo, who interview artists and researchers about their journeys.
Adriana Minu is an experimental sound/music maker that has set camp in the world of the senses. Her artistic research investigates how elements of our lived experience that precede language can be collected and used in creative ways.
In her vocal improvisation practice she listens to and resonates with what is already there, be it sound, emotion, space, social dynamic or the feeling of a pandemic or political event. She likes collaborating with human and non-human entities by attuning to their sensory potential with her body and voice. Her works take many forms, from a (pandemic inspired) 45 minute participatory guided vocal exploration of one’s private living room to durational performances in which she exists within a sculpture and the effects of time, space and audiences become materialised through her vocal utterances.
Adriana is currently pursuing a PhD in music composition at University of Glasgow and Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, funded by AHRC through the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities. At University of Glasgow she has been teaching two classes: Listening in Culture and Sonic Arts: Interacting with Sound. She has a Masters degree from Glasgow School of Art and spent her formative years at Birmingham Conservatoire doing an undergraduate degree in music technology. Originally from Romania, she now lives in Glasgow in a tenement flat with her husband.
Kevin Leomo is a Scottish-Filipino composer of experimental music based in Glasgow. He is interested in silence, fragility, perception, and liminality. His practice involves collaboration, improvisation, listening practices, non-standard notation, and working cross-culturally. Kevin recently completed his PhD in composition at the University of Glasgow, where he now teaches.
Kevin runs the experimental music series Sound Thought and plays in the experimental duo Dronehopper. He coordinates The Dear Green Bothy programme of arts and humanities responses to the climate crisis as well as the Collaboration & Cultural Activities Committee in the College of Arts.
Kevin is an Oxford Contemporary Music Boom Fellow and is one of Sound and Music’s 2023 Adopt a Music Creators. He recently received mentoring at Wandelweiser’s Composers Meet Composers.
Kevin enjoys running, planning new projects, getting handpoked tattoos, eating vegan junk food, and caring for his houseplant jungle.
