At the end of June, I had the unsettling pleasure of wandering through a blue fringed curtain and into the backroom-disco of Rowland Hill's miniaturised Eurodance clubnight. Presented at Post-Paradise in Birmingham, Interesting Times was a foreboding inoculation of nineties ‘lyrical optimism [in] an emotively charged minor key’. La Cream, Alice Deejay, Phutura, Aqua Ninja: their tracks have, as Hill writes in the programme notes, ‘melodies reminiscent of breaking news sound effects and beats that suggest states of both euphoria and emergency’ – this is music that brings an ‘unsettling blend of doubt and hopefulness’. Sash!’s ‘Mysterious Times’ opens with samples of thunder, later including the line ‘We're counting the hours and days to the end of all time’.

Ellen Arkbro has been much fêted in experimental scenes (though not – or not yet – so much in the sort of new music scenes with which hcmf// remains associated) for her two records, For Organ and Brass (2017) and CHORDS (2019). Her performance with Marcus Pal in St Paul's Hall in Huddersfield follows a number of other shows in the UK, including at TUSK festival in Newcastle and at the Barbican in London. The pair are based in Stockholm, where they seem to be part of a burgeoning experimental organ scene. Their just intonation drone music comes with impeccable credentials: both studied with La Monte Young, and Pal also studied with Catherine Christer Hennix. The organ emitted a quiet diminished octave as the audience filed in, a dissonance resolved as soon as Arkbro sat down at the organ manual. What followed appeared to be a reworked and extended version of CHORDS for organ: the organ articulating perfect intervals and single tones, sounding something like a harmonic series and something like the I–IV–V of rock and blues, while Pal's computer-generated additive synthesis, speakers carefully directed upwards parallel to the organ's pipes, combine with the organ's familiar sound to create dense and jagged masses, chords transforming into timbres and back again.

As I enter Georgia Rodgers’ Line of parts, I am struck by the instrument for which she has composed: three levitating circles of loudspeakers, one above the other, that form a cylinder of sound rising up above my head. They are housed inside a space-age enclosure, clad in complex geometric foam shapes; a circular array of chairs facing outwards sits in centre of this space, inviting an independent and reflective – rather than communal – listening experience. This space wraps you in it: a womb-like architecture of sonic potential.

When Eleanor Knight began researching her libretto for Silk Moth, she had to decide how to frame an opera about honour violence. Meeting women whose lives it had ruptured through the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation, she confronted the usual images that accompany the dozen-or-so honour killings per year in the UK media. Between the ‘old, faded school photos’ that illustrate victimhood and the male perpetrators with ‘blankets over their heads … shoved into waiting police cars’, she saw a gulf of painful complexity. ‘What’, she asks, ‘of the mothers?’.

After occasional previous engagements in the north of England, including a particularly memorable performance at Distractfold's Cut & Splice Festival in 2017, Hanna Hartman was engaged as composer in residence for hcmf's 41st iteration. Hurricane Season, a world premiere, was also an hcmf// commission. It was for objects, electronics, amplification, magnified projection and a rather large-sized magnet (or perhaps more than one), which I imagine most of the commission fee was spent on getting through international customs. The aural component of the piece was fairly unremittingly scratchy and granular, the sort of soundscape one might expect to hear if holding a stethoscope to a dead tree filled with insects. And it was certainly a soundscape – the sounds seemed to result not so much from the motions and frictions of the different materials (though, I assume, most of them actually did come from this) but hover around the space cavernously as a sort of underscoring to the action. Hartman's preoccupation with exploding the finest grains of material was here achieved at once aurally and visually, with the mega-enlarged projection complimenting the various gradations of scrapes and squeaks of the moving objects. I'm coming to this from a New Music perspective, so my frame of reference here is more Mikrophonie than Child of Tree, but one could just as easily go down the route of reading Hurricane Season through the more experimental tradition of allotting objects an aural agency which might be overlooked otherwise.