HELEN ANAHITA WILSON

Helen Anahita Wilson FRSA is a practice-based doctoral researcher at SOAS University of London and an award-winning composer, sound artist, pianist, and improviser. She is an alumna of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, University of Sussex, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and SOAS. 

Helen’s compositional practice brings together her research in South Asian musics, especially Karnatak rhythmic theories, with experiments in sonic life writing: how to share biographical stories through sound. Questions about how stories can be told through rhythm and how better understandings of our bodies can be generated through sound are central to her work. 

Her duo with tabla player Shahbaz Hussain is set to release a third album in 2024, building on the critical success of their first two releases on Golden Girl records and New Jazz and Improvised Music Recordings. Their 2019 album DIWAN featured in numerous top 50 jazz albums of the year and Helen was subsequently named one of five international female jazz artists to make their mark globally by Mexico’s Gatopardo magazine.

Her recent commissions include a series of electronic and archive-based works as part of her role as Heritage Sound Artist for Brighton Dome & Festival 2022/3, an extended work for repurposed and rewired hospital equipment for Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival - hcmf// 2022, and a long form composition with film exploring geometric connections between Tantric cosmograms and the South Asian vocal artform of konnakol for Bloomsbury Festival 2020. 

Helen has performed at venues including London’s Southbank centre (Purcell Room) and St Paul’s Cathedral (as musician-in-residence), and has toured extensively throughout Europe and India, including at major festivals. Alongside performing her own works, she is a regular commissioner of new music by fellow contemporary composers and she also presents the global classical and art music show, Stereophonica, on Repeater Radio. She is currently working on two “composed documentaries” for radio exploring sonic understandings of the body and is writing a book about corporeal acoustemology. Her forthcoming release, linea naturalis, will be featured on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in November.

She has been supported by Arts Council England, the Fund for Women Graduates, Help Musicians UK, and has recently been awarded the Francis Chagrin Composer Award by Sound and Music UK and a Thurston Dart Research Grant by the Royal Musical Association.

Helen has recently collaborated with Shahbaz Hussain, Talvin Singh OBE, Prathap Ramachandra, Debashish Bhattacharya, the Mysore Brothers, and visual artist Lisa Creagh. Upcoming projects include the launch of Corpora Collective in 2024, a composers’ collective exploring understandings of the body through music and sonic arts, and the release of ‘Sound of Harris,’ an EP of songs and field recordings from the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. 

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