My brother Francis composed Urdance — 'a ballet of the mind' — and never recorded it. After he died, I found the score in a mouse-eaten bag in his garage. This is the thread where I chart the attempt to bring the work back to life, and where I keep running into the real difficulty: how do you collaborate with the dead? It's the most personal thing here, and the least resolved.
While clearing my late brother Francis's chaotic house, I hunted for any surviving trace of Urdance — a 1987 synthesiser-and-orchestra work, never studio-recorded, that the two had discussed resurrecting together. Part eulogy, part detective story, this opens a series on reviving the piece, and on the strange question at its heart: how do you collaborate with the dead?
Reviving Urdance was never going to be a simple matter of interpretation. Drawing on Francis's own words about the piece's unfinished, ever-shifting nature, I weigh the creative licence he left me against the practical void of time and budget — and the daunting task of turning a hand-written score into something living and breathing. It's a story of digital transcription, generous collaborators, and the question of whether samples can ever sound truly alive.
The breakthrough on Urdance came from an unlikely source: Jack Wingad, a sound editor at our post-production house who, never having known Francis, took on the piece between jobs. In this post I let Jack describe his own approach, and reflect on what it means to honour Francis's 'no barriers' spirit — through Nick Cave's idea of vulnerability — by being brave enough to break the work creatively rather than slavishly second-guess a dead composer's intentions.
Twenty years ago a collaboration with Phoenix Dance Theatre changed the course of my life, setting me on a path through interactive art and into founding ViridianFX. Last Thursday I returned to their company for a motion-capture session — and the music was Urdance, my late brother's experimental 1987 work, reborn for the launch of CoStar Live Lab. Here I trace the echoes across time that brought me back to where I began.
Last week Urdance took its first public step back into the world in decades, performed at the CoSTAR LiveLab launch with live dancers, their motion-capture avatars, and a 28-speaker ambisonic mix. This is my reflection on a deliberately unfinished first outing — exhilarating, imperfect, and revealing — and on what it taught me about where my late brother's living composition might go next.