Dear Soil - Climate Week North East Music Commission

Dear Soil – Climate Week North East Music Commission

What would you say to the ground beneath your feet? Two composers, selected by Aberdeen Performing Arts through an open public call, present new works born from an extraordinary archive of love letters written to the soil: tender, worried, grateful, and alive. An evening of original music that listens downward, into the earth. 

The selected composers are Jessica Kerr and Dorian Cloudsley. 

Jessica Kerr is a cellist whose nature-connected practice explores our relationship with the more-than-human world, drawing on projects like Stories of People and Trees and residencies embedded in Scotland’s rainforests and seagrass meadows. For Dear Soil, she has created a new work for cello with live and recorded sounds from the land, reflecting on our entangled relationship with soil, and asking how the soil, in turn, experiences us through sound. 

Dorian Cloudsley is a Scottish composer, guitarist and producer based in Glasgow, whose music combines guitar, strings, electronics and field recordings to create layered instrumental works shaped by place and the natural world. For Dear Soil, he has created a new work for guitar, strings and electronics in response to the archive itself, a chorus of voices ranging from memory and gratitude to concern and belonging. Rather than illustrating individual letters, the piece unfolds through slowly evolving textures that reflect the emotional landscape the letters create together. 

Jessica Kerr is a cellist with a nature connected creative practice.  Happiest when sharing music amongst the trees, Jessica’s work focuses on creating and performing music that explores and communicates our relationship with the more-than-human world, and draws audiences out into nature by musical invitation. 

 As creator of Stories of People and Trees, Jessica travelled Scotland collecting personal stories of our human connections to trees, and commissioned and recorded seven new works for string quartet and solo cello inspired by these stories and the trees within them.  This led to further work in close collaboration with nature, and Jessica was commissioned as composer and artist in residence by Cove Park and the Argyll Rainforest Community Network; creating new music with temperate rainforest communities and performing in bird hides, yurts and ancient oak groves.  2026 sees a new musical collaboration with the seagrass meadows of Loch Craignish and the communities of life around them. 

 Jessica is cellist with string quartet Glisk, and a member of the cross genre GRIT Orchestra, sustaining the musical legacy of ground breaking late Scottish composer Martyn Bennett.  In 2025 Jessica toured as musician in residence with Illuminate Womens Music, premiering a programme of new works on a theme of land and legend for cello and voice alongside soprano Stephanie Lamprea.  Cellist for Small Acts of Love, the acclaimed 2025 production by Frances Poet and Ricky Ross that re-opened the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, Jessica is also cellist for the Tandem Writing Collective.  As an orchestral cellist Jessica has performed with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Royal Northern Sinfonia and the Halle, performing at the BBC Proms, the Edinburgh International Festival and around Europe and China.  Alongside her performing work, Jessica is a longstanding senior musician at Big Noise Govanhill. 

Dorian Cloudsley is a Scottish composer, guitarist and producer based in Glasgow. His music combines guitar, strings, electronics and field recordings to create layered instrumental works shaped by place and the natural world, drawing on ambient and contemporary classical influences. 

His debut solo EP, Lapse, explores the relationship between landscape and memory through field recordings gathered in places of personal significance. Alongside his solo work, he composes and produces music for artists, film, television and live performance.