PROJECTS

Roads to Then is Sorana Santos’s sustained research into Joni Mitchell’s Hejira. Beginning with her recreation of the 4,200-mile road trip on which the album was largely conceived, Sorana retraced Mitchell’s journey across the United States - including visits to its key landmarks, such as a now-closed Staten Island guitar shop - and reconstructed other formative events surrounding the work’s creation.

At the heart of the project lies an analysis of the symbology woven through Hejira’s lyrics and music, alongside Sorana’s musical response: a reimagining of the album presented as a collage work featuring fragments from the Great American Songbook, contemporary composers such as Adams and Cage, and echoes of 1990s activist movements.

In this work Sorana not only demystifies Mitchell’s metaphysical imagery, but also draws out resonant contemporary themes. In particular, she illuminates the parallel experiences of women travelling solo, and opens conversations around trauma, addiction, and equality within both the artistic and broader cultural landscape.

This work premiered for Poet in the City’s ‘Rules To Live By’ at Wilton’s Music Hall, with additional performances at The Vortex, Oxford Contemporary Music, & Pizza Express Soho, and remains ongoing.

Nightwriter is a multimedia sonic/literary work reflecting on the nature of ‘electronic intimacy’ and the balance between privacy and connection in voice memos. This work invites listeners into a world of sketches of musical ideas, nighttime experiments, and incidental environmental sounds.

The resulting work was created under self-imposed constraints based on Swansongs’ challenge to write and record an EP in two weeks. Building on this, each EP was written, recorded, and designed on location in 48 hours using only an iphone’s built-in apps, drawing on Sorana’s former publications for Lazy Gramophone Press and her abstract photography as source material.

Song-Poems was presented at The Vortex (Downstairs) as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival. Scored for a small band, the project marked the culmination of Sorana’s decade-long research into poemas cantadas within Portuguese Fado, exploring the interconnectedness of poetry and song. The programme featured original arrangements of texts by e.e. cummings, John Keats, & W. B. Yeats, alongside a selection of Sorana’s own compositions. Interlacing the lyrical traditions of Fado with contemporary jazz, the performance traced the musicality of poetic form and its capacity to transform across genres and cultures. Although its first chapter was cut short during the COVID-19 pandemic, the project is expected to continue in future iterations.

Our Lady of Stars is a multimedia project comprising an album, audiobook, and book of poetry and scores, which explores the shared written and aural syntaxes of music and language. Released independently on Sorana’s I Dream Sound imprint in collaboration with Nova/Universal and Lazy Gramophone Press, the work toured nationally with support from Arts Council England and was nominated for an Ivots British Composer Award. The album features Joe Wright (saxophone/electronics), Alex Bonney (trumpet/cornet), James Maddren (drums), and The Ligeti Quartet.

Books of Hours and Changes is the audiobook component of the British Composer Award–nominated Our Lady of Stars / Books of Hours and Changes. Combining an album with a collection of poetry and scores, the work stages a correspondence between a young woman and a silent counterpart through letters and verse. Employing contemporary compositional structures, it plays with muso-poetic structure and interrogates the boundaries between fate and free will.

Swansongs emerged from a challenge to write and record an EP within two weeks using only a single microphone. At the time engaged in dream analysis, Swansongs translated recently interpreted dreams into song, with the artwork itself echoing an analysed dream. Musically, the project marked the beginning of the sonic palette later developed in Our Lady of Stars, while drawing on the blues and soul–inflected topline writing she had been crafting for other artists.

Pawnography, written and directed by Tracy Keeling during her tenure as Writer-in-Residence at The Rose Theatre, Southbank, premiered in the summer of 2010 and went on to receive the Fringe Award for Best Play. Commissioned as music that could be sung by actors, function as incidental music, and also exist as a standalone suite, the response is an EP that mirrors the script’s ‘detuned’ quality. Employing out-of-tune keyboard instruments - piano, prepared piano, and harmonium - Sorana created sonic textures that shaped and destabilised the vocal delivery, offering a conceptual parallel to the play’s narrative dissonances.