ABOUT ALEXANDRA

Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres is an award-winning film composer and multi-instrumentalist. Her critically-acclaimed music, with a focus on telling stories, blends recorded sound worlds orchestrated into a rich palette of electronica and classical music, described by BBC Radio 6 Mary Anne Hobbs as “hauntingly beautiful”.

She won Best Original Feature Film Score in the Music and Sound Awards for BAFTA Scotland-winning duo Melt The Fly celebrated by Mark Kermode as an “evocative score” in Empire Magazine, working with MRI machine sounds and Her Ensemble on strings. Her most recent feature score for BAFTA Breakthrough Paul Sng’s BIFA- Longlisted TISH, the opening gala film of Sheffield DocFest 23, was celebrated in Screen Daily as “particularly well used throughout, chiming with memories of experiences” and said to be “worth a second listen” by Mark Kermode. Other film score credits include her score for The Oil Machine by BAFTA Scotland-winning director Emma Davie, using archive recordings of an oil rig being deconstructed.

In 2020 Hamilton-Ayres’ bold debut album 2 Years Stranger was reviewed by The Guardian as “devastatingly emotional”. Hamilton-Ayres’ striking second album Play Echoes released in winter 2022, was reviewed by CLASH as “spacious and dynamic” and described by Uncut magazine as “arresting compositions that fuse classical instrumentation with electronica”. The album was largely recorded over two weeks at Leiter’s Studio in Berlin’s Funkhaus complex. It is performed by Hamilton-Ayres and Her Ensemble and is released on LEITER founded by Nils Frahm and his manager Felix Grimm.

In her last collaboration project with Her Ensemble, commissioned by DONNE UK, Hamilton-Ayres performed the premiere of Next Chapter as part of the Steinway Series at the Royal Albert Hall alongside soprano Gabriella Di Laccio.

Hamilton-Ayres has released collaboratively with multiple labels including Piano & Coffee Records, Ninja Tune, One Little Independent, PIAS and Icelandic new classical label INNI founded by film composer Atli Örvarsson. As a “BBC Radio Three favourite” she sees merging her film scores and artist work as fundamental to her love of combining sound worlds and story-telling through music. For Pianoday 22 and 23 she performed at The Barbican alongside film composers and artists such as Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, Poppy Ackroyd, Avawaves and Neil Cowley. She has performed alongside artists such as iconic DJ and producer TSHA, electronic artist Throwing Snow and Talvin Singh OBE and studied continuous piano techniques with Lubomyr Melnyk. Her love of collaboration has also led to projects with artists such as violinist and composer Anna Phoebe on film score Until We Touch and singer, electronic rock-sitarist, composer BISHI on an AV Installation Reflektions. Alexandra is known for reworking other artists tracks including a rework for Vanbur releasing on Human Reworked alongside Mogwai and Katie Gately and Hector Plimmer’s Next to Nothing - remixed alongside artists such as Matthew Herbert. Her first collaboration EP Ciara released at the end of 2021 with producing artist and songwriter Mara Simpson. Her latest rework with James Heather, sees her blending her live work with film composer and violinist Alexander Parsons on Ninjatune.