Sound and Music and the British Council present Transmutations – the landmark project from the inaugural cohort of the New Music Commissioning Programme. This radically inventive international collaboration unites six visionary composers across three continents, weaving new works that explore how sound carries memory, identity and radical transformation.
Don’t miss the special Transmutations edition of The Sampler Mixtape premiering on Resonance FM Friday 30 January 2026 at 12pm (noon) – also available on our Mixcloud and as a streamable/purchasable EP later this year.
The New Music Commissioning Programme 2025–26
The New Music Commissioning Programme 2025–26 is a groundbreaking partnership between Sound and Music and the British Council, delivered as part of the British Council’s Culture Connects Programme. This pioneering initiative pairs three UK-based music creators with three peers based in Official Development Assistance (ODA) countries to collaboratively compose bold new work for radio that responds to our shared human experience.
Building on our earlier Digital Bridge collaboration with the British Council in Mexico in 2022, the programme creates unprecedented space for artist development, coaching, co-creation and broadcast opportunities across experimental radio and digital platforms in all partner countries. It removes barriers to international collaboration by championing process as much as outcomes, making room for risk, vulnerability and cross-cultural alchemy.
There was overwhelming interest in the open call, with 270 applications from creators worldwide. From this global field, six artists were selected for the inaugural pilot cohort: Yantó (Brazil), María Gabriela Rubio Hernández (Colombia), Fahmi Mursyid (Indonesia), and UK-based composers Tony Onuchukwu, RIEKO and Yasmin Rai.
Introducing “Transmutations”
“Transmutations” Cover art © New Music Commissioning Programme 2025-26
Transmutations is the electrifying collective title for the three new 10–15 minute works co-commissioned for radio from this landmark first cohort, accompanied by a stunning text-and-image publication that serves as your guide to the listening experience. Conceived as an “international mixtape, publication and visuals,” it fuses sound, archive, infrastructure and protocol into an “alchemical offering” oriented toward personal and relational transformation.
The works were developed entirely online, with the artists collaborating across time zones, languages and cultural contexts from the UK, Brazil, Colombia, Iceland and Indonesia. Throughout the process, our Creative Programme Leaders facilitated support sessions and group workshops, helping the cohort build trust, experiment fearlessly and reflect together as the commissions evolved into something extraordinary.
The partnership pairs and their works
RIEKO & María Gabriela Rubio Hernández – Ao
RIEKO, the Japanese-born neo-ritualist composer based between Margate and London, pairs with María Gabriela Rubio Hernández, the Colombian-Icelandic interdisciplinary artist working across electroacoustic music and sound art. Their collaboration “Ao” takes its name from a Japanese word that historically encompassed both blue and green, reflecting a time before those colours were culturally separated.
The work weaves together two deeply personal folk songs that shaped the artists’ childhoods—Colombian song “Canción de las Esmeraldas” and Japanese song “Akai Kutsu”—as entry points into profound questions of displacement, memory, national identity and belonging. Both artists were in personal transition during the commission, with María leaving Colombia for Iceland and RIEKO relocating from London to Margate.
© María Gabriela Rubio Hernández
“Working with my partner made me rethink what listening means. It’s not just hearing sound — it’s hearing someone else’s world.”
Recorded material ranges from Colombian rainforest and birdsong to lo-fi phone recordings of rural Japanese temples and the crashing ocean waves outside RIEKO’s Margate flat, all layered with voice and experimental electronics to create a cinematic sonic meditation on leaving, return, and the shifting colours of home.
© RIEKO
“It’s almost like the outcome isn’t just the work — it’s the friendship we built through it.”
– RIEKO
Fahmi Mursyid & Yasmin Rai – Interim Waktu
Bandung-based experimental electronic artist Fahmi Mursyid joins forces with London-based composer and AV installation artist Yasmin Rai for “Interim Waktu”, an ambitious eleven-movement work that spans microtonal instrumental writing, modular synthesis, field recordings and glitch textures. Their process established a weekly rhythm of independent creation followed by collaborative review, generating an extended body of work they envision extending beyond radio into physical releases and installations.
© Yasmin Rai
“This collaboration reminded me what freedom in music can feel like again.”
The pair obsessively explores thresholds between organic and digital sound—fingers on wood and strings, sympathetic resonance, bodily noise—alongside metallic, overtly electronic timbres that emerge even before digital processing. Drawing from biomimicry, randomness and chaos theory, they translate natural systems like plant growth patterns, ecological interactions and astronomical dynamics into evolving, generative musical structures.
© Fahmi Mursyid
“I never thought I could connect this deeply with someone across the world through sound — it felt like speaking a new shared language.”
Tony Onuchukwu & Yantó – Waters of Memory
British-Nigerian composer and sound designer Tony Onuchukwu collaborates with São Paulo-based singer-composer Yantó on “Waters of Memory”, a profound work tracing the ocean as both healer and witness to ancestral journeys, colonial histories, environmental crisis and diasporic futures. The piece confronts the sea as a “container of ancestral history,” carrying memories of transatlantic crossings alongside contemporary routes of exchange and migration.
© Yantó
“What I loved most was how different our backgrounds are — yet we found a shared rhythm that felt effortless.”
– Yantó
Their process emphasised trust-building through regular check-ins that extended beyond the project itself, creating space for vulnerability and genuine inquiry rather than fixed outcomes. Musically, they merge Nigerian, Brazilian and UK sound worlds through voice, electronic production and acoustic textures, forging a fluid, atmospheric language that foregrounds storytelling and emotional resonance rooted in healing traditions from multiple cultures.
© Tony Onuchukwu
“It’s rare that a programme feels both ambitious and emotionally safe. This one did.”
Tune in: Transmutations on Resonance FM & online
The three new works—Ao, Interim Waktu and Waters of Memory—will premiere together in Transmutations, a special edition of The Sampler Mixtape on Resonance FM on Friday 30 January 2026 at 12pm. Listeners can tune in live via Resonance’s FM and DAB broadcasts in London or worldwide via the station’s online stream.
After the premiere, the Transmutations edition of the mixtape will be available to listen on demand on Mixcloud and as an EP later this year.
Vanessa Maria’s reflections on the 2025 British Council x Sound and Music Commission
NMCP 25-26: Sound and Music and British Council partnership announcement
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