CLAIRE M SINGER is a Scottish composer and performer working across acoustic and electronic music, as well as film and installation. Her four critically acclaimed releases on Touch feature Singer playing both organ and cello, with her 2025 album “Gleann Ciùin” also featuring the London Contemporary Orchestra. The Guardian describes her music as “building from mournful softness to celestial maximalism,” while MOJO refers to her as a “pipe organ drone maestra” who evokes “the folk music of the spheres.” Performances include Glasgow Cathedral, Tate Modern London, Westerkerk in Amsterdam (where she opened for the band Low), and the Barbican in London (opening for Stars of the Lid). Her solo organ piece, “The Molendinar,” was featured in The New York Times’ “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Organ.”
Awards include the Oram Award in 2017 for her innovation in sound and music and the Festival Castell de Peralada Award for best film score in 2019 (“Tell It To The Bees”). In 2020 her work “Gleann Ciùin” was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award. Recent projects include music for choreographer Robert Binet’s new ballet ‘Dances For The Future’ for the Vienna State Ballet Academy, which premiered at NEST in October 2025.
In a collaboration initiated by Unsafe+Sounds and the concert series “Organ in Focus” of Austrian public radio oe1, Fennesz meets the Scottish film composer, organist and cellist CLAIRE M SINGER. Both Singer and Fennesz release on the influential label Touch. Both draw inspiration from nature and landscape, and are able to create an extraordinary atmospheric density and emotional depth. Singer coaxes rich harmonic textures and complex overtone structures from the organ, continuously generating new melodic patterns and subtle rhythmic pulses. Her minimalism is at once sensitive and sublime.
Claire M Singer & Christian Fennesz will perform both, solo and live as a duo at ORF RadioKulturhaus.