About
Northern Lights Project is a music organisation and registered charity, founded in 2016 by composer Peter O’Doherty.
The organisation creates, produces and promotes cutting-edge new music and adventurous interdisciplinary arts events, developing innovative approaches to presentation with performances, workshops, and concerts.
Most recently in 2019 and 2020 we organised a series of monthly sound, music and performance events in Derry which featured artists, composers and performance artists from Ireland, with support from Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Esme Mitchell Trust entitled “re:sonance #1”. These events included work by artists in the field of performance art whose brief was to create new work that explores and makes extensive use of sound. Edinburgh-based Emma Smith presented her “Bitches Brew” event, with several evenings of music written, improvised and performed by women musicians. The final component of this series were events by Northern Irish electronic and experimental sound artists and performers, including Derry-based Edy Fung and Belfast-based Una Lee.
Alongside a regular concert programme in Derry, the organisation commissions and produces new work. Past commissions and projects include Sasquatch, a multilingual, music theatre production with texts by the Irish poet Gabriel Rosenstock. In early 2020 we delivered a major commissioning project, with support from Arts Council of Northern Ireland entitled “The need for blame”, a 60 minute work for double bass, live percussion, electronics and video by Emma Smith and Philip Hague. This work was performed in 4 venues across Northern Ireland and Scotland.
For 2022 we are currently planning a series of three events in March, April and May, with each performance repeated in Derry, Belfast, Letterkenny and Dublin.