A shared encounter between contemporary music & art: Alex Mills's debut album Look How Brightly has a physical manifestation as an exhibition

Susan Rocklin: Realm - featured in Look How Brightly at Apsara Studio

Composer Alex Mills's Look How Brightly is his debut album on Delphian, presenting a body of work shaped over a decade, bringing together ten of his most personal and uncompromising pieces performed by CHROMA and contralto Jess Dandy. But it isn't just an album.

From 4 to 20 June, Alex Mills has co-curated a linking exhibition Look How Brightly. Described as 'shared encounter between contemporary music and art' the exhibition is co-curated by Jenn Ellis and is being presented by Aspara Studio in London.

Look How Brightly reimagines the album launch as a site of encounter, contemplation, and intimate exchange between contemporary music and art. The exhibition brings together work by 22 international artists that unpack the emotional and conceptual world of Mills’ album. 

Central to Mills’s body of work is a preoccupation with unison and fragmentation: musical lines that move together, unravel, fall apart, transform, and reintegrate. Drawing on influences as diverse as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, trauma studies, psychological theories, and grieving rituals, Mills likens these musical processes to the cyclical and bittersweet nature of human experience — how we continually break down, transform, and regather ourselves as we negotiate the many different parts of who we are.  

In the exhibition, artworks form a “visual orchestra”, each artist contributing a distinct expression to a larger emotional whole. Throughout the space, a balance of paintings and sculpture explore themes ranging from embodiment, grief, and transformation to time, memory and the natural world, tracing the fragile balance between fragmentation and reintegration, control and surrender, presence and disappearance. These works are held together by the music from Mills’s album as it permeates the space — itself fragmented, reimagined, and further “worked through” in a special presentation created uniquely for the exhibition and heard with vivid clarity on equipment supplied by legendary hi-fi specialists, Audio Gold. 

The exhibition is being held within Pink Floyd’s former Britannia Row recording studios and production warehouse in Islington.

Look How Brightly streaming details, on Delphian, exhibition at Apsara Studio.