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| Anna Blom & Alex Mills: Reverence – Brompton Cemetery Chapel |
Alex Mills is a composer for whom music and the visual arts are intertwined. Earlier this year, alongside his debut album Look How Brightly, he co-curated an exhibition with 22 artists responding to the music [see my article].
This weekend (3-4 October 2026) he and artist Anna Blom presented an installation, Reverence in the Chapel at Brompton Cemetery.
Reverence brought together four of Blom’s large-scale paintings alongside Mills’ generative sound installation. The whole intended to evoke our connection to the natural world, something that we easily overlook. Blom’s paintings were created outdoors using raw pigments and Blom’s process allows traces of the forest itself to become part of the work. Each image was striking in its own right, but placed in an arc in the centre of the chapel they made a compelling assemblage.
Around them Mills’ sound installation breathed. Mills’ starting point was the breath. He and cellist Clare O’Connell recorded some five or six hundred fragments of O’Connell’s cello playing, creating a sense of the instrument inhaling and exhaling. Alongside these Mills used samples of recorded bells and chimes plus a synthesized organ. These samples were brought together by software so that the music was constantly changing and never the same. Mills had worked on the piece so that it used pitches and harmonies that he liked, but the exact combination at any one time was up to chance.
Mills has used chance before in his pieces, but this is the first time he has used it in combination with technology. The piece was almost a living breathing thing, and if he had introduced new pitches, new samples onto his laptop the software would absorb them and change things.
The resulting sound world filled the chapel and created a sense of something inhaling and exhaling, a slow symphonic feel that built and died, constantly changing yet always within the same parameters. There was a slowness to the result that made you, almost compelled you to sit and absorb (and yes, the chapel does have seats!) The whole had a remarkably sustained and compelling sense of atmosphere.
On the Saturday, Clare O’Connell came and gave a live performance where she improvised over the sound installation which was using her material but strung together in an order she did not recognise. An intriguing multilayering of concepts. And on Sunday morning there was a breath workshop.
Brompton Cemetery is one of the Magnificent Seven cemeteries established in the 19th century to alleviate overcrowding in existing parish burial grounds as London’s population grew. Unlike the others, Brompton was very flat, and the architect Benjamin Bauda was brought in to create the domed circular chapel and colonnades designed to evoke St Peter’s in Rome.
