CL☺︎UDBURST

CL☺︎UDBURST is constructed around a triptych of intertextual sources: my own poem, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cloud, and the Eucharistic hymn O Salutaris Hostia. My text acts as a contemporary hinge between Shelley’s Romantic pantheism and the hymn’s sacramental theology, reframing both within a post-digital landscape of technocratic and authoritarian divinity. Where Shelley’s cloud embodies natural transformation and the hymn sings to transubstantiation, CL☺︎UDBURST reimagines these processes as ones of commodification and control. The “fresh showers for the thirsting flowers” of Shelley’s cloud dissolve here into the white noise of television static. Musically, the work operates through aesthetics of failure, glitch, and hauntology, aligning sonic texture with the instability of meaning. Rain and static, transubstantiation and commodification - these homophonic pairings underpin the piece’s semiotic flux. Fragments of O Salutaris Hostia haunt the piece echoed in harmonics, and the perfect-fifth drone harks to organum, all while sanctus bells ring out from behind the nut. The optional post-digital coda functions as a timbral "becoming" in which prior material is recast through processes of distortion, memory, and technological remediation. Its very optionality sustains a dialectic of potentiality (real and withheld) holding the work in a state of suspension between organic origin and synthetic afterimage.

Premiered and recorded in the Holywell Music Room, Oxford, December 2025.