Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres

Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres is an award-winning film composer and multi-instrumentalist.  Her critically-acclaimed music focuses on storytelling, blending recorded sound worlds into a rich palette of electronica and classical music, and is described by BBC Radio 6 Mary Anne Hobbs as “hauntingly beautiful”.

She won Best Original Feature Film Score in the Music and Sound Awards for BAFTA Scotland-winning duo Melt the Fly’s Long Live My Happy Head, celebrated by Mark Kermode as an “evocative score” in Empire Magazine, working with MRI machine sounds and Her Ensemble on strings.  Her most recent feature score for BAFTA Breakthrough Paul Sng’s BIFA- Longlisted TISH, the opening gala film of Sheffield DocFest 2023, was celebrated in Screen Daily as “particularly well used throughout, chiming with memories of experiences” and said to be “worth a second listen” by Mark Kermode.  Other film score credits include her score for The Oil Machine by BAFTA Scotland-winning director Emma Davie, using archive recordings of an oil rig being deconstructed.

In 2020 Hamilton-Ayres’ bold debut album ‘2 Years Stranger’ was reviewed by The Guardian as “devastatingly emotional”.  Hamilton-Ayres’ striking second album ‘Play Echoes’ released in winter 2022, was reviewed by CLASH as “spacious and dynamic” and described by Uncut magazine as “arresting compositions that fuse classical instrumentation with electronica”.  The album was largely recorded over two weeks at Leiter’s Studio in Berlin’s Funkhaus complex.  It is performed by Hamilton-Ayres and Her Ensemble and is released on LEITER founded by Nils Frahm and his manager Felix Grimm.  Alexandra is currently working on her third solo album for release in 2024.

In her last collaboration project with Her Ensemble, commissioned by DONNE UK, Hamilton-Ayres performed the premiere of Next Chapter as part of the Steinway Series at the Royal Albert Hall, alongside soprano Gabriella Di Laccio.