BIOGRAPHY

Photo by Fred Thomas

Lara Agar is a London-based composer and performer, whose music blends electronic soundscapes and sampled material with acoustic instruments.

Described as “crackling like static” (The Times), her music thrives in abstraction, often embracing indeterminacy and vocality whilst allowing for a messiness and quiet chaos. She has worked with several artists and musicians forming close and ongoing collaborative relationships across dance, visual arts and film, with interests in the accidental, the found and not knowing. Lara released her debut EP Solstice with October House Records 2023, and was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award in 2022 for This Unquiet Autumn.

Recent performers and collaborators who have played Lara’s music include Explore Ensemble, the London Symphony Orchestra, Juliet Fraser + Mark Knoop, the Plus-Minus Ensemble and Quatuor Bozzini.

Her music has been played on BBC Radio 3 Night Tracks and New Music Show, NTS and Noods radio, as well as in venues such as the Wigmore Hall, the Barbican, Milton Court, Sadler’s Wells, Iklectik, and many more DIY and grassroots venues throughout the UK and Europe, including Music We’d Like to Hear (London), Oxford Leider (Oxford), Festival of Laurence Crane (London), New Music Northwest (Manchester) and the Freedom of Movement Festival (London).

Lara is a frequent collaborator in cross-discipline art, most notably dance, working with choreographer Anthony Matsena on several projects since 2017, including Shades of Blue (commissioned by Dance East and Sadler's Wells) which received four star reviews from both the Guardian and the Financial Times, and features in the BAFTA winning BBC 4 Documentary 'Brothers in Dance’ as well as BBC Dancing Nation.

In 2023, she founded the Tantrum Experimental Music Series for raw and unfinished contemporary music making, creating a space to explore new material, ideas and formats before bringing them to more formal settings.

Lara held a Junior Fellowship at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 2019-20, following an Artist Master’s degree in composition. There, she studied with Paul Newland, Cassandra Miller and Laurence Crane.




© Lara Agar 2025