Playback 0026 2026 in New York – Bar Laika

What is Playback 0026?

Join us at Bar Laika on Wednesday, February 11 from 6pm for the twenty-sixth edition of Playback with Isobel Waller-Bridge. Isobel Waller-Bridge is an award-winning composer known for her scores for film, television, ballet, and theatre, alongside her work in electronic and contemporary classical music. She works in a wide range of genres, extending across large-scale orchestral music, electronic sound design, experimental music, and songwriting. Her newest album Objects released in December 2025. Written over four years in the rare quiet moments her career allowed, Objects draws from the philosophies of Pauline Oliveros and the experimental radicalism of Stockhausen. Mining sounds from her surroundings and filtering them through minimalism and musique concrète, Waller-Bridge finds music within everyday materials — a ball, a shoe, a cushion, a pane of glass — each becoming a conduit for tenderness and attention. It has been praised by NPR for being "full of soft, patient, beautiful, still instrumentals" and by KCRW for its "personal, mysterious response to the world around us." Isobel has scored a multitude of films, including Munich: The Edge of War, Emma, Wicked Little Letters, and the BAFTA-winning and Oscar-nominated The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse. Her television scores include Fleabag, Black Mirror, and Sweetpea. Her commissions include original work for the American Ballet Theatre for their new production of Crime and Punishment, alongside Temperatures for the Philharmonia Orchestra, which premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in 2021. She has collaborated with Alexander McQueen and Simone Rocha, scored installations at Frieze London and Venice Biennale, and partnered with the Royal Opera House's Francesca Hayward. Playback is a series of informal listening events curated by Kamran Sadeghi where record labels, musicians, composers, and producers feature recordings from their catalog, and premiere album pre-releases, archives, and other rarities.

Who is playing at Playback 0026?