Born in 1992, Sylvia Lim is a Malaysian Australian composer who spent equal times growing up in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia and in Sydney, Australia. She says that at school her music was mostly influenced by musical theatre and Australian contemporary choral music, before she moved to London to study composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama after finishing school. She completed her PhD entitled 'Exploring organic decay through sound' at Guildhall, where she is now a Professor of Composition, and a research Fellow. She also teaches composition at The Purcell School.

The very first album to feature Lim was NMS Presents: Lockdown Listening (One Glass Eye Records, 2020), a compilation of works by composers and performers from the Guildhall, issued to raise money for the charity Help Musicians UK. It was followed in 2022 by Sounds which grow richer as they decay (Sawyer Editions), a collection of her solo and chamber works from 2016-2020. Five Uncertain Situations (2023) comprised pieces commissioned by Prague Quiet Music Collective in response to five artworks from the Prague City Gallery. Also released in 2023, As Our Hands Move was a constellation of original compositions, field-recordings, spoken text, arranged folk tunes and interpretations of verbal and text scores... played by Breakfast Club, a quartet of flutes, records/voice and cello.

Impressive as Lim's previous recordings were, those on Flare are at the front of the field when all her compositions are considered. The album Flare opens with "Shadowfields" (2025) which features Kerry Young on piano, Simon Limbrick on vibes, Mira Benjamin on violin, Michelle Hromin on clarinet and Natasha Zielazinski on cello. This was studio-recorded by Simon Reynell at Goldsmiths Recording Studios, London, in January 2026, as was "Grafting" which also featured Benjamin on violin alongside Heather Roche on bass clarinet and Zielazinski again on cello. Other Lim pieces which were recorded further afield for this album include "Flare" which was played solo by pianist Ben Smith and recorded by Simone Tarsitani at Durham University in June 2021 and — closing the album in style with ten parts of "Field of Play" that date back to 2024-25. Having heard Flare several times from start to finish, there is only one question to ask — "when will Sylvia Lim be releasing her next Another Timbre album..."