Akaihirume is a young Japanese singer whose ear is always tuned to the world’s sounds, which she keeps as materials in her shell. As both an original songwriter and an improviser she has worked with a variety of artists, musicians, action-painters, photographers and more. Recent collaborators include Simon Fisher Turner, Joke Lanz, Akiko Nakayama and Carl Stone. First classically trained, then took a stint as a rock drummer in several Japanese garage bands. She began her career as a singer/songwriter in 2012. Her singing has been used in the soundtrack for the film Dies Irae by Eori Wakakuwa, and is also featured in Songs For A Thousand Duets, part of the, the sound installation by Duncan Speakman & Sarah Anderson as part of the Saitama Trienniale 2016.
Andrew Weathers (b.1988) is a composer and improviser originally from Chapel Hill, NC currently based in Littlefield, TX where he is engaged in a long-term project to renovate a storefront downtown. His music engages with notions of place, tradition, repetition, and spirit, taking cues from folk, experimental, and punk lineages. He studied composition at UNC-Greensboro and electronic music at Mills College in Oakland, CA. His work is focused on world-building, using art as a vehicle to create the world we want from what we have. Weathers primarily performs and records solo and heads up the utopic chamber-folk group Andrew Weathers Ensemble. He also works regularly with Tethers, Real Life Rock & Roll Band, Satin Spar, and Common Eider, King Eider, among others. Over the past decade of intense activity, Weathers has collaborated or studied with numerous figures of experimental music including Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, Tatsuya Nakatani, Eugene Chadbourne and many others. In addition to maintaining a busy performance and recording schedule, Weathers helps run Full Spectrum Records, a boutique label founded in 2008 focusing on limited editions of interesting work from the underground. He is also a producer at Other Minds Records in San Francisco, working to release new and archival works by luminaries of New Music. Weathers additionally works as a freelance mixing and mastering engineer out of his West Texas studio, Wind Tide and is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World.
Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music, and has been hailed by the Village Voice as “the king of sampling.” and “one of the best composers living in (the USA) today.” He has used computers in live performance since 1986. Stone was born in Los Angeles and now divides his time between Los Angeles and Japan. He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. His works have been performed in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and the Near East. In addition to his schedule of performance, composition and touring, he is on the faculty of the Department of Media Engineering at Chukyo University in Japan.
A winner of numerous awards for his compositions, including the Freeman Award for the work Hop Ken, Carl Stone is also the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Foundation for Performance Arts. A winner of numerous awards for his compositions, including the Freeman Award for the work Hop Ken, Carl Stone is also the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Foundation for Performance Arts. His 3-LP release “Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties” on the Unseen Worlds label placed #1 in The Wire Magazine’s “Best of 100” 2016 Archival category (the follow up release the next year ranked #3).
Carl Stone served as President of the American Music Center from 1992-95. He was the Director of Meet the Composer/California from 1981-1997, and Music Director of KPFK-fm in Los Angeles from 1978-1981. In 2019, DUBLAB.com reissed a series of radio conversations Stone had on KPFK-fm with Brian Eno, Frank Zappa, Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick, Harold Budd and others. Further activities have included serving as a regular columnist for Sound & Recording Magazine in Japan, serving as web editor for Other Minds, and for the official web site of the John Cage Trust. Recordings of Carl Stone’s music has been released on New Albion, CBS Sony, Toshiba-EMI, EAM Discs, Wizard Records, Trigram, t:me recordings, New Tone/Robi Droli, Unseen World and various other labels.
Casey Koyczan is a Tlicho Dene interdisciplinary artist from Yellowknife, NT, that works with various mediums to communicate how culture and technology coincide together alongside the political, economic, and environmental challenges that we are presented with. A portion of his large scale installation work utilizes earth materials to evoke the idea of nature reclaiming architectural space; returning to its original place of being. Inspired by sci-fi and Indigenous Futurisms, Koyczan implements various techniques of interactivity, audio-video, and the engagement of the bodily senses to raise awareness about a variety of topics within his creations.
His artwork has been shown nationally and internationally, and has participated in many residencies, exhibits, festivals and collaboration projects in parts of the world such as Finland, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, and The Netherlands. He is also a musician, producer, filmmaker, actor, writer, teacher, workshop facilitator, graphic designer, web designer and advocate for future generations of artists and musicians.
Colby Richardson is a media artist and experimental filmmaker currently based in Winnipeg MB, Canada. Driven by a fascination with out-of-date media technologies, and by the way we interact with and value the technology at our disposal, Richardson’s work examines the underused artistic capabilities of devices often unconsidered and dismissed. By utilizing and re-contextualising historic video equipment, everyday software, and ubiquitous electronics, Richardson creates dynamic and textural visual and auditory works, taking the form of; installations, performances, video-sculptures, expanded cinema, and single-channel film and video. His work embraces the potential meditative qualities of abrasive and jarring stimulus, and engages with unusual medium-specificity in a playful, structural, and exploratory manner.
Dona Mayoora aka Donmay Donamayoora is a Bilingual/Visual/Experimental poet living in the USA. Published author in India and Sweden. Ice Cubukal (2012), Neela Moonga (2019) form Insight Publica, India; and Listening To Red (2018), Echoes (2019), Language Lines & Poetry (2020) from Timglaset Editions, Sweden. Creator of Calligraphy Stories, onomatopoetic graphic narrative without text. Visuals were exhibited in Italy, Spain, USA, Poland and Portugal (forthcoming – UK and Canada).
Marja Ahti (b. 1981) is a Swedish-Finnish composer and sound artist based in Turku, Finland. Ahti works with field recordings and other acoustic sound material combined with synthesizers and electronic feedback in order to find the space where these sounds start to communicate. She makes music that rides on waves of slowly warping harmonies and mutating textures – rough edged, yet precise compositions, rich in detail. Ahti has presented her music in many different contexts around Europe, in Japan and the United States. She is currently active in the duo Ahti & Ahti with her partner Niko-Matti Ahti and in the artist/organizer collective Himera.
Martin Tétreault made his debut as a professional artist in 1985, creating the score for the Opéra-Fête theatre company’s production La tentation de Saint-Antoine. This sound collage was well received, and he continued his experimentation with and on vinyl discs and magnetic tape. In 1988, he emerged from his studio to give his first solo performance, Des disques et un couteau. On the advice of composer André Duchesne, he was soon drafted into the collective Ambiances Magnétiques, where he contaminated—and was contaminated by—the likes of Michel F. Côté, René Lussier, Jean Derome, Diane Labrosse and other brilliant Montreal- based improvisers. During the 1990s, his concert and studio performances were recorded by Hélène Prévost and Mario Gauthier, producers with Radio-Canada’s late, lamented Chaîne culturelle network. During the same period, Tétreault encountered distributors and musicians both at home and on his travels, developing fruitful collaborations with the Festival international de musique actuelle de Victoriaville (FIMAV), the London Musical Collective (LMC) (England), the Densités festival (France), Angelica (Italy), Club Transmediale (Germany), Otomo Yoshihide, Xavier Charles, Haco, Kevin Drumm, Ignaz Schick, Michel “Away” Langevin and numerous other stimulating producers and musical bricoleurs.
In the first decade of the 21st century, alongside his frequent travels, he discreetly pursued projects as a visual artist, sanding, scraping, cutting out and erasing printed material. Tétreault refuses to believe in a hierarchy of objects, taking the same pleasure and employing the same rigorous methods whether altering an advertisement for bath towels or a treatise on the history of the visual arts. Between 1998 and 2012, he created the exhibitions 1998, R _ _ G O, Prises de son : couleurs et animées, and Phonographes vinylisés. In 2004, at the request of choreographer Lynda Gaudreau, he developed a system of musical notation and playable surfaces; this then led him to form the Quatuor de tourne-disques (turntable quartet), which has performed concerts and recorded Points, lignes avec haut-parleurs on the ORAL label. His affinities for dance have continued of late, with works created for Ce n’est pas la fin du monde (Sylvain Émard Danse) and Symphonie dramatique (Hélène Blackburn for Cas public).
Olivia Shortt (she/her/hers/they/them/theirs: Anishinaabe from Nipissing First Nation)is a Tkarón:to-based multi-disciplinary performing artist. They are a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, noisemaker, improviser, composer, sound designer, curator, and producer. Many firsts for Olivia include their film debut playing saxophone & acting in Atom Egoyan’s 2019 film Guest of Honour; their Lincoln Center (NYC) debut with the International Contemporary Ensemble; their Australian debut performing with keyboardist Jacob Abela in Melbourne; and recording an album two kilometres underground with their duo Stereoscope in the SnoLAB (a Neutrino Lab in Northern Ontario, Canada).
They were selected as a Metcalf Performing Arts Intern in Producing with Nightswimming and Signal Theatre and were mentored by Brittany Ryan. They have also been named a 2020 cohort member of Why Not Theatre’s ThisGEN Fellowship and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s Emerging Creators Unit. Their most recent works include writing their first string quartet ‘the body remembers’ as part of the JACK Quartet’s inaugural 2020 JACK Studio in NYC, composition and sound design for ‘Welcome To My Underworld’ (Director Judith Thompson in collaboration with Soulpepper), as well as composition and sound design for ‘Brain Storm’ with Lucid Ludic Productions and Why Not Theatre. As an activist, they are alumni of the 2018 cohort of the artEquity facilitator training program (New Orleans, LA), as well as the 2019 Toronto Arts Council’s Leaders Lab and was a lead organizer and co-founded the Toronto Creative Music Lab (TCML).
Phill Niblock is an intermedia artist using music, film, photography, video and computers. He makes thick, loud drones of music, filled with microtones of instrumental timbres which generate many other tones in the performance space. Simultaneously, he presents films / videos which look at the movement of people working, or computer driven black and white abstract images floating through time. He was born in Indiana in 1933. Since the mid-60’s he has been making music and intermedia performances which have been shown at numerous venues around the world. Since 1985, he has been the director of the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York, where he has been an artist/member since 1968. He is the producer of Music and Intermedia presentations at EI since 1973 and the curator of EI’s XI Records label. Phill Niblock’s music is available on the XI, Moikai, Mode and Touch labels. A DVD of films and music is available on the Extreme label. He is a retired professor at The College of Staten Island, the City University of NewYork. In 2014, he is the recipient of the John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Sarah Jo Kirsch (she/they) creates autocollaborative electroacoustic landscapes rooted in behavioural and biological attachments to non-verbal lyrical vocalization and the physical effects/affects of harmonic and timbral consonance/dissonance. Projecting a hyper-versatile vocal spectrum through the lens of digitally-assisted tactile impulse, they explore the relational nature of sound and the ability of the body to listen.
Sarah regularly sings with Winnipeg’s classical ensembles, series and festivals, and has performed across Canada, in Europe and West Asia. They have premiered dozens of new works for voice, largely by Canadian composers, and they continue to bring contemporary relevance to old (and new) art song through curating and presenting sociopolitically-focused recital programs. Sarah is also half of a/v duo the gritty.
Sarah Peebles is a Toronto-based installation artist, composer and music improvisor. Much of her work explores digitally manipulated found sound, unconventional methods of amplification and distinct approaches to performing shō, the Japanese mouth-organ used in gagaku (court music). She also collaborates with artists, technicians and bee biologists on a series of projects addressing native bees, pollination ecology and biodiversity, entitled “Resonating Bodies”. Peebles’ activities over the past 3 decades have been wide-ranging and include music for dance, multi-channel sound, radio, video/film, performance art, integrated media, sound installation and improvised performance. She has been active in North America, Europe, Japan, New Zealand and Australia, and has collaborated with musicians, visual artists, data visualizers and with the groups “Smash and Teeny” (with guitarist Nilan Perera), and “Cinnamon Sphere” (Perera, Peebles & action calligrapher Chung Gong). Her music is published on Unsounds, Bandcamp, Cycling ’74, innova Recordings, Spool, Post-Concrète, and others. Details at sarahpeebles.net.
Susanna Hood is a compelling performer, maker and teacher in dance and music and was the artistic director of hum dansoundart (https://humdansoundart.wordpress.com/company/) from 2000-2013. Beginning her career in 1991 with the Toronto Dance Theatre, independently has performed the works of many Canadian choreographers, composers, and filmmakers. She performs widely as an improviser in dance and music, and has collaborated extensively in theatre as a movement director. Her choreography, compositions, and interdisciplinary collaborations have been presented locally, nationally, and internationally on stage and film since 1991. Her work is marked by a dynamic synthesis of voice and movement, creating intimate, raw and sensual performance work. Awards include the 1998 K.M. Hunter Emerging Artists Award in Dance, 2006 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Performance in Dance, and the 2008 Canada Council Victor Martin Lynch-Staunton Award for Outstanding Achievement in the field of Dance. Susanna recently participated in Pilot #2 of the Research Studios at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, Belgium, with emphasis on the synergistic relations between dance and music. http://susannahood.ca
tanner menard is a poet & composer, a Louisiana Creole & a member of the Atakapa Ishak Nation. They have published ten albums of ambient music& a chapbook & were twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Von Calhau!, born 2006, Porto. It’s all work developed by Marta Ângela and João Alves. The duo’s work has been presented in the recognizable forms of music, text, visual arts, performance, among others. Their presentations include Oximoroboro and Volta Subicida in Culturgest in 2015, Rotornariz in Galeria Pedro Alfacinha in 2016, the year in which they released Ú, via the Belgian publisher Kraak.
This album has been presented in venues such as Cafe Oto, De Player or in the LAFMS Uncanny Valley Festival. In 2017 they presented the performance, Tau-Tau, within the programme of the BO.CA Biennial, that was re-presented at Sesc Pompeia in São Paulo, in the Videobrasil Festival. In January 2018 they presented the exhibition/performance, Phantom Blot Back to Attack at Kunstraum in London and the performance O Praner de Urizar at Serralves Museum, Porto. Between February and May 2019 they were artists in residency at Residency Unlimited in New York. Their last soloshow, Unharias Ratóricas opened in February 2020 at MAAT, Lisbon.
William Hooker is an artistic whole, a vast circle of vision and execution. A body of uninterrupted work beginning in the mid-seventies defines him as one of the most important composers and players in jazz. As bandleader, Hooker has fielded ensembles in an incredibly diverse array of configurations. Each collaboration has brought a serious investigation of his compositional agenda and the science of the modern drum kit. As a player, Hooker has long been known for the persuasive power of his relationship with his instrument. His work is frequently grounded in a narrative context. Whether set against a silent film or anchored by a poetic theme, Hooker brings dramatic tension and human warmth to avant-garde jazz. His ability to find fertile ground for moving music in a variety of settings that obliterate genre distinctions offers a much-needed statement of social optimism in the arts.
Xuan Ye 叶轩 (CN/CA) is the prototype of many objects. As a live performer, X is techne agnostic and genre eclectic, and has been lauded as “one of Canada’s most exciting voices in textural soma” by EVERYSEEKER. X’s debut LP xi xi 息息 is compiled from solo improvisations across a three year span, the recordings comprise a document of X’s foundational ideas: free improvisation, computational randomness, noise of the field, hybrid chaos of gestures and mediated bio-electrical currents.
X has performed at Music Gallery (CA), Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center (US), Suoni Per Il Popolo (CA), OBEY Convention (CA), Kazoo! Fest (CA), Electric Eclectics Festival (CA), Downtown Music Gallery (US), Zoomin’ Night (CN), Le Festival Croisements (CN), etc. X’s live performances and releases have also received critical accolades from Bandcamp, Musicworks and Exclaim! X’s mixed media installations have been featured and exhibited internationally, including CONTACT Photography Festival, Varley Art Gallery of Markham (CA), Canadian Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario (CA), Vivid Projects (UK), Supermarket Art Fair (SE), InterAccess (CA), Inside-out Art Museum (CN), Goethe-Institut (Beijing & Montreal), ArtAsiaPacific, KUNSTFORUM (GE), Trinity Square Video (CA), among others. X is a finalist of EQ Bank Digital Artists Award and a recipient of SSHRC scholarship.
YATTA is an interdisciplinary artist and musician. They use incantations born of loop pedal drones, channeled screams, and improvised poetry to explore connections between psychosis, prayer, and presence. Last year, they released their sophomore album WAHALA, via NYC imprint PTP, in conjunction with a self-written/directed theatrical production called An Episode: Ricky’s Room, commissioned by The Shed. This year, they released ‘Dial Up’, a collaborative album with Philly poet and musician, Moor Mother. YATTA has shared the stage with musicians like Cardi B, William Basinski, and The Sun Ra Arkestra, creating multimedia performances that tour nationally and globally.