Nicolina Stylianou is an artist working in the intersection between performance, sound and sculpture. The spectrum of her interest lies in the absurdity of existence and the in-betweenness of bodies, objects, things, spaces, networks and subjects as states of transition, transformation and noise. Nicolina holds a Masters of Arts (Theatre and Drama) degree from the University of the Arts Helsinki (Finland) and BA (hons) in Art & Design from the Kingston University London (United Kingdom).
Tolgahan Çoğulu, The first prize winner at Georgia Tech Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition in 2014, Tolgahan Çoğulu, designed his “Adjustable Microtonal Guitar” in 2008. His first CD with microtonal guitar, Atlas, was published by Kalan Music in 2012. His microtonal guitar has taken him to many festivals and universities in 34 countries. Tolgahan is building a repertoire for microtonal guitar with more than 40 composers involved at this point.
He became an Associate Professor in 2013 and Professor in 2019 at Istanbul Technical University Turkish Music State Conservatory, where he had founded the classical guitar department in 2010 and the world’s first microtonal guitar department in 2014. His second CD ‘Microtonal Guitar Duo’ has been published by Kalan Music in June 2015. His recording of William Allaudin Mathieu’s three-movement ‘Lattice-İşi’ in just intonation was published in the US by Cold Mountain Music in 2016.
Tolgahan completed a research project entitled ‘Historical Tunings on the Microtonal Guitar’ at the University of Bristol in 2016 for 12 months. Between 2015-2017 he collaborated with the University of Music Würzburg for the project ‘Creating and Presenting a Repertoire for the Microtonal Guitar’ supported by DAAD in which 12 composers wrote pieces for microtonal guitar and ensemble.
He has been organising the world’s first “Microtonal Guitar Competition” since 2016 His book ‘Microtonal Guitar’ was published in 2018 by Mojo Roots Music, co-authored by Fernando Perez. His latest album ‘Microtonal’ was published in 2018 by Ahenk Music. Currently, he is teaching at Istanbul Technical University Turkish Music State Conservatory and Centre for Advanced Studies in Music.
Born to a family of artists in Pengosekan village in Bali, Dewa Alit grew up surrounded by Balinese gamelan music from early childhood. His father Dewa Nyoman Sura and his oldest brother Dewa Putu Berata were the most influential teachers for gamelan in his life. He began performing at age 11, and by age 13 was playing in his village’s adult group, Tunas Mekar Pengosekan. 1988-1995 he played in the internationally acclaimed Gamelan Semara Ratih of Ubud village, touring internationally.
In 1997, a year before graduating from Academy of Indonesian Performing Arts in Denpasar (STSI Denpasar), Dewa Alit and his brothers founded a gamelan group Çudamani which immediately acknowledged as one of the best gamelan groups and went on their own international tours.
Dewa Alit founded his own gamelan group in 2007, Gamelan Salukat, seeking a wider path for expressing his approach to new music in gamelan and performing on a new set of instruments of Alit’s own tuning and design.
As a composer, Dewa Alit is generally acknowledged as the leading figure of his generation in Bali and beyond. One of his early works “Geregel” (2000) was subject of a music analysis by Wayne Vitalle in the Perspectives on New Music. His “Semara Wisaya” for the Boston-base gamelan group Galak Tika was performed at New York Carnegie in 2004 and another composition “Pelog Slendro” at Bang on a Can Marathon in June 2006.
Dewa’s album released In 2022, “Chasing the Phantom” from the label Black Truffle was included in the lists for The Best Contemporary Classical on Bandcamp: July 2022, the Wire magazine’s Best Releases of 2022 list, The Best Contemporary Classical of 2022, and the New York Times’ Best Classical Music Tracks of 2022.
His compositions for non-gamelan ensembles includes music for MIT’s Gamelan Electrika, Talujon Percussion (USA) and Ensemble Modern (Frankfurt, Germany).
As a collaborator, Dewa Alit has worked with musicians and dancers from around the world. These include a contemporary theater production Theatre Annees Folles (director: Alicia Arata Kitamura, Tokyo), a butoh dancer Ko Murobushi, contemporary dancers Min Tanaka and Kaiji Moriyama, and Noh master Reijiro Tsumura.
Dewa Alit was the gamelan director in Evan Ziporyn’s opera “A House in Bali” with his Gamelan Salukat and toured with Bang On a Can All-stars to USA in 2009 and 2010.
Dirar Kalash (b. 1982) is a musician and sound artist whose work spans a wide range of musical and sonic practices within a variety of instrumental, compositional and improvisational contexts. Kalash also extends his practice into inter-disciplinary theoretical research. He has produced several solo and collaborative musical albums and is active as touring musician, in addition to that he also created several sound installations, live audio-visual performances, and photography projects.
Diemo Schwarz, born in Germany in 1969, is a researcher at IRCAM, and a musician and creative programmer.
He performs on his own digital musical instrument based on his CataRT open source software, exploring different collections of sound with the help of gestural controllers that reconquer musical expressiveness and physicality for the digital instrument, bringing back the immediacy of embodied musical interaction to the rich sound worlds of digital sound processing and synthesis.
He interprets and performs improvised electronic music as member of the 30-piece ONCEIM improvisers orchestra, or with musicians such as Frédéric Blondy, Benjamin Duboc, Richard Scott, Gael Mevel, Pascal Marzan, Massimo Carrozzo, Nicolas Souchal, Fred Marty, Hans Leeuw.
He composes for dance and performance (Sylvie Fleury, Frank Leibovici, Françoise Tartinville), video (Benoit Gehanne and Marion Delage de Luget), and installation (Christian Delecluse, Cecile Babiole),
His scientific research on sound analysis/synthesis and gestural control of interaction with music is the basis of his artistic work, and allows to bring advanced and fun musical interaction to expert musicians and the general public via installations like the dirty tangible interfaces (DIRTI) and augmented reality (Topophonie mobile).
In 2017 he was DAAD Edgar-Varèse guest professor for computer music at TU Berlin, and in 2022 artist in residence in the Arts, Sciences, Societies fellowship program of IMéRA institute of advanced studies, Aix–Marseille Université.
Canadian composer of Ukrainian descent Marc Sabat (*1965) has been based in Berlin since 1999. He makes pieces for concerts and installations, drawing inspiration from ongoing research about the sounding and perception of microtonally extended just intonation (JI). He relates his practice to various music forms—folk, experimental and classical—seeking points of shared exploration and dialogue between different modes of experience and cultural traditions. Largely self-taught as a composer, Sabat studied violin at the University of Toronto, at the Juilliard School in New York, and computer music at McGill University, as well as working privately with Malcolm Goldstein, James Tenney
and Walter Zimmermann, among others. With Wolfgang von Schweinitz he developed the Extended Helmholtz-Ellis JI Pitch Notation and is a pioneer of instrumental music written and performed in JI. Sabat’s work is presented internationally, available online and in numerous published editions. He teaches composition and the theory and practice of intonation at the Universität der Künste Berlin and is currently conducting doctoral research at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. Together with colleagues Catherine Lamb and Rebecca Lane he co-initiated the Harmonic Space Orchestra in 2019.
Suva is a Helsinki based artist and performer specialising in instruments, sculptures, and various techniques of painting. He has a Masters degree in Performance Studies from the Theatre Academy in Helsinki and a Masters degree in visual art from India.
He is interested in the aspect of public anatomy – making and doing something with public. The tools of intervention, interaction, anticipation , perception and the sense of community. Interest in engaging people to perform to have access to collective understanding of Art form. He combines the notion of Body and material in his performances .
The question of the existence of ‘the Other’ in the space of ‘An-Other’ formed into an important area of his work. His status as an outsider, intermingling through performances and actions in a foreign land, is an important approach, more in the line of hyphen rather than a slash.
He combines Music, Visual Art, Bodily writing in his creative process.
Marloes van Son builds instruments, installations and systems. The electromechanical objects that she develops explore natural phenomena and everyday appliances. By repurposing ordinary objects she aims to create unusual, yet familiar experiences.
Her recent work focuses on sound objects, instrument building, graphic scores and experimental compositions. During performances Marloes plays her self-built instruments combined with voice according to precomposed scores.
Marloes van Son regularly collaborates with new media artist Alex van Giersbergen as audiovisual duo ALOES. They have joined forces on artistic projects where electronics, software and self-made systems meet. Their audiovisual performances often include human – machine / system interactions and translations from the “real” world into a technologically constructed new reality. During the past years they have performed atmospheric soundscapes with melodic elements and particle based visuals in several venues and festivals around Europe. Important to their practice is the use of self-built instruments and software. Through this approach they aim to create experimental pop-music which engages an audience and surprises as a structured composition, always in their own de ned style.
Additionally Marloes has been organising workshops where participants can explore experimental sound devices and graphic scores by designing and constructing their own versions. Dialogues with an audience engaged in experimentation are an increasingly important element in her work.
Originally from the Netherlands, she currently lives and works in Helsinki (FI). Recent events include: Solo-exhibitions at Galerie AMU (Prague, CZ) and the Tekniikan Museo (Helsinki, FI). Artist residencies at bb15 (Linz, AU), Titanik (Turku, FI) and DordtYart (Dordrecht, NL). Sound-performances at Art Fair Suomi (FI), Inversia Festival (RU), Lofoten Sound Art Symposium (NO), Noise oor festival (UK), STEIM (NL), SMC2017 conference (FI) and DASH festival (Helsinki, FI). She presented work at Supermarket art fair 2017 (Stockholm, SE), ITGWO festival (Vlieland, NL), and Shiny Toys festival (DE).
She graduated in 2017 from the Visual Culture and Contemporary Art programme (ViCCA MA, Aalto University, Helsinki, FI) after completing her BA at the ArtScience Interfaculty (BA, KABK, The Hague, NL).
Looking for common ground between different and seemingly disparate art forms, Ruscica’s practice explores the mutability of meaning and processes of naming, whilst on one hand questioning notions of fixity and on the other, any sense of stable categories or binaries.
Their work attempts to playfully and experientially collapse boundaries of language, matter, animacy and meaning through the use of a variety of mediums; from video to sound and performance and from murals to print works and sculpture.
Ruscica’s interdisciplinary practice has lead to a wide range of collaborations and commissions; amongst others with Camden Art Centre and Animate Projects in London, MoMA PS1, Creative Time and MTV global in New York. Their works are also held in public and private collections (e.g. the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Kiasma, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki)
Most recently, Hans-Gunter Lock has been increasingly engaged in real-time sound synthesis and creation of musical environments involving analogue synthesis and digital electronic instruments as well as acoustic and electromechanical instruments as disklavier. He has also created music, where sound, through the use of sensors, is synthesized of influenced by physical processes. In many of his projects he has used motion sensors as a source of sound synthesis.
Hans-Gunter Lock’s way of creative thinking has been strongly influenced and renewed by the cooperation with composer and conductor Andrus Kallastu. Many alternative musical concepts as open form, interdisciplinarity, united forms of art and experimental solutions, have been discussed and practiced in their numerous projects. Latterly he has discovered microtonal possibilities of organising pitches, using mainly Bohlen-Pierce scale.
Hans-Gunter Lock’s works have been performed in Germany, Finland and Estonia: in Autumn Festival of Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre (2002, 2004, 2009), Estonian Music Days Festival (2003), NYYD Festival (2003, 2005, 2007), Young Estonian Composers Festival in Tartu (2005, 2008), Diverse Universe Festival (2009), Two Beauties’ Festival in Pärnu (2008, 2009), Summer Air Festival in Pärnu (2008, 2009), Pärnu New Music Days (2008, 2009, 2010) and Estonian Music Forum in Helsinki. From 2008, he has repeatedly organized multi-media workshops in Pärnu New Music Days and from 2002, he has been active as sound engeneer and sound designer of ensemble Cyberstudio.
Hans-Gunter Lock has acquired music education in Germany and Estonia. In 1994–2000, he studied music theory with Hans-Wilhelm Hösl, composition with Dimitri Terzakis and electroacoustic music with Eckard Rödger at the Leipzig Felix Mendelssohn Academy of Music and Theatre. In 2002, he received his master’s degree in musicology (thesis Eduard Tubin’s use of folk tunes, supervised by Mart Humal) in Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, where he additionally took part in courses of electronic music studio. In the years 2004-2006, Hans-Gunter Lock supplemented himself in Hamburg Academy of Music and Theatre in the field of multimedia composition with Georg Hajdú. Since September 2008, he is a PhD student at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, studying composition under the guidance of Associate Professor Margo Kõlar.
In 2002–2007 Hans-Gunter Lock worked as a consultant at the Electronic Music Studio of EAMT. Since 2002, he also has been a lecturer teaching sound synthesis, sonogram analysis, algorythmic composition, live-electronics and interactive composition, analogue synthesis practice, electronic music seminar and history of electronic music. In NYYD Festival 2003 and 2005, he was the artistic director of Electronic Music Studio concerts. Since 2007, Hans-Gunter Lock has been working as the head of the New Media Department in the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Instrumentalist, Conductor, Teacher. Founder of the Ensembles XelmYa, Umbratono and others. Praised for her equally fierce and bold dramatic performance style, Sylvia Hinz is one of the leading recorder players worldwide, specialised in contemporary music and improvisation.