Swiss ensemble Contrechamps perform Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi’s Unstuck in Time. Commissioned by Zubin Kanga as part of Cyborg Soloists, Unstuck in Time was created for Distractfold Ensemble, who premiered it in London at Café OTO in October 2023. The piece uses Vochlea’s Dubler 2 voice to MIDI software.

Contrechamps will also be performing music by Zeynep Toraman, Nilufar Habibian and Denis Rollet. Full details and a link to buy tickets when available on Contrechamps’ website →

Plus-Minus Ensemble presents a programme containing three new Cyborg Soloists-commissioned works by Seán Clancy, Francesca Fargion and Jessie Marino. Francesca and Jessie are both using Vochlea’s Dubler 2 voice to MIDI software, while Seán has opted to work with Echoes’ geolocated sound app.

Seán has created soundwalks for each city of Plus-Minus’ UK tour of his piece - London, Birmingham, Edinburgh - which will be available on the free Echoes app from mid-October 2023.

These three new pieces will be complemented by a realisation of Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music.

Programme:

Jessie Marino: Seahorses [wp]
Seán Clancy: Where the Paths End [wp]
Francesca Fargion: Louise, gently falling [wp]
Anthony Braxton: Ghost Trance Music

Book tickets at MINU Festival →

Zubin Kanga performs a varied programme of works for piano and an assortment of technologies for Modulus Festival in Vancouver:

How does a pianist “play the internet”? Alexander Schubert’s WIKI-PIANO.NET is a hilarious and curious challenge that pairs piano, spoken instructions, and an internet score that can change at any time.

Laura Bowler’s SHOW(ti)ME investigates our physical and virtual selves. Over the course of the piece, you’ll witness an explosive magnification of the minutia of being a pianist, contorted through a collage of multimedia.

In Luke Nickel’s hhiiddeenn vvoorrttiicceess, simulated roller coaster velocities become metronomic pulsations passing through wireless connections to small vibrating watches cueing a pianist to press keys that hit hammers on strings. It’s a wild – and fun! – ride.

And Zubin Kanga’s Metamemory is a dialogue between his real and artificial music memories, using a neural network created from Kanga’s own past to create music that is both monstrous and strangely beautiful.

More information and ticket bookings from Music on Main →

Plus-Minus Ensemble presents a programme containing three new Cyborg Soloists-commissioned works by Seán Clancy, Francesca Fargion and Jessie Marino. Francesca and Jessie are both using Vochlea’s Dubler 2 voice to MIDI software, while Seán has opted to work with Echoes’ geolocated sound app.

For those in London, Edinburgh and Birmingham, Seán has created soundwalks for each city which will be available on the free Echoes app a couple of weeks before the performance.

These three new pieces will be complemented by a realisation of Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music.

Programme:

Jessie Marino: Seahorses [wp]
Seán Clancy: Where the Paths End [wp]
Francesca Fargion: Louise, gently falling [wp]
Anthony Braxton: Ghost Trance Music

Book tickets at Café OTO →

Plus-Minus Ensemble presents a programme containing three new Cyborg Soloists-commissioned works by Seán Clancy, Francesca Fargion and Jessie Marino. Francesca and Jessie are both using Vochlea’s Dubler 2 voice to MIDI software, while Seán has opted to work with Echoes’ geolocated sound app.

For those in London, Edinburgh and Birmingham, Seán has created soundwalks for each city which will be available on the free Echoes app a couple of weeks before the performance.

These three new pieces will be complemented by a realisation of Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music.

Programme:

Jessie Marino: Seahorses [wp]
Seán Clancy: Where the Paths End [wp]
Francesca Fargion: Louise, gently falling [wp]
Anthony Braxton: Ghost Trance Music

Book tickets at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire →

Plus-Minus Ensemble presents a programme containing three new Cyborg Soloists-commissioned works by Seán Clancy, Francesca Fargion and Jessie Marino. Francesca and Jessie are both using Vochlea’s Dubler 2 voice to MIDI software, while Seán has opted to work with Echoes’ geolocated sound app.

For those in London, Edinburgh and Birmingham, Seán has created soundwalks for each city which will be available on the free Echoes app a couple of weeks before the performance.

These three new pieces will be complemented by a realisation of Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music.

Programme:

Jessie Marino: Seahorses [wp]
Seán Clancy: Where the Paths End [wp]
Francesca Fargion: Louise, gently falling [wp]
Anthony Braxton: Ghost Trance Music

Free event. Book tickets at Edinburgh College of Art →

Zubin Kanga performs a programme of pieces exploring technology's ability to augment musical instruments and composition. The programme features Answer Machine Tape, 1987 along with other pieces exploring futuristic new technologies and new pianistic possibilities. Kanga’s own Steel on Bone uses motion sensor gloves and knitting needles to generate great surges of cavernous sound. Vicentino, love you (Oliver Leith) is a set of microtonal pieces for keyboard and synthesiser - and DEVIANCE (Emily Howard), a tribute to Ada Lovelace, uses brain data and machine learning to explore connections between music and mind. All four works were commissioned as part of Kanga’s multi-year music and research project, Cyborg Soloists. Vicentino, love you and DEVIANCE appear on Kanga’s latest album, Cyborg Pianist (NMC Recordings).

More information and bookings on the Oxford Contemporary Music website →

Clarinettist Heather Roche and accordionist Eva Zöllner perform Joe Snape’s Signs of Life in Belgrade, Serbia at the Composers’ Association of Serbia’s ‘Tribune of Composers’. Signs of Life was commissioned by Cyborg Soloists for the duo, and premiered by them in April 2023. Snape’s piece will be performed alongside other works for clarinet and accordion by Julie Zhu, Miharu Ogura, and Sina Fani Sani.

The concert is free. See the full programme of the festival here →

Another Sky is a new London-based festival celebrating experimental music from the SWANA (South West Asia & North Africa) region and diaspora - 2023 is our first edition. Join us in listening, in watching, in dancing and in connecting for two days and three nights. We’ll present composed, improvised and electronic music; short films and moving-image works; six new commissions; a film workshop and an independent label & publisher fair. Another Sky is co-directed by Sam Salem أسامة سالم (composer; co-founder Distractfold Ensemble; RNCM) and Emily Moore (Southern Bird artist management & production; former co-director Kammer Klang).

Over the course of the 3 day festival (Sep 29 - Oct 1st) Distractfold will be premiering four new works, including Unstuck In Time by Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi کیمیا کوچک زاده یزدی, commissioned by Zubin Kanga for Cyborg Soloists.

See the full festival programme and buy tickets from Café OTO here

Pianist, composer and technologist Zubin Kanga launches his debut solo album with NMC, Cyborg Pianist, in a concert featuring all six newly commissioned works, using new technologies to swirl, melt and morph the sounds of his piano and keyboards. Across these works, Kanga creates distinct and unique sound worlds by blending the piano with immersive electronics, dialoguing with synthesizers, bending pitch with new keyboard instruments, shaping sound in the air using sensor gloves, playing with the audio-visual sonification of brain data, and duetting with AI-generated sounds.

More information and tickets from the Kings Place website →

Programme

Oliver Leith Vicentino, love you – studies for keyboard ('L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica)

Zubin Kanga Hypnagogia (after Bach) (excerpt)

Shiva Feshareki Whirling Dervishes (album version)

Laurence Osborn Counterfeits (Siminică)

Emily Howard DEVIANCE

Laura Bowler SHOW(ti)ME

Zubin Kanga performing Philip Venables’ Answer Machine Tape, 1987

Zubin Kanga will be performing Philip Venables’ extraordinary and moving Answer Machine Tape, 1987, for solo piano and Augmented Instruments Lab’s KeyScanner technology at Musica Festival in Strasbourg.

Read about Venables’ powerful work about the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York here →

For more information and tickets, visit the Musica Festival website.

Zubin will also be performing this piece at 7pm on the same day.

Zubin Kanga performing Philip Venables’ Answer Machine Tape, 1987

Zubin Kanga will be performing Philip Venables’ extraordinary and moving Answer Machine Tape, 1987, for solo piano and Augmented Instruments Lab’s KeyScanner technology at Musica Festival in Strasbourg.

Read about Venables’ powerful work about the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York here →

For more information and tickets, visit the Musica Festival website.

Zubin will also be performing this work at 10pm on the same day.

A vibrant programme of musician-technology interactions in which performing bodies, musical instruments and novel hardware and software collide, offering three manifestations of the modern-day musical cyborg. Featuring the winners of our 2022 Call for Collaborative Music Projects, Kathryn Williams and Ed Cooper, and Ben Jameson and Harry Matthews.

Drones and tones merge with the human pulse, both heard and imagined, in Fourfold by flautist Kathryn Williams and composer Ed Cooper. Using Soundbrenner’s vibrating metronomes and their own heartbeats, the duo weave a dreamy soundscape with alto flute, electric guitar and fixed media. Active listening combines with performance and spoken word, constructing an augmented, bodily instrument.

Composer-guitarist Ben Jameson and composer-pianist Harry Matthews’ Aeolian Fantasy forms a digital aeolian harp as they feed Vochlea’s audio-to-MIDI software Dubler 2 with prerecorded and live wind sounds. Beautiful and uncanny microtonal harmonies fill the space from small speakers, augmented by live performance on acoustic guitar and synthesisers.

Celebrated Canadian clarinettist Heather Roche presents a poignant set of works for low clarinets and electronics. ‘Droning falsities (for one’s self)’ (2019), composed by Mark Dyer, uses unstable performance techniques and prerecorded murmurs to conjure the ghost of Renaissance composer Guillaume Dufay. In tribute to Robert Phillips, who tragically passed away recently, Heather will perform ‘Rutaceae’ (2015) in which the distinction between live instrument and tape part is held, beguilingly, at a knife’s edge.

Full details and bookings from the IKLECTIK website →

Nonclassical presents the launch event for Zubin Kanga’s new album of Cyborg-Soloists-commissioned pieces, Machine Dreams. The album - and this performance - explores the intersection between music, technology and virtuosity, with new music for augmented keyboards, synthesizers, electronic sensor gloves, AI-generated sounds, and more interactive technologies. The night will feature new commissions by Alex Paxton, CHAINES, Tansy Davies, Nwando Ebizie, Robin Haigh, Alex Groves, Jasmin Kent Rodgman, Ben Nobuto, Amble Skuse and Zubin himself.

Zubin’s performance is paired with a set by Zöllner-Roche duo in which accordionist Eva Zöllner and clarinettist Heather Roche will perform Joe Snape’s piece for Cyborg Soloists, Signs of Life, ‘a quirky, pop-infused work that begins in melancholy but by the end radiates hope and joy’ as well as work by American composer Julie Zhu.

For full details and tickets, visit the Nonclassical website →

Join Zubin Kanga as he makes full use of the audio-visual capabilities of the Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub at Jesus College to showcase brand new, technology-focussed music that has not yet been heard in Oxford. He will perform on a range of instruments, including digital instruments, synthesizers, and a traditional piano.

The programme includes Alexander Schubert’s WIKI-PIANO.NET, Alex Groves’ Single Form (Swell), Luke Nickel’s hhiiddeenn vvoorrttiicceess and Zubin’s own Hypnagogia (after Bach).

Full details and tickets here →