PROGRAMME
7pm Doors + DJ (Blasio Kavuma)7.30pm Zubin Kanga
8.10pm DJ (Blasio Kavuma)
8.30pm Zöllner-Roche Duo
9.00pm DJ (Blasio Kavuma)
9.20pm Zubin Kanga
10.00pm DJ (Blasio Kavuma)
This is what the future sounds like.
Zubin Kanga explores the intersection between music, technology and virtuosity in Machine Dreams. Experience experimentalism like you’ve never heard it before, 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.
All new works feature on Zubin’s upcoming release Machine Dreams, out on CD and digital platforms on Nonclassical on Thursday 20 April.
Featured alongside Zubin is a performance from the Zöllner-Roche duo. Accordionist Eva Zöllner and clarinettist Heather Roche are accompanied by electronics and projections for a set pairing Joe Snape’s Signs of Life – a quirky, pop-infused work that begins in melancholy but by the end radiates hope and joy – with American composer Julie Zhu’s theatrical and surreal Nadir aux Pommes, inspired by the poet Anne Sexton. It’s full of little strange repetitions, odd interactions, and a lot of fish.
Photo: Raphael Neal
Photo: Sam Walton
About the artists
Zubin Kanga
ZUBIN KANGA – BIOGRAPHY Zubin Kanga is a pianist, composer, and technologist. For over a decade, he has been at the forefront of curating and creating interdisciplinary musical programmes that seek to explore and redefine what it means to be a performer through interactions with new technologies.
In 2020, following his appointment as Lecturer in Musical Performance and Digital Arts at Royal Holloway University, Kanga was awarded a £1.4 million UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship to fund his latest multi-year project Cyborg Soloists, which is unlocking new possibilities in composition and performance through interactions with AI and machine learning; interactive visuals and VR; motion and biosensors, and new hybrid instruments.
Zubin has premiered more than 130 works and collaborated with many of the world’s leading composers including Alexander Schubert, Michael Finnissy, Nicole Lizée, George Benjamin, Thomas Adès, Simon Steen-Anderson, Brett Dean, Tansy Davies, and Brett Furrer. He has performed at many international festivals including the BBC Proms, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, London Contemporary Music Festival (UK) Melbourne Festival (Australia), Festival Présences (France), Time of Music (Finland), Klang Festival (Denmark), PODIUM Festival (Germany), and November Music (Netherlands).
Recent collaborations include Neil Luck’s Whatever Weighs You Down, using MiMU’s multi-sensor gloves to interact with deaf performance artist Chisato Minamimura (premiered at Gaudeamus Festival and featured in the New York Times), Shiva Feshareki’s Whirling Dervishes, a duo for piano and turntable-generated electronics in ambisonic surround sound with live interactive visuals, Laura Bowler’s SHOW(ti)ME, combining piano live and fixed electronics and video in a semi-staged work exploring the private and public lives of musicians, and Alexander Schubert’s internet-based score WIKI-PIANO.NET (performed 30 times across 9 countries as well as the BBC World Service) as well as a new collaboration with Schubert, Steady State, that will use EEG brain sensors to control sound and light.
www.zubinkanga.com www.cyborgsoloists.com
Zöllner-Roche Duo
Clarinettist Heather Roche and accordionist Eva Zöllner are two of contemporary music’s most versatile and adaptable voices. Known for their independent travels in experimental performance and extended techniques, the duo come together in concerts of constantly changing aesthetics and approaches. Adventurous music-making, creative risk-taking and innovation characterize their work. In cooperation with composers from different parts of the world they create a new and exciting repertoire and bring it to the stage.
