EXAUDI vocal ensemble will be performing pieces from Mark Dyer’s Scribe project in this performance of mediaeval vocal music. Featuring pieces from the Codex Chantilly (ca. 1400) and the Old Hall manuscript - the manuscript which Dyer sampled to create the works in his project - EXAUDI will also be performing new works created for them by A-level students at St Leonard’s Catholic School, in partnership with Durham Music Service.

Johannes Ciconia: Le ray au soleyl
Jacob Senleches: La harpe de melodie
Rodericus: Angelorum psalat
Various: Music from the Old Hall Manuscript
Marcel le Gan, ed. Mark Dyer: Scribe
Guillaume de Machaut: Tant doucement; Fin cuers doulz; Riches d’amour
James Weeks: Four virelais

For full details and to book tickets, visit Durham University’s webpage for the performance →

Zubin Kanga performs three new works that fuse the piano with keyboards, sensors and interactive video, exploring dreamlike states, split identities and frenzied virtuosity.

Alex Ho‘s Cyborg Études combines piano and live gesture-controlled electronics with interactive visual design and text created by Gillian Tan and Elayce Ismail. Across five continuous movements, the cycle explores the tension between virtuosity and vulnerability and what it means to collapse their sharp edges together. It draws inspiration from W. E. B. Du Bois’ articulation of ‘double consciousness‘, the toil of racialised experience and the struggle to find new beginnings.

Claudia Molitor’s In den Träumen draws on her own poem of the same name with the repeated refrain ‘doch weil Du einfach nicht hier bist dann bleibt das in den Träumen’ (‘but as you’re just not here then it stays in my dreams’). It combines the piano, ranging from mesmeric textures to scintillating graphic-scored passages, with electronics that draw on her field-recording and sound-sculpting work. Lastly, Alex Paxton injects manic energy into Car-Pig, using sampler keyboards to layer dozens of sounds, including choirs, theremins, tennis balls and animal noises.

Tickets available from hcmf// →

Zubin Kanga performs the UK premiere of Steady State by Alexander Schubert, a work for musician and two assistants which features live brain-sensor control of music and holographic video. This will be the UK premiere of this innovative and theatrical piece.

Part of the free hcmf// shorts day of performances. See the full programme here →

Zubin Kanga performs Philip Venables’ extraordinary and moving Answer Machine Tape, 1987, for solo piano and Augmented Instruments Lab’s KeyScanner technology at Transit Festival in Leuven, Belgium.

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

For more information and tickets, visit the festival website →

Zubin Kanga performs three works commissioned by Cyborg Soloists:

Tansy Davies – Star-Way
Alex Groves – DANCE SUITE
Zubin Kanga – Hypnagogia (After Bach)

This performance of DANCE SUITE will be the world premiere of Groves’ second work for the Cyborg Soloists project, after his earlier work for the ROLI Lumi Keys, Single Form (Swell). DANCE SUITE will be performed on a ROLI Seaboard RISE 2 keyboard, and in it, Groves takes chopped-up dance floor remnants and reimagines them for the concert hall.

Tickets and more information may be found on the Southbank Centre website →

This performance is the second of the evening, following Zubin’s performance with Manchester Collective of the London premiere of a new work by Laurence Osborn, Schiller’s Piano. Read more about this event here →

Zubin Kanga premieres Laurence Osborn’s new piece Schiller’s Piano with Manchester Collective. After seeing a replica of Schiller’s piano – which was built by WW2 prisoners and unable to play music – Osborn responds to fascism’s empty attempts to recreate the past in his new concerto. It’s an auditory hallucination where Kanga conjures ghostly samples of piano construction with his keyboard: handsaws, sandpaper, drills.

Also on the programme, music by Grażyna Bacewicz, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Caroline Shaw and Wojciech Kilar.

For more details, full programme and ticket sales, visit Manchester Collective’s website →

Zubin Kanga premieres Laurence Osborn’s new piece Schiller’s Piano with Manchester Collective. After seeing a replica of Schiller’s piano – which was built by WW2 prisoners and unable to play music – Osborn responds to fascism’s empty attempts to recreate the past in his new concerto. It’s an auditory hallucination where Kanga conjures ghostly samples of piano construction with his keyboard: handsaws, sandpaper, drills.

Also on the programme, music by Grażyna Bacewicz, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Caroline Shaw and Wojciech Kilar.

For more details, full programme and ticket sales, visit Manchester Collective’s website →

Zubin Kanga returns to Gaudeamus, performing four works that extend the piano, and his body, with cutting-edge technologies. Massimiliano Vizzini’s Fantasie Im(prompt)u, explores the changing role of AI in the artistic process, as well as a new experimental optical scanner, the Keyscanner, turning the piano into a hybrid audio-visual controller. Alex Paxton injects manic energy into Car-Pig, using sampler keyboards to layer dozens of sounds, from choirs, to bagpipes to animal noises. Zubin Kanga’s Steel on Bone uses MiMU sensor gloves to shape visceral sounds from inside the piano. And Laura Bowler’s SHOW(ti)ME explores the contrast between musicians’ public personas and their private anxieties, in an interdisciplinary work combining the speaking pianist with sensors and live audio-visual interaction.

Massimiliano Vizzini - Fantasie Im(prompt)u (World Premiere)
Alex Paxton - Car-Pig
Zubin Kanga - Steel on Bone
Laura Bowler - SHOW(ti)ME

Tickets for this performance may be purchased via the Gaudeamus website →

Car-Pig by Alex Paxton and SHOW(ti)ME by Laura Bowler were both commissioned by Zubin Kanga as part of Cyborg Soloists, supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and Royal Holloway, University of London. Steel on Bone was also developed as part of Cyborg Soloists. Fantasie Im(prompt)u by Massimiliano Vizzini was co-commissioned by Gaudeamus Festival and Zubin Kanga, with the support of Gaudeamus Festival.

Zubin Kanga will be premiering Larry Goves’ Cyborg Soloists-commissioned concerto Curious codes of silence with Explore Ensemble at 2024’s Aldeburgh Festival. Laura Bowler’s SHOW(ti)ME is also on the programme, as are pieces by Lara Agar and Alex Paxton.

Lara Agar: New work (Britten Pears Arts co-commission / first performance) (15’)

Larry Goves: Curious codes of silence (first performance) (20’)

Laura Bowler: SHOW(ti)ME (20’)

Alex Paxton: Spit Crystal Yeast-rack, dripping (à l’orange) (15')

Explore Ensemble
Nicholas Moroz live sound
Zubin Kanga piano, keyboard, Lumatone, MiMU gloves, multimedia

For full details and ticket bookings, visit the Britten Pears website →

Celebrating the launch of we are environments for each other, a new album of music by Scott McLaughlin performed by Mira Benjamin (violin) and Zubin Kanga (piano & electronics), released on Huddersfield Contemporary Records.

The concert features an extended version of the title track, which concerns entanglements of sound and material and agency, and what paths and possibilities emerge when responding in performance to a complex field of potentials. Zubin Kanga uses an electromagnetic resonator to explore the harmonics of the piano strings, creating feedback drones. Mira Benjamin's violin is inserted into this feedback, impersonating the piano string and replacing its resonances with her own, trying to find points of metastability, hybrid harmonies where piano and violin strings mutually reinforce. Both players holding each other in a balance of resonances, curating serendipity.

Visit Music We’d Like To Hear’s website for more information and ticket bookings →

Zubin Kanga performs Alexander Schubert’s Cyborg Soloists-commissioned piece Steady State in Dublin. Using state-of-the-art brain sensors, (along with body and motion sensors) to control video, light and sound, this work is staged as a retro sci-fi laboratory experiment in which the cyborg performers’ brain becomes a component in an audio-visual feedback loop. This is the world premiere of this groundbreaking work. 

The concert also features Zubin Kanga’s own Steel on Bone, using MiMU sensor gloves to shape visceral sounds from inside the piano using gestures through the air. The concert concludes with British composer Laura Bowler’s SHOW(ti)ME, which explores the contrast between musicians’ public personas (on stage and social media) and their private anxieties. It draws back the mask of performance through an explosive magnification of the minutiae of piano practice, combining the piano with a range of technologies including live video and audio (including talking emoji) and MiMU sensor gloves.

Tickets available now from the National Concert Hall’s website →

Vicky Clarke - aka SONAMB - will be premiering her Cyborg Soloists-commissioned work NEURAL MATERIALS at a performance at Modern Art Oxford on Thursday 25 April 2024. NEURAL MATERIALS is “a system for sound sculpture, modular electronics, and machine learning” based around a new steel sonic sculpture created by Clarke, and will be accompanied by live visuals by Sean Clarke. Using field recordings of cotton mill machinery, urban noise, and canal network waters made by Clarke, NEURAL MATERIALS is “a love letter from the materials of a post industrial city”.

This performance has been curated by EMPRES (Electronic Music Practice Research) in response to Frieda Toranzo Jaeger's exhibition: 'A future in the light of darkness'.

More information and free tickets available at Modern Art Oxford →

Featuring new works by three student composer-performers selected from our 2024 Call for Student Projects: Art Banymandhub, Hannah Lam and Sophia Manta. These artists have created their pieces using innovative technologies including the ROLI LUMI Keys (a keyboard with pressure and surface sensors) and ShowSync (software that creates live visuals that respond to the music).

The concert also features a duo performance by Jack Frankland and Jonathan Packham (Cyborg Soloists Postdoctoral Research Assistant) featuring the Genki Wave motion sensor ring, as well as a performance by Zubin Kanga of his own piece Hypnagogia (after Bach), featuring the piano, an analogue synthesizer and MiMU sensor gloves that can shape sounds through gesture and movement.

Part of the New Sounds Festival. Booking is essential.

More information and tickets available here →

What happens when you fuse the piano instrument with cutting-edge technology? In his performance of Shiva Feshareki, Zubin Kanga complements his piano play with immersive electronics and ambisonic surround sounds. In his own music, he distorts Bach's music with analog synthesisers and MiMU's sensor hands, while in Laura Bowler's work, he explores the complex relationship with social media through live video and audio, speech and movement theatre.

Programme

Shiva Feshareki: Whirling Dervishes

Zubin Kanga: Hypnagogia (after Bach)

Laura Bowler: SHOW(ti)ME

More information and tickets from the Flagey website →

Benjamin Tassie’s Earth of the Slumbering and Liquid Trees uses the latest studio and keyboard technologies (including the 4D expressive ROLI Seaboard Rise 2 keyboard) to augment the sound and capabilities of some of the world’s most significant historical organs. The piece uses recordings made by the composer, of historical organs from across the UK and Europe, including the Van Straten Organ, a reconstruction of a late-Medieval Dutch organ (dating from 1479) in Amsterdam, period instruments at St Cecelia’s Hall, University of Edinburgh, and the Wingfield Organ, a reconstructed English Tudor organ. 

Earth of the Slumbering and Liquid Trees is a monolithic, 75-minute tour de force, in which the audience is invited to immerse themselves in this sonically enveloping drone-composition. Performed by Kanga in the round using three different keyboards to trigger these organ sounds virtually, this piece of shifting and transforming tones creates a rich and enveloping sensory experience.

Full details and tickets for this free performance on the National Gallery’s website →

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 →