Dr. Zubin Kanga
Kanga’s Piano Ex Machina is a rewarding experience, rich in possibility, infused with curiosity and playfulness, and not afraid to explore conceptual and expressive horizons well beyond the boundaries of a traditional piano recital - LIMELIGHT
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, Kanga was awarded a £1.4 million UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship to fund his latest multi-year project Cyborg Soloists, based at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is Senior Lecturer in Musical Performance and Digital Arts. Cyborg Soloists 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. His Cyborg Soloists work was recently featured in The New York Times, The Wire, Classical Music Magazine, and Limelight Magazine.
Zubin has premiered more than 150 works and 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).
As a composer, Kanga’s output includes Dead Leaves for piano and live electronics, which was selected to represent Australia at the International Rostrum of Composers in 2018; Spider Web Castle for viola and piano, which he premièred with Brett Dean at Extended Play Festival; and Steel on Bone, which he premiered at hcmf//, featuring MiMU multi-sensor gloves morphing the sounds of extended techniques inside the piano, which The Times praised for its ‘bravura and madness’.
Recent collaborations include Philip Venables’ Answer Machine Tape, 1987, which explores the AIDS crisis through a crucial week in the life of New York artist David Wojnarowicz, using a KeyScanner to allow the piano to type text onto the screen like a typewriter; Neil Luck’s Whatever Weighs You Down, using MiMU sensor gloves to interact with deaf performance artist Chisato Minamimura; 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.
Biography current to August 2023
