Pamela Z (US)
Tarek Atoui (LB/FR)
Keir Neuringer (US/NL)
Curated by Takuro Mizuta Lippit
One of the themes that I would like to explore as STEIM's Artistic Co-Director is "Musicianship in Live Electronic Music." Although this is something that STEIM has dealt with for many years, there still seems to be a general lack of discourse that encompasses the sonic aesthetics that both acoustic and electronic musicians are starting to share in a post-digital era. Live computer music has helped us realize that it is the sonic relationship which the musician attains with his/her instrument, sound material or audience that is more important to the performative representation of music than any kind of visual substitution or subtraction. I believe this relationship is something that all musicians intuitively develop and is revealed most clearly in solo performances.
Artist Biographies:
Pamela Z is a San Francisco-based composer/performer and audio artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, and sampling technology. She creates solo works combining operatic bel canto and experimental extended vocal techniques with found percussion objects, spoken word, digital processing, and a MIDI controller called The BodySynth (which allows her to manipulate sound with physical gestures.) In addition to her solo work, she has composed and recorded scores for dance, theatre, film, and new music chamber ensembles. Her large-scale multi-media works have been presented at Theater Artaud and ODC in SanFrancisco and at The Kitchen in New York, and her audio works have been presented in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum in New York and the Diözesanmuseum in Cologne. Her multi-media opera Wunderkabinet – based on the Museum of Jurassic Technology (created in collaboration with Matthew Brubeck and Christina McPhee) has been presented at The LAB Gallery (San Francisco) in 2005 and at REDCAT (Disney Hall, Los Angeles) in 2006. Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. She has performed in numerous festivals including Bang on a Can at Lincoln Center in New York, the Interlink Festival in Japan, the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco, Pina Bausch Tanztheater Festival in Wuppertal, Germany, and La Biennale di Venezia in Italy. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Creative Capital Fund, the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts, the ASCAP Music Award, and the NEA and Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. www.pamelaz.com
Tarek Atoui is a Lebanese laptop musician who lives and works in Lebanon, France and other places.Artist on the label Staalplaat, his work focuses on developing musical and video computer software thought for live performances. Besides his compositions and concerts, he works with research and creation studios as well as several theater, dance and puppet companies on composing music and conceiving interactive environments.
Keir Neuringer was born in New York in 1976 and lives and works in The Hague. He is active as an improvising saxophonist and a composer of electronic and acoustic music. He also writes texts, curates concerts and makes videos and installations. Much of his work is a manifestation of his opposition to the destructive behavior exhibited and accepted by the dominant culture. He studied composition, jazz, computer music, ancient and modern literature, classical saxophone, and multi-disciplinary art at institutions in the US, the UK, Poland, and the Netherlands.