Thursday 13 October 2022, 8pm
PROGRAMME:
- Nina Whiteman – Cybird Cybird
- Nwando Ebizie – I Will Fix Myself (Just Circles) (World Premiere)
- Zubin Kanga – Steel on Bone
-interval-
- Neil Luck – New Work (World Premiere)
- Neil Luck – Whatever Weighs You Down (UK Premiere)
Zubin Kanga / piano and multimedia
Neil Luck / misc.
Pianist, composer and technologist Zubin Kanga performs the UK-premiere of Whatever Weighs You Down, Neil Luck’s new 40-minute work for piano, electronics, two videos, and MiMU sensor gloves.
Whatever Weighs you Down is an intense and bizarre meditation on weights, senses, inertia, and dreams. It features Deaf performance artist Chisato Minamimura as an onscreen co-performer in an intense gestural dialogue with Kanga’s piano and sonified movements using the MiMU gloves, as well as composer-performer James Oldham as a chaotic second onscreen protagonist.
The event will also feature a solo performance by Luck, and Kanga will perform a set featuring his own work and world premieres by Nina Whiteman and Nwando Ebizie, combining the piano with a Moog synthesizer, and sensor technology from Movesense and Holonic Systems.
All the works in this event have been created as part of Zubin Kanga’s Cyborg Soloists music-technology research project, supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and Royal Holloway, University of London.
Zubin Kanga is a pianist, composer, and technologist. For over a decade, he has been at the forefront of creating, co-creating and performing interdisciplinary music that seeks 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, 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, and regularly featured on BBC Radio and the BBC World Service.
Zubin has premiered more than 160 works and performed at many international festivals including the BBC Proms, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Aldeburgh Festival, London Contemporary Music Festival (UK) Melbourne Festival (Australia), Paris Autumn Festival (France), Time of Music (Finland), Music Current (Ireland), Klang Festival (Denmark), PODIUM Festival (Germany), Gaudeamus Festival (Netherlands), Transit Festival (Belgium) and Modulus Festival (Canada). He was a member of Ensemble Offspring for 15 years, and has performed as concerto soloist with Manchester Collective, Explore Ensemble, and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
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; 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, Steady State, that uses EEG brain sensors to control music and holographic video; the keyboard/piano concerto, Schiller’s Piano by Laurence Osborn, performed with Manchester Collective at the Southbank Centre in London, and a new concerto by Rob Laidlow which will be premiered with the BBC Philharmonic, featuring an AI system modelled on the orchestra’s archives, performed with AI-integrated digital instruments.
Neil Luck is a musician based in the UK.
His work takes a range of forms from music-theatre, to concert works, radio, public projects and recordings, and is the founder and director of the experimental music ensemble ARCO.
Neil has worked with and written for people and ensembles in the UK and abroad, and presented work at music venues, festivals, and galleries internationally including Tate Britain, Tate Modern, BBC Proms, Aarhus and Vilnius European Capital of Culture festivals (2017, 2009), V&A, Tokyo Experimental Festival, London Contemporary Music Festival, BBC Radio 3, Venice Biennale, ICA, Whitechapel Gallery, MATA Festival (New York), BBC Proms, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), November Music, Klangforum Wien, Apartment House, and Explore Ensemble. Neil also performs with artist Jennifer Walshe in the duo WACK, touring internationally.
Nina Whiteman is a vocalist, composer and multimedia artist based in Manchester, UK. Her work engages with ideas of lostness (including a series of maze-inspired compositions) as well as ecological concerns (such as current creations for Zubin Kanga’s UKRI-funded Cyborg Soloists project). Recent commissions have been from the Royal Opera House (developing an opera with writer Nadifa Mohamed) and Riot Ensemble. Nina is vocalist and co-director of Trio Atem and Artistic Director of Manchester Contemporary Youth Opera. She teaches at the RNCM, and is Reader in Composition at Royal Holloway, University of London.
ninawhiteman.com
An unclassifiable polymath, British-Nigerian multidisciplinary artist Nwando fabulates speculative fictions and alternate realities at the intersection of live art, experimental music and multi-sensory installation. She proposes new myths, rituals and provocations for perceptual change, radical care and transformation of the self and community, drawing from science fiction, Black Atlantic ritual cultures, biophilia, neuroscience, her own neurodivergency and Nigerian heritage.
Awards include: An Ivor Novello nomination, an Oram Award, and the Steve Reid Innovation award. Her debut album was released in 2022 on Matthew Herbert’s Accidental Records to critical acclaim.
Commissions include compositions for London Sinfonietta, Aurora Orchestra, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Opera North and Sky Arts.
Her work including live art gigs, sound art installations and curated happenings, has been performanced at Barbican, Southbank Centre, Wellcome Collection, Tempo Festival (Rio de Janeiro), Hepworth Wakefield, Melbourne Science Gallery, Tate Britain, Art/Science Museum, Singapore.
