Artist Biographies

Kevin T. Allen

Kevin T. Allen is an award winning filmmaker and sound artist living in Brooklyn. He has created sound-installation work for the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Third Coast International Audio Festival. He most recently completed at yearlong sound ethnography on trains in North and South America called American Transit.

Kristi A. Allik

Kristi A. Allik was born in Canada and has received degrees from University of Toronto (Bachelor of Music), Princeton University (M.A. in Music Composition), and University of Southern California (D.M.A. in Music Composition). She has received numerous commissions and awards, including Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants, Chalmers Award, and has won prizes from the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition and Ars Electronica.Allik's work synthesizes the stylistic and cultural resources of atonality, jazz, and Estonian music. Her works, which include electroacoustic music, multimedia works, orchestral works, opera, and chamber music, have been performed in Europe, U.S.A., South America and Canada. Currently she is Associate Professor at Queen's University, where she is Director of the Electroacoustic Music Studios and the Computer Laboratory for Applications in Music. She teaches courses in electroacoustic music composition, computer music, multimedia, and jazz arranging.Allik's most recent compositions and performances include "~infoweaver", which was commissioned by the New Music Concerts through the Canada Council, and has been performed at numerous venues, including the Robert Gill Theatre in Toronto, thePrimavera en la Habana International Music Festival in Cuba, The Performance Arts Series at Queen's University and the Festival on the St. Lawrence. She is currently working on a digital music theatre piece titled "Hole in One".

Adam Basanta

Adam Basanta is a Music major at SFU's School of Contemporary Arts, studying electroacoustic composition with Barry Truax. In his compositions, Adam tries to preserve a connection to the real world while engaging with acousmatic techniques. He is particularly interested in semiotic approaches to electroacoustic composition, compositional use of sound phenomenology, as well as found sound environments. His compositions have been performed at concerts and festivals throughout North America, and have been recipients of national awards. www.myspace.com/adambasanta.

Martin Bedard

Martin Bedard earned his master's degree in electroacoustic composition under the direction of composer Yves Daoust and Andre Fecteau at the Conservatoire de musique de Montreal, graduating with honours. His keen interest in film language and sound culture should provide him ample new creative avenues to explore for future projects. He is currently a lecturer and a PhD student in electroacoustic composition with composer Robert Normandeau at Université de Montréal. He also teaches at the Conservatoire de musique de Montreal in the electroacoustic composition class.

Nicolas Bernier

Nicolas Bernier is a composer and sound artist based in Montreal. Mixing both popular and academic music backgrounds his works are eclectic but still always look for a balance between the cerebral and the sensual, and between organic sound sources and digital processing. He is the founder of the sound art microorganism Ekumen and the artistic director of Réseaux, a prominant electroacoustic concert producer in Quebec and Canada.

Hervé Birolini

Hervé Birolini studied electroacoustic composition at the Centre Européen de Recherche Musicale (CERM) from 1990 to 1993. He went on to complete a postgraduate diploma in audiovisual production, before joining the Paris-based GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) in 1994 as chief sound engineer for the Multiphonie and Présences électroniques concert series. This involvement would ultimately inspire him to start writing his own music in 2000.

Viv Corringham

Viv Corringham is a British sound artist, currently based in Minnesota, USA, who has worked internationally since 1984 in performance, installation and soundwalks. She explores people's relationship with familiar places and how that links to an interior landscape of memory, history and association. She was a 2006 McKnight Composer Fellow.

Kenneth Emig

Kenneth Emig is a transdisciplinary artist who integrates sound, sculpture, optics, dance and technology within his artistic practice. His artwork and aesthetic are influenced by the background of the acoustic design of telephones and research of large-scale collaborative environments over broadband internet. He has exhibited and performed across Canada.

Emilie Cecilia LeBel

Emilie is an emerging composer based in Toronto. Her compositions aim to avoid and break traditional boundaries in style, form and substance. She strives to create music that is imaginative, embraces the unusual and draws from a wide spectrum of sounds. Emilie has studied at the University of Victoria, Harris Institute for the Arts and York University. Most recently she completed a long-term composition residency at The Banff Centre. She will be starting doctoral studies in composition at the University of Toronto this fall. website: www.ceceproductions.ca

Marilyn Lerner

Exhilarating jazz pianist/improviser Marilyn Lerner performs to acclaim internationally, from her native Montreal to Havana, from Jerusalem to Amsterdam and the Ukraine. Her groundbreaking recordings have garnered much recognition, including her 2 solo recordings Luminance and Romanian Fantasy and Special Angel with Sonny Greenwich. Her intimate knowledge of the piano, combined with a fearless experimental and passionate spirit render her a true original. Lerner's work spans the worlds of jazz, creative improvisation, klezmer, and 20th century classical music. She composes for film, theatre, radio and television. She is also an audio artist and has created a series of soundscapes using samples of sounds she collects in the natural environment.

Robert C. F. Mulder

Robert C. F. Mulder was born in The Hague, Holland in the last century. After much probing he will admit to being an independent interdisciplinary artist with a passion for the real-time interaction of light, sound and imagination. This passion has resulted in a long exploratory path of discovery in the domain of live media arts ˜ the integration of visuals, music, and drama ˜ in performance utilizing new means. He was (and still is) inspired by the interdisciplinary ideas/works of Le Corbusier & Edgar Varése, Louis-Bertrant Castel, Thomas Wilfred, Bulat Galeyev, and Leon Theremin. Among his major commissions are new media and integrated arts commissions for the Canada Pavilion of Expo 1986, Ars Electronica Festival, (Austria 1992), the Berlin Music Biennale (Germany,1997), and New Music Concerts (1992 & 2000). He has won awards/prizes from the Bourges Electroacoustic Music Competition and Prix Ars Electronica. His works have been staged, screened or exhibited in Brazil, Canada, Europe, Estonia, USA, and Russia. He is a founding member of LEARK, a live improvisatory laptop band. His most satisfying event of this Century was the creation of an interactive CD-ROM about the passing of the Millennium Year in partnership with the extended public school community of a small Ontario village.

David Ogborn

Freely traversing borders and genres, David Ogborn is a composer, guitarist and performer of electronic sound and video. At the centre of his work is the combination of traditional performance arts with electronic elements - whether these be recordings of diverse outdoor environments around the world, improvisations on a laptop or altered guitar, video projections influenced by live musical gestures, or massive synthesized sounds on immersive arrays of loudspeakers. His sound installation Dream House was featured at the Canadian Music Centre's Chalmers House during Toronto's inaugural Nuit Blanche and his live electronic music for Fritz Lang's silent film Metropolis was a special event at the Esprit Orchestra's 2007 New Wave festival. In November 2007 the Transatlantic Transient tour saw Ogborn perform on guitar and electronics in Amsterdam, Belfast, Berlin, and several Canadian cities. He is an Associate of the Canadian Music Centre, a founding member of the angelusnovus.net group, and serves on the board of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC). website: www.davidogborn.net

Barry Prophet

Barry Prophet is a composer, percussionist, and sculptor whose music has appeared in galleries and theatres in Canada, United States and Europe. Creating unique sounds since 1979, he has exhibited and performed on his percussion sculptures 'Glass Box', 'Revolving Tone Door' and 'TransparentTone Arch' at the Art Gallery of Windsor (1986), Bloomsburg Theatre (1989) Bloomsburg, USA, the Art Gallery of Algoma (1989, 1991, 1992) Sault Ste. Marie, Thunder Bay Art Gallery ((1989, 1990, 1991), White Water Gallery (1989) North Bay, McMichael Canadian Art Collection (1994) Kleinberg, Pekao Gallery, (1997) Toronto and the Canadian Sculpture Centre (2002) Toronto. Barry's micro tonally tuned glass lithophones have been featured in performance venues throughout the country and his 1997 recording 'Crystal Bones' (CD) has been choreographed to by international dance artists. Barry has led traditional and experimental percussion programs for students and educators across Canada since 1983.

Stefan A. Rose

Stefan A. Rose is an artist interested in creative and documentary forms, using photography, videography, and poetry. He is documentary photographer for the Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound, and for New Adventures in Sound Art, and uses a large-format panoramic camera among others for his creative work. He graduated from Mount Allison University with an Engineering Certificate, Bachelor of Science, and Bachelor of Fine Arts, and resides with his wife, artist Laura De Decker, in Waterloo, Ontario. Stefan has exhibited his photographs in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and has received a New Brunswick Arts Award and the Equinox Emerging Artist Video Award. He has collaborated with other artists across many media; his collaborative works include Townsend Retraced (with Laura Cunningham and Hilary Martin); Death by Chocolate (with photographer Andrew Wright); and several video works commissioned by the Penderecki String Quartet, to accompany their performances across Canada and internationally. His first book of poetry, The House That Stands, was published in 2008 by Anchorage Press, and the book won the 2008 Alcuin Society Canadian Book Design Award in the poetry category (designer: Andrew Steeves). Stefan's panoramic camera photo exhibition Vernacular Veracity will be part of the Contemporary Art Forum of Kitchener and Area (CAFKA) in September 2009.

Benjamin Thigpen

Nomad, born in the United States, with degrees in English Literature, Comparative Literature and "Esthetics, Technologies and Artistic Creations," immigrated to Paris at the age of 31. Since then, he has composed at GRM (Paris), at Musiques et Recherches (Belgium), at SCRIME (Bordeaux), at EMS (Stockholm), at the Visby International Centre for Composers (Sweden), at STEIM (Amsterdam), at Djerassi (California), at l'Espace Totem (Montreal), in his bedroom and in the train. After 6 years teaching computer music at Ircam (Paris), followed by a brief period at the University of Washington (Seattle), he currently teaches at the Conservatory of Cuneo (Italy) and at the the Royal Conservatory of Mons (Belgium). As a free-lance musician and programmer, he collaborates with the State University of New York (USA), with New Adventures in Sound Art (Toronto), with La Kitchen.com (Paris), with Noise Watchers Unlimited (Luxembourg), with CIRM (Nice), with the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (Milan) and with Ircam (Paris). His music is concerned with issues of energy, density, complexity, movement, simultaneity and violence, and he often works extensively with space as a primary compositional parameter. He thinks that music does not exist in time but rather creates it, and considers that music is not the art of sound but the art of the transcendence of sound.

Simon Trottier

Folk and experimental guitarist from Montreal, Simon Trottier is engaged in a number of projects and music groups such as Ferriswheel, Timber Timbre, Ghost Bees as well as working with electroacoustic composer Nicolas Bernier with whom he created two albums, "objet abandonné en mer" (2007) and "...et retrouvé en forêt" (2009).

Annette Vande Gorne

Following her classical studies in Belgium, Annette Vande Gorne chanced upon acousmatics when on a training position in France. Instantly convinced, by the works of François Bayle and Pierre Henry, of the revolutionary nature of this art form (disruption of perception, renewal of composition through spectromorphological writing and listening conduction, historical importance of the movement), she took a few training positions to grab its basics, then studied musicology (ULB, Brussels) and electroacoustic composition with Guy Reibel and Pierre Schaeffer at the Conservatoire national supérieur in Paris. She founded and managed Musiques & Recherches and the Métamorphoses d'Orphée studios (Ohain, 1982). She also launched a series of concerts and an acousmatics festival called L'Espace du son (Brussels, 1984; annual since 1994), after assembling a 60-loudspeaker system, an acousmonium, derived from the sound projection system designed by François Bayle. She is the editor of the musical aesthetics review Lien and Répertoire électrO-CD (1993, '97, '98), a directory of electroacoustic works. She also founded the composition competition Métamorphoses and the spatialized performance competition Espace du son. She gradually put together Belgium's only documentation centre on that art, available online at www.musiques-recherches.org She gives numerous spatialized acousmatic music performances, both of her own works and the works of international composers. Professor of electroacoustic composition at the Royal Conservatory in Liège (1986), then Brussels ('87) and Mons ('93), she founded an autonomous Electroacoustic Music section at the latter, later (2002) integrated to the European graduate studies framework. Since 1999, she has been managing an international summer training session on spatialization and - since 1987 - on electroacoustic composition. Her works can be heard in every festival and on every radio program presenting media-based (previously 'tape') music. Her current work focuses on various energetic and kinesthetic archetypes. Nature and the physical world are models for an abstract and expressive musical language. She is passionate about two other fields of research: the various relationships to word, sound, and meaning provided by electroacoustic technology, and the composition of space seen as the fifth musical parameter and its relationship to the other four parameters and the archetypes being used. Her work falls essentially in the acousmatic category, including the Tao suite and Ce qu'a vu le vent d'Est, which renews electroacoustic music's ties with the past, with a few incursions in other art forms, including theatre, dance, sculpture, etc. [English translation: François Couture, ix-07]

Artists

Kevin T. Allen
Kristi A. Allik
Adam Basanta
Martin Bedard
Nicolas Bernier
Hervé Birolini
Viv Corringham
Kenneth Emig
Emilie Cecilia LeBel
Marilyn Lerner
Robert C. F. Mulder
David Ogborn
Barry Prophet
Stefan A. Rose
Benjamin Thigpen
Simon Trottier
Annette Vande Gorne