Damian Barbeler (Festival Curator)
Damian Barbeler is the creator of the hiberNATION Festival. He is an award-winning composer and multimedia artist recognised for his playful artistic style and lush, emotional creations inspired by textures and patterns from nature.
He regularly collaborates with colleagues from diverse fields including film, architecture, software design, media arts, dance, and incorporates visual, sculptural and light elements with all his music.
His work often emphasises tactile experiences of physical places and relationships. His work (with artist Tim Jetis) Visiting Eucalyptus is a good example, where 6 months of travelling, photographing Eucalyptus trees resulted in a concert work, installation, book, film and website.
Damian has twice received the ‘Recommended Work’ award at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers and was a finalist in the Toru Takemitsu Prize in Tokyo in 2008.
June WAS to see the premiere of his major trans-music work “Paper Forest” for Jane Sheldon and Continuum Saxophone Quartet, in the Dangrove art space in Sydney. But don't worry... that piece is on it's way soon... somehow!
Timothy Constable
Timothy Constable is an award-winning percussionist and composer. He is a member of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. A compelling, creative and sensitive performer, he has performed as concerto and chamber music soloist at the majority of Australian classical music festivals, in New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, UK, Ireland, Senegal, USA, China, Korea, Nepal and South-East Asia. He was the artistic director of Synergy Percussion between 2009 and 2017, during which time the group undertook some of its most ambitious work, including the 40th anniversary season in 2014, and extensive collaboration with renowned ensemble Noreum Machi (S. Korea), commissions of Steve Reich, Anthony Pateras, several recordings and the video project 40under40. Recent works include Omer Backley-Astrachan (Maholohet Festival, Israel), Orava String Quartet (Australian Festival of Chamber Music), Cinemusica (Australian Chamber Orchestra), Ordinary Time and Spirals (Southern Cross Soloists), and numerously for Noreum Machi, Synergy Percussion and Taikoz. Contemporary dance score credits include Meryl Tankard, Shaun Parker, Legs on the Wall and Dance Makers Collective. He is committed to both new and ancient music, with a large body of World/Australasian premieres to his name, including Steve Reich Mallet Quartet, György Ligeti Síppal, Dobbal, Nádihegedüvel, Anthony Pateras Beauty Will Be Amnesiac Or Will Not Be At All, and Flesh and Ghost, works by Simon Holt, Lisa Lim, Arvo Pärt, Gerard Brophy among many others. In the realm of ancient music, he has undertaken detailed study with Senegalese master drummer Aly N’Dyiaye Rose, and (currently) Korean Jangoo with Kim Yeong-Taek and Kim Chong-Hee. He is a Freedman music fellow, an Elizabethan Theatre Trust scholar, a university medalist of Newcastle University, and a graduate of Royal College of Music in Stockholm, Sweden.
Liam Mulligan (Festival Curator)
Liam Mulligan (b.1997) is a composer, film maker, visual artist, curator and academic based in Sydney, Australia. He was recently awarded First Class Honours at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music for his thesis ‘Counterpoint Between Different Mediums’. His music is substantially inspired by experimental electronic noise, with strong aleatoric elements, and he combines his practices in varying art forms to create multimodal compositions. Liam is known for creative work that is rhythmic, audiovisual, electroacoustic, cross-genre and contains elements of humour. His work has been featured in concerts and events at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Sydney’s City Recital Hall, Vivid Sydney, hiberNATION Festival and playlists curated by Making Waves.
Liam has had a hand in multiple large-scale projects in his young career. He co-founded new music collective Konzertprojekt and has worked with them as a composer, performer, sound engineer, social media content creator and curator. Notably, he was project manager for the 2019 ‘Light Qualities’ mini-festival as part of Vivid Sydney, consisting of four concerts across four weeks which showcased more than ten commissions and numerous emerging ensembles and soloists. In 2020 he is co-curator of the online hiberNATION Festival of the Lo-fi alongside Damian Barbeler and Elizabeth Jigalin, which gives performers, composers and audiences a platform to make and enjoy art in the comfort of their own homes. By the festival’s completion, over 50 artists will have contributed to over 100 live streams.
Benjamin Carey
Benjamin Carey is a Sydney-based composer, improviser and academic. He makes electronic music using the modular synthesiser, develops interactive music software and creates audio-visual works. Ben’s research and practice is concerned with musical interactivity, generativity and the delicate dance between human and machine agencies in composition and performance. Ben has released four albums; ANTIMATTER (2019, Hospital Hill Records), derivations | human-machine improvisations (2014, self-released), Ben + Zamyatin (2013, Not-Applicable Records), and Wingello Sessions, (2014, self-released). His work has been performed and exhibited nationally and internationally at numerous festivals and conferences including the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music (UK), the dBâle festival of electronic music (Switzerland), the New York City Electronic Music Festival (USA), the Totally Huge New Music Festival (Australia), IRCAM Live @ La Gaité Lyrique (France), the Festival de Mùsica Electroacùstica (Chile), the International Computer Music Conference (Australia) and the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (USA, UK and Australia). Ben collaborates regularly with artists/ensembles such as Sonya Holowell, Zubin Kanga, Joshua Hyde, Jane Sheldon, Ollie Bown, Alon Ilsar, Ensemble Offspring, Sydney Chamber Opera, and many others. Ben completed a PhD in interactive musical composition at the University of Technology Sydney in 2016, and is currently Lecturer in Composition and Music Technology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
Elizabeth Jigalin
Elizabeth is a composer. Her friends recently described her music making as ‘beautiful, organised chaos’ and an ‘awesome sandpit’ that she likes to invites others along to play in, explore and sometimes get a little messy in. You’ll often find Elizabeth composing for a range of musicians and instrumental forces (from music for a field of theremins…to string trios…to red objects), performing and composing new soundtracks for silent films on the piano (frequently in collaboration with violinist Jane Aubourg), making music outside the usual order of things with "the music box project" and with guitarist Danica Hobden as "dnka+zil".
Lewis Mosley
Lewis Mosley is a composer and guitarist working on Gadigal Land. His works often stand at the intersection between composition and installation art, with a focus on the sculptural and performative aspects of the music. Being a guitarist, Lewis has played in played in bands in the Sydney music scene from a young age; an influence that is present in many of his works.
riverkid/Niall FitzSimons
Niall aka riverkid is a hip hop beatmaker and DJ, a singer and trombonist, ethnomusicologist and a radio host with Radio Skid Row. He has released several mixtapes of 'lofi beats to sleep/study/relax to', including 2020's 'dreams+memories', leaning heavily on samples from his collection of cheesy light orchestral pop covers records so popular with middle Australia through the mid-late 20th century and clogging op shop record shelves across the country. Full of string flourishes, chimes, harps, bells and warm organs, his lofi beats are like the soft embrace we've all been missing. For the festival he'll be trying to translate these beats to a live context for the first time, or maybe just doing some jammy voice and trombone loops or maybe both who knows.
Claire Edwardes
Internationally acclaimed percussion soloist, chamber musician and artistic director of Sydney based maverick new music group, Ensemble Offspring, Claire Edwardes has been described by the press as a ‘sorceress of percussion’ performing with ‘spellbinding intensity’ and ‘graceful virtuosity’. Her award-winning performances combine a theatrical energy with charismatic and original interpretations bringing to life the varied array of music she performs. Graduating as Student of the Year in 1997 from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, where Daryl Pratt was her teacher, she went on to win the coveted Symphony Australia Young Performers Award in 1999. She subsequently relocated to the Netherlands to undertake a Masters Degree at the Rotterdam and Amsterdam Conservatories under Richard Jansen, Peter Prommel and Jan Pustjens. Resident there for seven years, she was the recipient of many international awards and prizes including first place at the 2000 Tromp Percussion Competition and 2001 Llangollen International Instrumentalist. Claire was the 2005 MCA/Freedman Fellow and she is the three-time winner (2016, 2012, 2007) of the APRA Art Music Award for Excellence by an Individual for her contribution to Australian music. In 2014 she was granted a prestigious Australia Council Music Fellowship and in 2016 Ensemble Offspring won the APRA Art Music Award for Excellence by an Organisation. Claire has performed concertos with all of the Australian and New Zealand orchestras as well as numerous European orchestras and has premiered works by an array of composers worldwide such as Harrison Birtwistle, James McMillan, Matthew Hindson, Elena Kats-Chernin and Matthew Shlomowitz. In her role as Artistic Director of Ensemble Offspring she programs and performs to the highest level, some of the most innovative and cutting-edge new music being presented in the world today. Claire is endorsed by Mike Balter Mallets and Adams Percussion. She teaches percussion at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and maintains a busy concert schedule throughout Australia and abroad.
James Hazel
James Hazel is an artist/composer/researcher (and aspiring neo-luddite) particularly interested in resistant text and sonic practices (and making in general) that emerge within the conditions of neo-liberal pre(care)ity - as well as the way in which neo-liberal imaginaries and network-configurations a(e)ffect ontologies and intimacies. In this space, Hazel's practice involves installation, performance-texts, video and assemblage, while working with materiality such as sound, noise, language, and found-objects/subjects. Of late, Hazel's practice is predominantly led by collaborative encounters with resonating-comrades. James is seeking long walks on the beach; thick post-internet altruisms; mysticisms and ritualisation; and digital ensoundings and archives - like the ones he has been involved in making: contscore.com; adsrzine.com (w/ Elia Bosshard and Sonya Hollowell) and "The Opera Company" (w/ Joe Franklin and Tina Stefanou).
Lamorna Nightingale
Lamorna Nightingale is a freelance flautist, concert presenter, educator and publisher who is passionate about the future of art music in Australia. Lamorna has many years experience working in the orchestral sector, performing regularly with the ACO, SSO and AOBO. She is a core member of the new music group, Ensemble Offspring, a group with a strong commitment to the nurturing of Australian composers. Recent highlights performing with Ensemble Offspring include Classical:NEXT Festival Rotterdam 2019, Solitude European Tour 2019, World Premier performance of Fantasie for solo flute by Elisabeth Younan at Lone Hemispheres 2019. Since 2017 Lamorna has curated and produced a new concert series Sydney ‘BackStage Music’. This series was initiated to create a community that supports, encourages and fosters a culture for living music. From 2017-19 BackStage have presented 10 programs which showcase early career and established local and international artists in back to back sets of living music. Lamorna has created several recordings of new Australian flute music with repertoire selected to suit flute players with less experience with new music. This music is now widely performed by students and professionals Australia wide and internationally, transforming for many flute players their experience of new Australian music. She has recently created a new album of Australian music for flute and electronics with an associated education kit designed to introduce school students to electroacoustic music and contemporary Australian classical composition. Lamorna has also created several pedagogical volumes of repertoire for young flute players through her publishing company ‘Fluteworthy’.
James Nightingale
James Nightingale is a saxophonist based in Sydney, Australia. He is the alto saxophonist with the saxophone quartet Continuum Sax and has performed regularly as a casual musician with Sydney’s orchestras since 1993. He performs as a soloist and chamber musician, including recent appearances for Backstage Music, the Melbourne International Saxophone Festival (2019) and for the Canberra International Music Festival (with Ensemble Offspring, Continuum Sax and as a casual musician). His recordings of saxophone music by Alan Holley and Andrew Ford have been released on CD. Performances with Continuum Sax for Phoenix Central Park are now available on YouTube. James has been a leading exponent of new Australian music for saxophone, commissioning new works and giving premiere performances, both as a soloist and with Continuum Sax. Between 2007 and 2015, James was the President of the New Music Network. James studied saxophone at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music between 1989 and 1992, graduating as the first saxophonist to earn the Bachelor of Music degree from The University of Sydney and as Student of the Year. From 1997, James began a Masters Degree in Performance at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, completing a thesis on Paul Mefano’s work for solo tenor saxophone, Periple. After completing this degree he then began a PhD at the University of Queensland in the field of Cultural Policy Studies, completing his doctorate in 2011.
Gabrielle Cadenhead
Gabrielle Cadenhead is an emerging writer and composer who blurs the line between music and poetry. She regularly weaves together both her disciplines, and is interested in the symbiosis of creativity, activism and faith. She is in her final year of studying English and Composition at the University of Sydney and Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Gabrielle is a founding member of Konzertprojekt composer collective and has composed for Vivid Sydney, Fluteworthy, Gondwana Choirs, Sydney Chamber Opera musicians and Sydney Youth Orchestras. In 2018, she performed Echo for poetry and solo flute at Extended Play New Music Festival, which also received an Honourable Mention in the Flute New Music Consortium’s Composition Competition. Her poetry and fiction have been published in ARNA and the University of Sydney Student Anthology, and she writes for CutCommon Magazine.
Connor Malanos
Connor Malanos is a B.Mus (Music-Ed) graduate from the Sydney Con with a background in classical viola, and a foreground in making weird sounds with his mouth. He has toured all over Australia and New Zealand delivering Beatboxing programs for students and workshops for teacher Professional Development, as well as filming his documentary on the topic. Connor has been extremely fortunate to spend time performing and working with some of Australia's best musicians across a wide range of genres including Jazz, Hip-Hop, Rap, Folk, Electronic, A Cappella, Connor is a strong advocate of 'the whole musician' and rounded development across a broad range of skills through Project Based Learning.
Adam Melzer
Adam Melzer is an English born, Australian-based composer. His compositional work is varied, but more recently has focus in on both acousmatic and experimental music domains. He has recently graduated from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music with the result of a First Class Bachelor of Composition (Honours). In addition, he has previously been a featured artist in the November 2019 playlist "Evolving Waves", curated by Making Waves New Music. Adam is also a multi-instrumentalist. He holds a High Distinction (A+) AMEB Certificate of Performance in Piano, a Credit (B+) in AMEB 8th Grade Trombone, and has participated in Australian Youth Orchestra Young Symphonists Camps playing 1st and 3rd trombone (2013 - 2015). Furthermore, Adam is a passionate piano teacher, currently working for Archadenia Music 2018 – present). He has also done volunteer work for the Australian Children's Music Foundation (2014), and has previously stage managed the Jazz Stars of the Future Stage at the Manly Jazz Festival (2016 – 2017).
Jaslyn Robertson
Jaslyn Robertson is a young Melbourne-based composer navigating a developing career in music with her interests in social justice. An excitement for unusual sounds, alternate tuning systems and new forms of notation draws her to unique instruments including theremin, quartertone flugelhorn and analogue synths. At Monash University she studied with David Chisholm and Thomas Reiner, and was awarded the prize for best Honours in Music for her composition folio and research on alternate gazes in the music of gender oppressed people. She has composed for world-class performers including Tristram Williams, the Argonaut String Quartet, Landesjugendensemble Neue Musik Berlin and Sydney’s ‘the music box project’. Her work has received multiple performances in Germany, including at the Deutsche Oper as part of Klangwerkstatt Festival für Neue Musik Berlin, as well as in Canada in Toronto Creative Music Lab. Locally, she has had multiple works performed at the Bendigo International Festival for Exploratory Music and Tilde New Music Festival. She has recently been awarded the Monash Animated Notation Ensemble commissioning prize, to create an animated score in 2020 for a high profile performance by an ensemble of staff and postgraduate students. She is a regular participant of the Little Songs of the Mutilated collaborative composition project, often appears on Making Waves playlists and recently collaborated on an audio/visual work for the Lifted Brow with artist/poet Eloise Grills. Her work Wandering for quartertone flugelhorn was awarded the 2015 Monash University Composition Prize. Jaslyn is also a passionate advocate of diversity in the arts and has presented workshops, papers and seminars on this topic at BIFEM, Melbourne Music Analysis Summer School, the Women in Creative Arts conference at ANU and on the radio program Eclectica 3MDR. She started the Queer and Now interview series in CutCommon Magazine.
Rhys LIttle
Rhys Little (b.1998) is a Sydney Based composer, performer and conductor with a young but packed-full career in many sides of the music industry. An alumni of the Conservatorium High School, he studied composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (University of Sydney) under the tutelage of Liza Lim, Damien Ricketson, Gerard Brophy and others. He holds a Bachelor of Music (Composition) with 1st Class Honours. Rhys’s work as a composer overlaps many genres of ‘classical’ music, such that no two works are the same. His work is at once modernist, romantic, sonorist, calm, agitated, structured, free and always unyieldingly humanist. Some pieces are multimodal, involving spoken text and electronics, where others are purely acoustic. All of Rhys’s music is concerned with portraying the subtlety of human existence and experience. Rhys has worked with Sydney Chamber Opera, Sydney Conservatorium Ensembles as a composer, conductor, euphonium/trombonist, and sung with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Sydney Philharmonia Choirs. He is a founding member student-run new music initiative Konzertprojekt.
Anthony Pasquill
Listed by Limelight magazine as a Rising Star in Australia’s choral scene, Anthony has worked with some of today's leading conductors, preparing choirs across the UK and Australia. He currently works as Musical Director of Bel a cappella (Sydney) as well as the accompanist at Wenona School and Monte Sant' Angelo (Sydney) having worked as Assistant Chorus Master of the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and the Associate Chorus Master of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus
Alexis Weaver
Alexis Weaver is an electroacoustic composer and sound artist based in Sydney, Australia. Alexis draws on field recordings of animals, insects and everyday objects to create unique and adventurous radiophonic and acousmatic works. While her principal interest lies in composing fixed-media acousmatic music, she has also composed soundtracks for animation, short videos, radio, theatre, and dance. Alexis’ work has been broadcast in Australia, France and Scotland, as well as featured on RMN Classical’s Electroacoustic and Beyond II (2017). While studying a Bachelor of Composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Alexis was awarded People’s Choice Award and First Place in the 2015 and 2016 University of Sydney Verge Awards respectively for her acousmatic works. In January 2018, Alexis was awarded the National Council of Women’s Australia Day Prize for her research undertaken during her Honours year on the visibility and practice of female electroacoustic composers. She is currently a Master of Music candidate at the Sydney Conservatorium, where she also teaches composition. Her research has focused on the transferral of high-quality acousmatic music to everyday, portable diffusion systems – naming this new movement Small Diffusion. Alexis is also co-founder of composer collective lost+sound, who in 2018 launched a concert series celebrating emerging artists working in experimental music.
Sian
Sian Lindsay is a Sydney based composer. She grew up playing clarinet and developed a keen interest in composing electroacoustic music, writing for small chamber groups with electronics. While completing her Bachelor degree at the Sydney Conservatorium of music, Sian was drawn to the modular synthesiser and has since started improvising and exploring the sound world of analog synths.
Maddy Briggs
Maddy Briggs is an emerging composer based in Sydney. Her pieces often create a soundscape, with real sourced sounds peverted by electronic means, in order to create a unique and intriguing listening experience. Her interest lies in translating ideas across different artistic mediums, as well as using composition as a device to navigate ideas of complex emotion or social unrest. Currently studying Composition and English at The University of Sydney and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, she became a member of the composer collective Konzertprojekt in 2020. She has also been commissioned Vivid Sydney 2019 and been featured the 2018 Extended Play Festival.
Ciaran Frame
Ciaran Frame is a composer and educator based in Melbourne. Having completed his Honours degree at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Ciaran is passionate about cross-disciplinary collaboration and education, working at the intersection of data, technology and music. His work has been featured and premiered around Australia and internationally, with recent projects including a regional pilot program of synthesiser workshops for young children, as well as making music out of lichen in the Arctic Circle.
Amanda Cole
Amanda Cole is a composer of instrumental and electronic New Music. Her compositions feature microtonal structures, interference beats and fusions of electronic and acoustic timbres. Amanda’s compositions include percussion trios for a purpose built Microtonal Glass Harmonica, a string quartet for string harmonics and sine tones and an audio-visual installation that maps pitch to hue. Amanda’s compositions have been performed by Synergy Percussion, Ensemble Offspring, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Chorus, The Noise String Quartet and Kroumata (Sweden). Her music has been performed at the Sydney Opera House, Art Gallery of NSW, Museum of Contemporary Art, Casula Powerhouse and Salamanca Arts Centre. Her piece Barcelona Bells for carillon and sine tones was recently premiered in Barcelona at the Palau de la Generalitat by Grace Chan. In 2016 Amanda collaborated with visual artist Micheala Gleave and programmer Warren Armstrong to create A Galaxy of Suns, which is a smart phone app and associated choral performance that ‘plays’ the stars as they rise and set over 360˚ of the horizon – for any location on Earth. The choral version of this piece has been performed at Dark Mofo (2016), Bristol Biennial (2016), Melbourne Festival (2017) and the Horizon Festival (2019). In 2013 Amanda was awarded an Australia Council Creative Arts Fellowship. In 2019 she was awarded the Apra Professional Development Award in the Art Music category. Amanda has a Bachelor of Music (Hons.1) and a PhD in Composition from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
Zubin Kanga
Zubin Kanga is a pianist, composer, improviser and technologist. Over the last decade he has established his reputation in Europe and Australia as a leading innovator of new approaches to the piano. His work in recent years has focused on new models of interaction between a live musician and new technologies, using film, AI, motion capture, 3D modelling, animation and virtual reality. Zubin has performed at many international festivals and international venues including the BBC Proms, London Contemporary Music Festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK) Melbourne Festival, Sydney Festival (Australia), Festival Presénces (France), Klang Festival (Denmark), Darmstadt, Podium Festival (Germany), Resonator Festival (Sweden), Gaudeamus Festival, November Music (Netherlands), CUBE, Graz (Austria) and Borealis Festival (Norway). He has performed several concerti under the composer’s baton, including with Thomas Adès and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and with Beat Furrer and the London Sinfonietta. He is a member of Ensemble Offspring and has performed duos with Brett Dean, Rolf Hind, Thomas Adés and Jack Liebeck. Zubin has collaborated with many of the world’s leading composers including Michael Finnissy, George Benjamin, Nicole Lizée, Steve Reich, and Liza Lim and premiered more than 120 new works. His collaboration with Alexander Schubert on WIKI-PIANO.NET is being performed in a 25 city international tour and has been covered by The Times (UK), WDR (Germany National Radio), Limelight Magazine, Sydney Morning Herald, German national television, BBC Radio 3 and the BBC World Service. As a composer, his solo piano works have been performed at the Waterloo, Bangor and Cambridge Music Festivals and broadcast on the BBC and ABC. His work, Dead Leaves, was selected to represent Australia at the 2018 International Rostrum of Composers and his viola-piano duo, Spider Web Castle, was premiered with Brett Dean at City Recital Hall, Sydney. A Masters and PhD graduate of the Royal Academy of Music, London, Zubin was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Nice and IRCAM, Paris before becoming a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Jonathan Watson
A human pursuing experimental sound that assists in the human story.
Kun Ho Lim
Hi. My name is Kun Ho Lim AKA Limited Days. I've been into producing future bass, experimental pop songs. My ultimate goal with my music career is to express my identity. I was born in Korea (south), then moved to Vietnam and graduated my high school and came to Australia. With all these cultures that I have experienced. I was searching for a method to express my self. In my case. It was music.
Lachlan Foster
Lachlan Foster is an undergraduate of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, with a keen interest in opera, theatre and electronic compositions. Lachlan also conducts chamber ensembles. His electronic work "Ashfall" was performed at Vivid 2019 with the composer-performer collective, Konzertprojekt. Lachlan has since parted with Konzertprojekt to pursue his own, individual projects, including a one-act musical centered around the judgment of humanity by a group of gods. He is also preparing a proposal for his Masters in 2021, in which he hopes to write a chamber opera.
"Make a Monster with Lachlan Foster" is a livestream dedicated to taking sounds people are familiar with and distorting them into new, vibrant creatures. Will they be beautiful, or will they be horrifying? Lachlan hopes to find out with the audience's help.
Jessica Scott
Sydney-based flutist Jessica Scott recently completed her Bachelor of Music in Performance at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, studying Flute with James Kortum. In 2020, she has been accepted into the Royal Academy of Music, London to study a Postgraduate Certificate (graduating Master of Arts). In 2021, Jessica has been selected as a Performance Fellow for the soundSCAPE, Nief-Norf and Bang on a Can Summer Festivals. Past performances have included world premieres of works by Elia Bosshard, Josephine Macken and Keyna Wilkins, alongside ongoing collaborations with Elizabeth Jigalin and Alexis Weaver. Jessica is a core and founding member of Ensemble Muse, a modern music group who aim to bring a gender-balanced and diverse approach to the programming of new music. Representing the fragility and beauty of nature through improvisation forms a core part of Jessica’s artistic practice. Past performances on this theme have included the Yerrabingin Rooftop Concert Series (SCM Improvised Ensemble), and the Lost + Sound Series in 2019. Other performance highlights have included the Chicago Midwest Clinic, Siteworks Festival in Bundanon and Backstage Music Series. In 2018, Jessica received the Peter Richardson Memorial Prize and was the NSW Flute Society Open Champion. In 2018, she also performed as a Finalist in the Sydney Eisteddfod Drs Orchestra Scholarship and Fine Music Young Virtuoso Award.
Mark Oliveiro
Technology jerry-rigged. Noise to frequency ratio imbalance. The aesthetics of error abound. Epic tech, noise rituals and the ambience of a system overload. Oliveiro is interested in explorations that include reconstructing lost or imagined performance traditions. Current interests include modular synthesis, instrumental deconstructions and black midi - all of which are featured in selected works composed in the return to the roaring Twenties. Deconstructions in Noise and Midi ft. Saxophones, Synthesizers, Soundcards and Speakers.
Emma Harlock
Emma Harlock is a Western Sydney based composer and performer. She completed a Master of Research at Western Sydney University, with the supervision of Associate Professor Bruce Crossman and Dr Clare Maclean, where her research focussed on exploring the cross-cultural connections between American minimalism and French spectralism. Her works, both scored and performative, focus on the exploration of evolving timbre and textures. Emma enjoys performing in her quasi-improvisational ambient duo Sonfa with Simon Gooden, a duo comprised of piano, bass guitar, and electronics. Her notated compositions sit somewhere between the minimalist, contemporary classical, and spectral genres.
Julian Day
Julian Day is an artist, composer and writer based in New York. Day has presented work at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, Jewish Museum, Fridman Gallery, MASS MoCA, Royal Academy of Music, California Pacific Triennial, Asia Pacific Triennial, Prague Quadrennial, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Institute of Modern Art, Artspace, Sydney Opera House, Carriageworks and Performance Space. His music has featured at such festivals as Bang On A Can Marathon, MATA Festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Spitalfields Music Festival, Queensland Music Festival, MONA FOMA and Liquid Architecture, performed by TILT Brass, Lisa Moore, Synergy Percussion, Australian String Quartet, Ensemble Offspring, Decibel, Intercurrent, The Song Company and Zubin Kanga. Since 2008 Day has facilitated Super Critical Mass, a ‘radical orchestra’ project that reimagines the traditional orchestra as a mobile and participatory vehicle for social interaction. In 2013 SCM opened the new Library of Birmingham, the largest such space in Europe, with a commission for 100 brass players featured on BBC Two’s The Culture Show. In 2011 SCM made the front page of the New York Times’ arts section for SWELTER. Day has won various awards including the ARTAND Credit Suisse Contemporary Art Award, Samstag Scholarship, Peggy Glanville Hicks Fellowship, and Australia Council and British Council fellowships. Beyond his art practice, Day is a writer, broadcaster and academic. He has curated many programs on experimental music on ABC and BBC radio, published with The MIT Press and Cambridge University Press, presented papers at Harvard, NYU, UCLA and Goldsmiths, and taught at Australian National University and Macquarie University. In 2018 he was accepted into the highly selective sound art MFA at Columbia University. His work has been acquired by Orange County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Justin Art House Museum, Wollongong Art Gallery and private collectors.
Michelle Nguyen
Michelle Nguyen is a composer and sound artist focusing on live processing and studio production. They are interested in exploring texture and how immersive sound worlds are created, as well as forming new ways to think about sound and music with current and upcoming technologies. Michelle has been a classically trained pianist since childhood and is interested in classical, ambient, dance, psychedelic, IDM, breakcore, experimental and improvised music. Having completed a Bachelor of Music with Honours (Composition) in 2018, Michelle has since been focussing on writing electronic music and incorporating elements of ambient, psychedelic, experimental, and noise music to create their soundscapes. Their work has been performed at Tilde New Music and Sound Art Festival and the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (BIFEM), and they occasionally perform at Make It Up Club. They also work in collaboration with Humphrey Cheung to create Wholegrain Ears, an interactive audio-visual installation. Together they have set up their work at many outdoor music festivals and nightclub events, including The Town, Esoteric Festival, Stacks On, and Newkind Festival. Currently they are creating with STRANGEkit, a multi-disciplinary artist collective from Monash Uni, and developing pieces for SIGNAL's Screen X Sound Commission.
Bree Van Reyk
Bree van Reyk is a drummer, percussionist, composer and sound artist who makes unconventional and tradition-challenging performance works. Her music resides in the intersection between contemporary classical, indie-rock and performance art and is equally warm-hearted, celebratory, and focussed on issues of equality. Bree has been commissioned by Sydney Festival, Sydney Chamber Opera, Ensemble Offspring, Canberra International Music Festival, Marrugeku, Urban Theatre Projects, Performance Space, Sydney Dance Company, The Letter String Quartet, Shaun Parker Company, fashion designer Bianca Spender, AGNSW, GOMA and the MCA. Her performance career includes tours and recordings with artists such as Gurrumul, Paul Kelly, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Synergy Percussion, Ensemble Offspring, Holly Throsby, Sarah Blasko, Marcus Whale, Laura Jean, Sally Seltmann, Toby Martin, Darren Hanlon, Grand Salvo, Katie Noonan, Oren Ambarchi + Martin Ng, and Anthony Pateras.
Justice Yeldham
What's been described as ‘a trumpet player trapped in a two dimensional universe’ is in fact the utterly unique music of Lucas Abela aka Justice Yeldham, a maverick improviser who performs on shards of broken glass. Since its invention in 2003, the glass has evolved from a means to create free-noise cacophonies into a rudimentary instrument that produces an organic form of outsider electronica. Due to the volatility of the material combined with the ecstatic nature of early performances (that tended to end in bloodshed) the instrument has been somewhat maligned as a shtick by some who wrongly assumed the show is merely screaming into glass. These assumptions couldn’t be further from the truth, as in fact as an instrument the glass is incredibly versatile and acoustically most of he vocal techniques employed are barely audible. Behind the amplified din, closer observation reveals the shards are played somewhat like a bellow-less saxophone, vibrating lips subtlety transmitting micro-sonic vibrations into the pane. This single source of audio then feeds into an array of parallel effects chains giving the music an illusion of ghostly accompaniment (also wrongly ascribed to backing tapes / looping pedals). Once amplified they come together to form dense layers of anomalous music which David Rees described in The New York Times as sounding like " John Coltrane playing a volcano".
Konzertprojekt
Konzertprojekt is a new music collective with inclusivity at our core. Focusing on emerging artists, we curate concerts which feature composers and performers of diverse genders, cultural backgrounds, sexualities and abilities, and seek to cultivate a vibrant community of living music strengthened by the different voices it presents.
Konzertprojekt began as a group of student composers and performers studying at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and have evolved into a dynamic team of students and graduates dedicated to expanding the bounds of live performance to showcase chamber, audiovisual and electroacoustic music in all its forms.
Our Light Qualities series was featured in the Vivid Sydney Festival in 2019, and in 2018 we were a recipient of the Flute Society of New South Wales grant. We have worked with a wide range of emerging ensembles, including Ensemble Terra, The Judgment of Paris and Quart-Ed, and commissioned many of our compositional peers. We look forward to sharing our upcoming projects, concerts and collaborations with you.
Will Hansen
Will Hansen (b.1997) is a Sydney-based double bassist, improviser and composer. A co-founder of SPIRAL Ensemble and regular member of Ensemble Onsombl (always spelled a different way) and Ensemble Apex (Syd), Will has performed across Australia at venues such as the Sydney Opera House, Sydney City Recital Hall, Sydney Town Hall, Palau de la Musica Catalina, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and the CCEC Chengdu, China. Will has performed as a soloist and ensemble member alongside a number of groups including Ensemble Offspring, the Australian String Quartet and The Living Room Theatre. An avid New Music enthusiast, he has commissioned and premiered a great number of new works for solo Double Bass by local composers including Josephine Macken, Sarah Elise Thompson, Solomon Frank and Oscar Smith. In 2019, Will toured Spain with the Sydney Conservatorium Wind Symphony under the baton of Dr. John Lynch, and Chengdu, China, with the Conservatorium’s Modern Music Ensemble under Daryl Pratt, graduating with a BMus in Music Performance later in the year. Will has additionally made appearances at Ensemble Offspring’s Hatched Academy Open Mic Night, as a composer for the Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney, and at 107 Projects Redfern with Spiral. Will has been nominated as Ensemble Offspring’s 2020 Hatched Academy Associate Artist, and will perform a number of new works in concerts alongside the Ensemble and as a soloist.
Freya Schack-Arnott
Freya Schack-Arnott is an Danish/Australian contemporary cellist who enjoys a multi-faceted career as a performer, improviser, composer and curator; ranging from contemporary classical repertoire to experimental, electronics, popular and cross-disciplinary art forms. Schack-Arnott regularly performs with Australia's leading new music ensembles, including ELISION Ensemble and Ensemble Offspring. Her curatorial roles include co-founder and curator of the regular 'Opus Now' music series, an ongoing project exploring relationships between the music of today and classical string quartets, and co-curator of the Rosenberg Museum, together with violinist and improviser Jon Rose. Past curation has included co-curator of the improvised music festival ‘NOW Now’ and monthly series. Schack-Arnott has performed in a number of festivals and major venues across Australia, Asia and Europe: National Concert Hall, Taipei; JazzSpot Candy, Tokyo; Copenhagen Jazz festival; Sydney Festival; Melbourne International Arts Festival; Vivid, Sydney; Dark Mofo, Hobart; Supersense, Melbourne; No New Noise, Melbourne; Now Now Festival, Sydney; Baiame's Ngunnhu Festival, Brewarrina; Day for Night, Liveworks, Sydney; Melbourne Fringe; SIMA Jazz Festival, Sydney; Ensembles and artists Schack-Arnott has performed with in recent years, include: Elision (AUS), Ensemble Offspring (AUS), Speak Percussion (AUS), Oren Ambarchi (AUS), Eugene Chadbourne (USA), Liquid Architecture (AUS), James Rushford (AUS), Ensemble Midtvest (DK), Bae Il Dong (KOR), Brian Ritchie (US), Wilfred brothers (AUS), Jon Rose (AUS), Clayton Thomas (AUS), Sophia Brous (AUS), Peter Knight (AUS), Fate Maps (AUS), Schack-Arnott duo (AUS), Bonniesongs (AUS), Indianerne (DK) and Missy Higgins (AUS).
Damien Ricketson
Sound Touch: Music you can Feel
Sound Touch is a showing of a new work-in-progress conceived by composer Damien Ricketson, with director Sally Blackwood, percussionist Bree van Reyk and sound-designer Bob Scott. What do you hear when you listen with your body? Imagine a music that bypasses your brain and penetrates your skin. A music that plays upon your nervous system like an Aeolian harp, as though you are a set of sympathetic strings stirred into resonance by distant touch. Sound Touch is a performance-work exploring vibration and the body. Sitting somewhere between a musical performance and an outlandish therapy session, join us live from the Sydney Conservatorium as we guide you through a tune-up, a sonic massage and a sound bath that will leave your body sensitive and attuned to the world around you. Sound Touch is a playful and provocative exploration of music’s capacity to affect one’s character. Traversing references from ancient acoustic myths and conspiracy theories to emerging medical technologies and sonic weapons, this enveloping experience is a sensory lesson in the vibratory nature of existence and the delicate art of listening.
Artists
Damien Ricketson - composer
Sally Blackwood - director
Bree van Reyk - percussion
Bob Scott - sound designer
Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears. (Pauline Oliveros)
Ensemble Terra
Ensemble Terra is a Sydney-based chamber ensemble, focused on the promotion and performance of Australian music. We aim to encourage and support composers, performers and listeners to immerse themselves in the diverse Australian musical landscape.
Katherine Howarth
Katherine Howarth is a clarinettist from Orange, NSW, now based in Sydney. She has recently completed a Bachelor of Music Performance in clarinet at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, achieving First-Class Honours. During her time at the Sydney Con, she studied clarinet and bass clarinet with Ms Susan Newsome, as well as performing in masterclasses with international clarinettists Jose Franch-Ballester and Dimitri Ashkenazy. Katherine also had the opportunity to travel to the U.K with the assistance of Sydney Conservatorium’s Vice Chancellor's Global Mobility Scholarship to have lessons with Robert Hill, Janet Hilton, Richard Hosford and Timothy Lines. As part of her undergraduate degree, Katherine was principal clarinettist of the Conservatorium Symphony Orchestra (2019), Wind Symphony (2019), and toured to China with the SCM Modern Music Ensemble as bass clarinettist (2019).
Katherine is an active collaborator and performer, working with emerging local composers and composer collective Kozertprojekt to promote and bring to life new Australian works. Works Katherine has premiered include Deja – for Clarinet and Saxophone Quartet; Liam Mulligan (2019), French Earl Grey – for Bass Clarinet; Christine Pan, Left On Seen – for Wind Quintet and Recorder Quartet; Christine Pan (2019), Walk Towards The Fire – Wind Quintet; Lachlan Foster, Birdsong Revisited; Gabrielle Cadenhead (2018), Etendue Numerique – for Clarinet in Bb and Electronics; Connor Hutchinson (2017) and In The Face of Agony – Sophie Van Dijk (2016).
Jasmine Mills
Jasmine-Jade Mills is a classical saxophonist who has just completed her Bachelor of Performance at Sydney Conservatorium of Music. In 2015, she graduated from the Australian Institute of Music, where she received a scholarship for a Bachelor of Classical Music.Some of her past teachers include Dr Michael Duke, Andrew Smith, Dr Benjamin Carey and Nick Russionello.
In June 2018, Jasmine premiered a new concerto for Alto Saxophone and Wind Orchestra titled “Rapture” by Joshua Winestock, with the Sydney University Wind Orchestra. As part of the Sydney Conservatorium Saxophone Orchestra, Jasmine went on tour to Canberra to perform at the National Portrait Gallery. Other tours she has participated on this year include the “Kurt Weill Inclusion Project” tour to Wollongong, and the Sydney Conservatorium Modern Music Ensemble tour to Newcastle. Earlier in 2018, Jasmine performed with the ‘Coil Saxophone quartet’ in a masterclass with Sabine Meyer and the Alliage Quintett as part of Musica Viva.
In 2019, Jasmine went on tour with the Sydney Conservatorium Wind Symphony to Spain, and worked with Claude Delangle and Vincent David at the University of Gap saxophone academy in France.
