Genevieve Cecile
Geneviève Cecile is an interdisciplinary artist studying composition and experimental sound practices as a graduate student. Their work explores themes of decay, destruction, and rebirth with evocative visuals and soundscapes. Geneviève is deeply inspired by nature and expresses their love for tiny life-forms by scoring music to their original macro films of insects. They are a lover of all things whimsical, especially animation, and engage in this passion by scoring music and voice-acting for student animators.
Grace Dashnaw
Grace’s practice navigates the intangible of the human experience. The expression of their humanness is at the forefront of their artistry. Longing, nostalgia, frustration, anger, and tranquility are paramount in Grace’s work. The emotive qualities of music are not limited to pleasantries. They utilize their training in music notation, cello performance, looping, synthesizer, DAWs, and found objects to create an immersive sound world. Animation, poetry, fiber arts, photography, sculpture, and visual programming are part of Grace’s practice as well.
Jules Evens
Jules Evens is a musician and visual artist. Through methods of playful analog improvisation and digital experimentation, his work evokes unique sentiments characterized by contradiction: the funny sense of freedom within hopeless pessimism, or the sad darkness of positivity. By way of surprising turns of melody, intrusive or off-putting timbral elements, vocals that may be most expressive in their garbled-ness, and a misalignment between lyrical substance and melody, he pushes on and absurd-ifies traditional western concepts of “song”.
Jules works within and between the frameworks of free-jazz improvisation, bedroom recording and production, and performance art. As a multi-instrumentalist and creative person across various fields, he prioritizes moments of childlike discovery and conceptual intrigue over expertise or completion. During his time at CalArts, he hopes to explore the precarious art of collaboration and to hone his individual voice as a performer and sharer of ideas.
Henry Ives
Henry Ives (b. 1998) is a Los Angeles-based composer and technologist. He studied under Dr. James David and Dr. Eric Hollenbeck at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he received undergraduate degrees in Music Composition and Computer Science.
His work has been recognized in both the academic sphere and the pageantry arts. In 2020 he won the Southern California Percussion Alliance Composition Scholarship Competition for his electroacoustic chamber composition what was, and in 2022 his piece the optimist for flute and piano was selected as the winner in the professional flute category of the “What IF…” call for scores.
Ives is a composer in the broadest sense of the term and often combines his musical work with his passion for technology and the visual arts, creating multimedia pieces that resist categorization.
When he’s not flouting capitalization in the titles of his works, he can be found writing unit tests, playing spock rolls, and blindly following the strange convention of writing his own bio in the third person.
Alessandro Rovegno
Alessandro Rovegno is a composer, sound artist, and improviser currently based in Los Angeles, CA.
His work is rooted in an innermost relationship with the act of Listening– allowing the phenomenological, emotional, and spatial revelations from Deep Listening to guide the structural and aesthetic manifestations of his pieces. This interest in auditory perception is often explored through gradual manipulation of tone, timbre, and mood over long durations– in both acoustic and electronic mediums.
Rovegno’s practice is simultaneously influenced by his current and past experiences working in fine dining food service. Drawing from this, he believes that the listener should be treated as an honored guest and their participation should be one that allows for active engagement and introspection.
Rovegno has a BM in Composition from Cornish College of the Arts, where he studied with Tom Baker and Jarred Powell. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Composition and Experimental Sound Practices from the California Institute of the Arts under the mentorship of Michael Pisaro-Liu.
Brody Scott
Brody Scott is a performing saxophonist, artist, improviser and noise manipulator. Having come from a jazz background and having performed with the likes of Michael Formenek, Tim Berne, Ralph Alessi, and others, Brody’s compositional techniques sit at the extreme fringes of jazz language. His solo saxophone works experiment heavily with distortion and other effects to create new instrumental sounds which are distinctly “unsaxophonian”, even aiming to create an experience which is unearthly. This is combined with use of raw materials, field recording, radio, tape sampling, DAW composition, and low budget equipment to procure a DIY aesthetic which explores the dilapidation of sound. His compositions are primarily improvised, though he also creates Dada inspired collages and paintings that function as scores as well. Brody’s music is released under the moniker ‘bes’.
