Visiting Artists

Ellen Fullman has been developing the Long String Instrument, an installation of dozens of wires fifty feet or more in length since the early 1980s. This project encompasses the study of Just Intonation tuning theory, a compositional practice centered on string harmonics, the development of a tablature graphic notation system, and musical instrument design and fabrication. The enveloping nature of the rich acoustic tones produced by The Long String Instrument evokes a sensation of being inside of a musical instrument. For more info go to: ellenfullman.com.

Awards include: The Gerbode Foundation Special Award in the Arts, Guggenheim Fellowship, Music Composition; Foundation for Contemporary Arts “Grants to Artists” Award; DAAD “Artists-In-Berlin Program” residency; and Japan-US Friendship Commission/NEA “Creative Artist Exchange Fellowship for Japan”. Her recordings include: Harbors (Room40 2020) a collaboration with Theresa Wong, and The Long String Instrument (Superior Viaduct, 2015) first issued on Apollo Records in 1985 and selected as the number one reissue for 2015 by the Wire. Fullman’s work was cited by Alvin Lucier in his book Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music (Wesleyan University Press, 2012).

I am a composer and sound artist whose work ranges from music created for digital and acoustic instruments to installations and kinetic sculptures. Each piece typically explores one simple process and often reflects various related interests of mine such as phenomenology, mathematics, epistemology, and algorithmic information theory. My work has been presented at venues and festivals throughout the world such as REDCAT, in Los Angeles; the Ostrava Festival of New Music in the Czech Republic; Tsonami Arte Sonoro Festival in Valparaiso, Chile; the Huddersfield New Music Festival in the United Kingdom; and Umbral Sesiones at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Oaxaca, Mexico. Recordings of my music have been released by XI Records, Another Timbre, New World Records, Edition Wandelweiser, Bahn Mi Verlag, Tsonami Records, and Pogus Productions. In 2008, I co-founded the wulf., a Los Angeles-based organization dedicated to experimental performance and art. From 2018 to 2019, I was an artist-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. I am currently a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany.

I have lectured and published extensively on algorithmic and computer-generated music; the connections between music, mathematics, communication theory, and epistemology; art and alternative communities and economies; and musicological investigations about the work of my mentors and contemporaries. My recent philosophical treatise “Meta+Phenomenology: Primer towards a Phenomenology Formally Based on Algorithmic Information Theory and Metabiology” was published in “Unravelling Complexity”, a book on complexity, philosophy, mathematics, and information theory in honor of the work of renowned mathematician Gregory Chaitin. I am currently extending this phenomenology with Brazilian mathematician Felipe Abrahão. By studying experience and subjectivity through algorithmic information theory, we are proving mathematical conjectures that uncover foundational aspects and limits of the emergence of complexity, consensus, echo chamber effect, niche construction, innovation triggering, and the constitution of status quo. The results can be used to understand how Big Data and the algorithmization of social, political, and economical relationships function within the context of the current and future digitally intermediated society.

Gabby Fluke-Mogul is a New York based violinist, improviser, composer, & educator. fluke-mogul exists within the threads of improvisation, the jazz continuum, noise, & experimental music. Their playing has been described as “embodied, visceral, & virtuosic” & “the most striking sound in improvised music in years…” gabby is humbled to have collaborated with Nava Dunkelman, Joanna Mattrey, Fred Frith, Daniel Carter, Ava Mendoza, Jessica Pavone, Luke Stewart, Zeena Parkins, & Pauline Oliveros among many other musicians, poets, dancers, & visual artists. gfm holds a MFA in Music Performance & Literature from Mills College, a BA in Music & Early Childhood Education from Hampshire College, & a Deep Listening certificate from The Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer.

French musician/composer Franck Vigroux is a multifaceted artist whose works range from electro-acoustic and experimental electronic music to modern composition, improvisation, radio works, avant rock, and beyond.
Primarily known as a guitar player, he also manipulates electronics and turntables, and has composed works for contemporary classical ensembles.
He is equally prolific as a solo artist and as a collaborator, and has worked with Elliott Sharp, Zeena Parkins, Mika Vainio, Reinhold Friedl (Zeitkratzer), and numerous others. Franck Vigroux ‘s music is made of tectonic tensions, beats, electronic textures and a very personal approach to sonic exploration. Vigroux’s uniqueness comes from his artistic approach that integrates new media and performing arts. He designs transdisciplinary shows and audiovisual concerts, collaborating with visual artists such as Antoine Schmitt and Kurt d’Haeseleer.
Vigroux’s records have been published on such as DAC Records, Leaf, Cosmo Rhythmatic, Monotype, Radio France, Erototox, Aesthetical.

Catherine Lamb (b. 1982, Olympia, WA. U.S.) is an active composer exploring the interaction of tone, summations of shapes and shadows, phenomenological expansions, the architecture of the liminal (states in between outside/inside), and the long introduction form. She began her musical life early, later abandoning the conservatory in 2003 to study Hindustani music in Pune, India. She received her BFA in 2006 under James Tenney and Michael Pisaro at CalArts in Los Angeles, where she first developed her research into the interaction of tone and continued to compose, teach, and collaborate with musicians (such as Laura Steenberge and Julia Holter on Singing by Numbers). In 2008 she received a W. A. Gerbode Foundation and W. & F. Hewlett Foundation Emerging Composers initiative for Dilations, premiered at the Other Minds festival in San Francisco. She mentored under the experimental filmmaker/Dhrupad musician Mani Kaul until his death in 2011. In 2012 she received her MFA in music/sound from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College in New York. She toured Shade/Gradient extensively and was awarded the Henry Cowell Research Fellowship to work with Eliane Radigue in Paris. In 2013 Lamb relocated to Berlin, Germany where she lives currently, and has written for ensembles such as Konzert Minimal, Dedalus, Ensemble neoN, the London Contemporary Orchestra, as well as the JACK Quartet; while collaborating regularly with Marc Sabat, Johnny Chang (Viola Torros), Bryan Eubanks, and Rebecca Lane. Her first orchestral work, Portions Transparent/Opaque, was premiered by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at the 2014 Tectonics Festival in Glasgow and was conducted by Ilan Volkov. She completed a series of nine pieces entitled Prisma Interius (2016-18) in which the infinite opening filter from inner to outer perceptions are deeply explored. In 2019 she co-founded the collectively oriented Harmonic Space Orchestra in Berlin. She is a 2020 recipient of the Ernst von Siemens Composer’s prize, a 2018 recipient of the Grants to Artists award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a Staubach Fellow for the 2016 Darmstadt Summer course as well as a 2016-2017 Schloss Solitude Fellow. Her writings/recordings are published in KunstMusik, Open Space Magazine, QO2, NEOS, New World Records, Another Timbre, Other Minds, Winds Measure, Hubro Records, Black Pollen Press, Sound American, and Sacred Realism.

Zachary James Watkins studied composition with Janice Giteck, Jarrad Powell, Robin Holcomb and Jovino Santos Neto at Cornish College. In 2006, Zachary received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College where he studied with Chris Brown, Fred Frith, Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros. Zachary has received commissions from Cornish College of The Arts, The Microscores Project, the Beam Foundation, sfsound, The Living Earth Show, Kronos Quartet and the Seattle Chamber Players among others. His 2006 composition Suite for String Quartet was awarded the Paul Merritt Henry Prize for Composition and has subsequently been performed at the Labs 25th Anniversary Celebration, the Labor Sonor Series at Kule in Berlin Germany and in Seattle Wa, as part of the 2nd Annual Town Hall New Music Marathon featuring violist Eyvind Kang. Zachary has performed in numerous festivals across the United States, Mexico and Europe. Zachary releases music on the labels Sige, Cassauna, Confront (UK), The Tapeworm and Touch (UK). Novembre Magazine (DE), ITCH (ZA), Walrus Press and the New York Miniature Ensemble have published his writings and scores. Zachary has been an artist in resident at the Espy Foundation, Djerassi and the Headlands Center for The Arts.

CHRIS BROWN, composer, pianist, and electronic musician, makes music with self-designed sonic systems that include acoustic and electroacoustic instruments, interactive software, computer networks, microtonal tunings, and improvisation. His compositions are designs for performances in which people bring to life the musical structures embedded in scores, instruments, and machines.
Early pieces featured instruments he invented and built including a prepared electric piano in the orchestral piece Alternating Currents (1983) and a digitally-controlled analog signal processor for the environmental piece for brass, percussion and electronics Lava (1992). Talking Drum (1995-2000), was a MIDI network installation exploring polyrhythm, distance, and resonance in large architectural spaces. He is a founding member of the pioneering computer network band The HUB, which received the 2018 ZKM Giga-Hertz Prize for Electronic Music. Throughout his career he has composed solos for computer and for acoustic instruments with interactive electronics using self-authored software. Since 2005 he writes music in Just Intonation, also integrating rhythmic structures that parallel the proportions used in their tunings.
His music is available on New World, F’oc’sle Music, Tzadik, Pogus, Intakt, Ecstatic Peace, Red Toucan, Leo, and Artifact Recordings. He has recorded music by Henry Cowell, Luc Ferrari, José Maceda, John Zorn, David Rosenboom, Glenn Spearman, and Wadada Leo Smith; recordings as an improvisor include with Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith, the Rova Saxophone Quartet, William Winant, and Frank Gratkowski; and he produced three albums of music by the Filipino composer and ethnomusicologist José Maceda.
He taught electronic music and composition as Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland, California for 30 years. His articles on live electronic music have appeared in Computer Music Journal, Leonardo Music Journal, and “At A Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet” (MIT Press).

Micaela Tobin is a soprano, sound artist, and teacher based in Los Angeles, CA who specializes in experimental voice and contemporary opera, composing under the moniker “White Boy Scream.” Within this project Micaela dissects her operatic and extended vocal techniques through the use of electronics. She has performed extensively throughout the western United States, most notably as a guest with hip-hop experimentalists clipping. during their 2017 tour in support of The Flaming Lips. Micaela’s most recent full length release, “BAKUNAWA” (Deathbomb Arc) is part sonic ritual, part diasporic storytelling. Of the album, Steve Smith of The New Yorker Magazine asserts that “opera would do well to pay attention.”

As an opera composer, Micaela premiered and earned a five-star review for her first original experimental opera, entitled “Unseal Unseam,” at the world’s largest art festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in summer 2016; the work was described as “hypnotic” and “paralyzingly beautiful,” by New Classic LA after its U.S. debut in October 2017. Her most recent opera, “Belarion: A Space Opera” which premiered at the American Legion Center in Pasadena, CA in February 2019, is about the magickal practices of JPL founder Jack Parsons. Tobin hopes to perform the opera again at the Mount Wilson Observatory in 2021.

As a performer, Micaela most recently played the principal role of Coyote in the critically acclaimed opera, SWEET LAND (dir. Yuval Sharon & Canuppa Luger; Comp. Raven Chacon & Du Yun). She also performed with The Industry in their groundbreaking opera, “Hopscotch, a mobile opera for 24 cars (dir. Yuval Sharon).” Other major roles include the poet Mina Loy in the opera “Dada Divas” (dir. Jacqueline Bobak) which has toured internationally both in Europe and Mexico; as a principal vocalist in the premiere of Ron Athey and Sean Griffith’s automatic opera, “Gifts the Spirit”; and as a soprano soloist alongside Annette Bening in the play “Medea” at UCLALive.

Micaela is currently a voice teacher on faculty at the California Institute for the Arts and teaches privately out of her home in Los Angeles, CA.

Julia Holter is a composer, performer, and recording artist based in Los Angeles. Her interest in sonic mysteries has led her to record in various settings–in her home, outside with a field recorder, and in recording studios—as well as to perform live, often with a focus on the voice and the space between language and babble. Holter’s music is multi-layered and texturally rich. She has amassed a body of work that explores melody within free song structures, atmosphere, and the impulses of the voice. She has released five studio albums: Aviary (2018), Have You In My Wilderness (2015), Loud City Song (2013), Ekstasis (2012), and Tragedy (2011). Holter has performed her music at venues and festivals throughout the world with an ensemble of creative musicians. She has written music for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and other ensembles, as well as scores for the films “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” (2020) and “Bleed for This” (2016) and the TV show “Pure” (2019).

Michelle Lou is a composer, performer, and sound artist that works mainly in the realm of electro-acoustic music. Her work has been presented at Wien Modern, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, The Festival of New American Music, the MATA Festival in New York City, The 66th American Music Festival at the National Gallery in Washington D.C., The Rainy Days Festival in Luxembourg, Ultima Festival in Oslo, Chance and Circumstance in Brooklyn, amongst others. She received degrees in double bass performance and composition from UC San Diego and Stanford University. She was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and an Elliott Carter Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She has taught composition and electronic music at Dartmouth College, the WasteLAnd Summer Composition Course, the Academy for New Music Künstlerhaus Boswil, Switzerland, and is currently teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Jane Cassidy is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator from Galway, Ireland. Trained in music and visual art, Jane earned a Masters in Music and Media Technologies from Trinity College Dublin in 2008 and an MFA in Digital Art from Tulane University in New Orleans in 2014. Jane’s main interests lie in audio-visual immersive environments, visual music, live VJing and multi-channel work. Cassidy has had solo shows at the Mobile Museum of Art, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, the University of New Orleans, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Exhibitions include the European Media Art Festival, Germany, the New Orleans Film Festival, Punto Y Raya Festival, Spain, Galway International Arts Festival, Currents New Media Festival, New Mexico, live visuals for Animal Collective in New Orleans, as well as group shows internationally. Currently she is the Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Boston College in Massachusetts.

Though they differ in generation and performance practice, the NYC-based Aki Onda (b. 1967) and the Kyotango-based Akio Suzuki (b. 1941) share an astonishingly inventive, open-ended, and spontaneous approach to the infinite and variegated possibilities of sound. Since initiating a collaborative relationship in 2005, the duo have embarked on a number of tours in Europe and Asia, exploring site-specific locations ranging from an abandoned factory on the outskirts of Brussels to an underground parking lot in Glasgow. Suzuki and Onda released their first album “ma ta ta bi” on ORAL_records in 2014. This year, they were invited to perform at documenta 14 in Athens.

Since the 1960s, sound art pioneer Akio Suzuki has been investigating the acoustic quality of selected locations and creating corresponding topographies. His intensive involvement with the phenomena of pulse and echo led him to develop his own instruments in the 1970s. Starting from the 90s, his soundwalk project, oto-date, which means, respectively, “sound” and “point” in Japanese, finds listening points in the city, and playfully invites the audience to stop and listen carefully at given points on the map.

Aki Onda is a New York-based artist and composer. He is particularly known for his “Cassette Memories” — works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by using the cassette Walkman over a span of last quarter-century. He creates compositions, performances, and visual artworks from those sound memories.

I am a performer, composer and researcher studying connections of sound and language. I create intermedia and site-specific performances and lecture demonstrations, write traditional songs and compose art music that usually involves the voice in one way or another. As a performer, I’m a jack-of-all-trades type: I sing and talk and play contrabass, viola da gamba, piano, guitar, harmonica, as well as a number of simple invented instruments.

Past work as a psycholinguistics researcher studying nonsense language influences my creative work. My current research investigates how language and nonsense define the boundaries of knowledge. From a rational perspective, the failure of language defines the limits of knowledge. From a metaphysical perspective, the failure of language is a requirement of mystical experience. Ultimately, I want to understand what it means to believe, which I study by looking at connections between science and mythology from the dawn of civilization to the present day.

Composer, performer, and sound artist, Bryan Jacobs’ work focuses on interactions between live performers, mechanical instruments and computers. His pieces are often theatrical in nature, pitting blabber-mouthed fanciful showoffs against timid reluctants. The sounds are playfully organized and many times mimic patterns found in human dialogue. Hand-build electromechanical instruments controlled by microcontrollers bridg  e acoustic and electroacoutic sound worlds. These instruments live dual lives as time-based concert works and non-time-based gallery works.

His music has been performed by ensembles such as the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Wet Ink, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Ensemble Pamplemousse, and defunensemble.  His music has been featured at many music festivals in Europe and the US. He is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow. He has performed his own compositions for guitar and electronics at the Stone (NYC), Miller Theater (NYC), and the Wulf (LA). In addition to his artistic endeavors, Bryan is the co-founder of Qubit, a New York based new music initiative that presents mostly emerging artists whose work involves creative uses of technology.

Seth Cluett (b. Troy, NY) is an composer, performer, and artist whose work ranges from photography and drawing to video, sound installation, concert music, and critical writing. His “subtle…seductive, immersive” (Artforum) work has been characterized as “rigorously focused and full of detail” (e/i) and “dramatic, powerful, and at one with nature” (The Wire). Exploring the territory between the senses, Cluett’s works are marked by a detailed attention to perception and to the role of sound in the creation of a sense of place, the workings of memory, and the experience of time. His research interests and critical writings investigate embodied experience, immersive multi-media systems, the media history of the loudspeaker, the history and documentation of sound as an expressive medium, and architectural acoustics as compositional material.

His work has been presented internationally at institutions and festivals such as Kill Your Timid Notion at Dundee Contemporary Arts in Scotland; the 10th Rencontres Internationales, Palais de Tokyo, Main d’Oeuvres, and GRM in Paris; Hebbel am Ufer Theater and Staalplaat in Berlin; the Osage Art Foundation/October Contemporary in Hong Kong; The Kitchen, The MATA Festival, Issue Project Room, Roulette, Experimental Intermedia, Audio Visual Arts, and Diapason Gallery in New York; the Institute for Contemporary Art, Non-Event, and Mobius Artist Space in Boston; the Betty Rymer, Heaven, Artemisia, and Deadtech Galleries in Chicago; as well as Swarm Gallery in Oakland, CA and the Deep Listening Space in Kingston, NY. He has created dance and theater works with DD Dorvillier/Human Future Dance Corp, Helene Lesterin/Atlas Dance, and Jen Mesch.

Lambkin first entered the public consciousness at 19 when he formed his band The Shadow Ring, in Folkestone, a small town in Kent, England. The band was memorable and built an rabidly passionate fan base because of its sui generis approach, blending elements of folk, noise, cracked electronics, and surrealist poetry, while radically changing the overall formula with each release. A decade of increasingly skewed and inspired work culminated in 2003’s I’m Some Songs, constructed long distance as Lambkin had relocated to the US in 1998. Over the last few years, Lambkin has primarily worked under his own name, most notably with 2007’s brilliant Salmon Run, a precursor to The Breadwinner.