Shahzad Ismaily

Shahzad Ismaily © Niclas Weber for Monheim Triennale

For New York based artist Shahzad Ismaily (* New York, USA) “finding and channelling musical spirit is an ongoing obsession (…). He is a musician, composer, teacher and producer who runs his own recording studio, Figure 8, in Brooklyn. He plays electric bass and guitar, synthesiser, drums, uses computer software and various types of percussions brought back from his travels to Turkey, Chile, Indonesia and Morocco. (…)”

“Ismaily’s work (…) blurs the boundaries between pop, experimental music and everything in between. Music is magic, and he himself is the instrument – or perhaps the lightning rod – that taps into the collective spirit of the space at any given moment.” And it is precisely for this reason that he has been invited to participate as “Signature Artist” not only to the first Monheim Triennale, but also to the second.

Over the past thirty years, Ismaily has worked with countless internationally renowned artists including Yoko Ono, Bob Dylan, Laura Veirs, Beth Orton, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Marianne Faithfull, Faun Fables, Maya Hawke, Feist, Aaron Dessner, Secret Chiefs 3, Sam Amidon, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer and many more.

Ismaily has worked for dance and theatre pieces, including the Oscar-nominated film “Frozen River” and “Inkboat” (with a Butoh crew from California and Switzerland).

Visitors to the first Monheim Triennale will also remember Shahzad Ismaily for his joint performance with Zoh Amba.

Shahzad Ismaily:
“I’m sort of in the role that I’m often placed in [at] sessions, which is to ‘Bring the spirit’ on whatever instrument that makes sense.”
“That [mathematical] side of music always made a lot of easy sense – the forms and the structures, the crystals, the cubes. What was always more esoteric and challenging was ‘How is it that you make sound and then a person outside of you feels something or feels transported, or the room feels different?’”
From: Monheim Papers

“Ismaily has become one of music’s most in-demand collaborators, flitting like a mischievous butterfly through genres as diverse as honeyed folk, rambunctious free jazz and spectral meditations sung in Urdu.” – New York Times

Shannon Barnett

Shannon Barnett (* Traralgon, Australia) is a trombonist and composer who studied in Melbourne and New York. She moved to Cologne in 2014, where she has been based ever since. Barnett established herself at an early stage as an important voice in the Australian jazz scene and was honoured as “Young Australian Jazz Artist of the Year” in 2007. Today, in addition to her international concert activities, she is also very active on the German scene and an important voice as an artist and professor.

Terre Thaemlitz

Terre Thaemlitz (* Minnesota, USA) is a Tokyo based award-winning multimedia producer, writer, speaker, lecturer, audio remixer, DJ and owner of the record label Comatonse Recordings. Her work combines a critical examination of identity politics, including gender, sexuality, class, linguistics, ethnicity and race, with an ongoing analysis of the socio-economics of commercial media production.

yuniya edi kwon

yuniya edi kwon (aka eddy kwon, * Minnesota, USA) is a violinist, vocalist, poet, and interdisciplinary performance artist living in New York City. Her practice connects composition, improvisation, movement, and ceremony to explore transformation and transgression, ritual practice as a tool to queer ancestral lineage, and the use of mythology to connect, obscure, and reveal.