Artists

Oren Ambarchi (* Sydney, Australia) is a Berlin based composer and multi-instrumentalist who focuses on exploring the guitar. He is an avid collaborator and improviser who has worked with many of today´s leading personalities in the current music scene. Since 2009, he has also run the Black Truffle label, which has produced over 100 highly acclaimed releases.

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.

Dr. Peni Candra Rini, PhD (* Java, Indonesia) is a Javanese singer, composer, and faculty member at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts. The Kronos Quartet has described her as “one of the world’s greatest singers.” She is a master of several traditional forms and is regarded as one of Indonesia’s most daring young composers, one of only a handful of female composers in the majority Muslim nation.

Brìghde Chaimbeul (* Isle of Skye, Scotland) is a leading purveyor of experimental Celtic music and of the Scottish smallpipes. She is based in Belfast and has developed her own unique way of playing the instrument. The intimacy with which she is enveloped by the continuous, dronelike double tones during her play, as well as the physical experience of a whole world of sound and vibration, are important characteristics.

Anushka Chkheidze (* Kharagauli, Georgia) is based in Utrecht and grew up in the small village of Kharagauli, where she began singing in a choir at the age of 11. She herself describes the time she spent there as magical and believes that her music is strongly influenced by those childhood years. This also led her to create the poetic sound installation “Lost Lullaby” for the orphaned garden of a day-care centre, which she created as part of The Sound, the sound art exhibition of the Monheim Triennale in the summer of 2023.

Peter Evans (USA) is a composer, trumpet player and bandleader based in New York City since 2003. Evans is part of a broad, hybrid scene of musical experimentation, and his work cuts across a wide range of modern musical practices and traditions. Evans is committed to the simultaneously self-determining and collaborative nature of musical improvisation as a compositional tool, and works with an ever-expanding group of musicians and composers in the creation of new music.

Heiner Goebbels (* Neustadt an der Weinstraße, Germany) is a musician, composer and theatre maker. He lives in Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. Goebbels is one of the most important representatives of the contemporary music and theatre scene. His compositions for ensembles and large orchestras are performed all over the world, as are his music theatre and scenic concerts.Goebbels has also created a large number of sound and video installations for the Documenta in Kassel, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.

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. (…)”

Selendis Sebastian Alexander Johnson (* San Francisco, USA) is a vibraphonist and trombonist. She has been living in New York City since 2018, where she completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in jazz and contemporary music at The New School. Johnson works with a variety of musical styles, and plays and organizes performances of Black-American improvisation based music. She leads projects and large ensembles, alternating between trombone, vibraphone and megaphone.

Darius Jones (* Norfolk, USA) is an alto saxophon player, composer and teacher. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. As a composer and musician he works in the fields of electroacoustic, experimental, chamber and jazz music, as well as in modern dance and multimedia contexts. As a critically acclaimed saxophonist and composer, he has a distinctive voice embracing individuality and innovation in the tradition of Black Music.

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.

Muqata´a (* Ramallah, Palestine) uses sampled material from records and tapes, electronic devices and field recordings, the results varying between hard beats, abstract sounds and glitches. He also composes film music and has worked on several compositions for dance theatre performances.

Rojin Sharafi (* Teheran, Iran) is a Vienna basted composer, sound artist and sound engineer. At the age of 17 she moved from Teheran to Vienna to study composition. Described as “raw and refined, rough and dreamy”, her music explores acoustic, electro-acoustic and electronic approaches.

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.

Julia Úlehla (* Knoxville, USA) is a transdisciplinary performer, singer, improviser and scientist living on the Musqueam territories, a Canadian First Nation region around Vancouver. “Julia Úlehla´s artistic practice is also a type of resistance, resistance against forgetting, resistance to the museumization of traditions, but also resistance to the appropriation of folk rituals and songs for nationalist purposes. ‘I sometimes get really tired of the baggage of nationalist folk song’, Julia elaborates.”

Ludwig Wandinger (* Weilheim, Germany) is a producer, drummer, performer and visual artist. He lives in Berlin. He has been playing in bands as well as producing electronic music since his youth. In 2014, he left his Bavarian home and moved to Berlin, where he studied drums at the Jazzinstitut Berlin. He has played with numerous renowned and up-and-coming cross-genre artists ever since. He has worked as a theatre musician for the Berliner Ensemble.