Leon Duncan grew up in Nairobi, Kenya blinding debut volley of industro-dub and free-jazzed electronics, signed for Hakuna Kulala. Together with vocalist Martin Kanja (now half of Nyege Nyege’s Duma), they developed an idiosyncratic form of Kenyan industrial music.

Anne-F Jacques is a sound artist based in Montreal, Canada. She is interested in amplification, oblique interactions between materials, and the construction of various contraptions and idiosyncratic systems. Her particular focus is on low technology, trivial objects, and unpolished sounds. She regularly realizes installations, performances, and ephemeral interventions and gives workshops about domestic appliances hacking. She has worked amongst others with Tsonami Festival (Chile), Experimental Intermedia (New York), Ftarri (Tokyo), CTM (Berlin), Umbral (Mexico), Centrale for Contemporary Arts (Brussels), High Zero (Baltimore), and MEM (Bilbao). Small events and accidents, extremely amplified: Something gone wrong is a performance that follows and provokes interactions between rocks, motors, pipes, seaweed, and other materials, assembled in precarious moving contraptions.

Jennifer Lucy Allan, known informally as Jen, is a British writer, researcher, and radio presenter. Allan has written for The Guardian, The Quietus, and The Wire, being online editor for the latter. She was a presenter on Resonance FM, and in autumn 2019 became a co-host of BBC Radio 3 programme Late Junction, alternating with Verity Sharp. Allan has a particular interest in foghorns, and following a PhD on the subject at the University of the Arts London, her history book The Foghorn’s Lament was published in 2021. She teaches an eight-week evening course in music journalism.

Kurt Schwitters (1887 – 1948) was a German artist born in Hanover, living in exile from 1937. He worked in several genres and media, including Dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called “Merz Pictures”. Schwitters spent the last one-and-a-half years of the war working as a drafter in a factory just outside Hanover. He was conscripted into the 73rd Hanoverian Regiment in March 1917, but was exempted on medical grounds in June of the same year. By his own account, his time as a draftsman influenced his later work and inspired him to depict machines as metaphors of human activity. He composed and performed an early example of sound poetry, “Ursonate” (1922–1932; a translation of the title is Original Sonata or Primeval Sonata).

Éliane Radigue was born in 1932 in Paris. With a career of over 50 years, her artistic production can be perceived in three different periods, each one in its own way representing an exploration of thresholds, of spaces that expand in intervals, and a dialogue between auditory experience and inner experience, between personal history and sensual memory. The first period (1968–1971) was that of work on feedback and reinjection, an embryonic phase already marked by extreme precision and work on thresholds and threatened balances. The second period, which spans thirty years (1971–2001), is characterized by a fruitful production of electronic compositions that, in an indissoluble way, combine their music with the unique beats of their ARP 2500 synthesizer. This period is also marked by the development of long forms with subtle variations that disappear and resound between the history carried by the music and the time necessary for its unfolding. The third and still ongoing period is that of her mainly acoustic works, which are produced in close collaboration with like-minded musicians from all over the world, giving an additional relational dimension to music that was previously created alone. In the course of her life, Éliane Radigue has produced a research, demanding, and inspiring oeuvre which today influences a whole new generation of musicians.

Beatriz Ferreyra is an Argentine composer born in 1937. She lives and works in Hameau de Hodeng, France. She studied piano with Celia Bronstein in Buenos Aires. She continued her study of music with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and worked with Earle Brown and György Ligeti in Germany. In 1963, she took a position in the research department of the Office de Radiodiffusion Television Francaise (ORTF), working with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), directed by Pierre Schaeffer. She assisted with Henri Chiarucci’s and Guy Reibel’s Rapport entre la hauteur et la fondamentale d’un son musical, published in 1966 in Revue Internationale d’Audiologie and Pierre Schaeffer’s Solfège de l’Objet Sonore. During this time, she also lectured at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris. Beatriz Ferreyra is a member of the original Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM). She contributed to Pierre Schaeffer’s book ‘Traité des Objets Musicaux’ (1966), collaborated on the realisation of Schaeffer’s ‘Solfège de l’Objet Sonore’ (1967), and went on to take composition lessons with Earl Brown and György Ligeti at Darmstadt. As an independent composer, Ferreyra has received major international commissions, also composing for film and ballet. In 2014, she was elected as an Honorary Member of the International Confederation of Electroacoustic Music.

Cromagnon was an American band that was active during the late 1960s. Led by multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriters Austin Grasmere and Brian Elliot, the band released an album entitled “Orgasm” in 1969, which was later reissued as “Cave Rock”. While the band was not commercially notable or successful, they are said to have foreshadowed the rise of noise rock, no wave, and industrial rock. Bagpipes, pounding percussion, blood-curdling yelps, chanting, laughing, and billowing subterranean rumblings create the otherworldly soundscape that is Cave Rock. Heralded as one of the best freak-out records of all time, a record that was ahead of its time and brings to mind the savage sound-fuckery of Nurse with Wound and Throbbing Gristle, as well as the hallucinations of early Red Krayola.

Laurie Anderson is an American artist born in 1947, a musician and filmmaker whose work encompasses performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performative projects in New York City during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She achieved unexpected commercial success when her song “O Superman” reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981. Anderson’s debut studio album, “Big Science” was released in 1982 and has since been followed by several studio and live albums. She starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave. She is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several musical devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows.

Laurie Spiegel is an American composer born in 1945. She has worked at Bell Laboratories in computer graphics and is known primarily for her electronic music compositions and her algorithmic composition software “Music Mouse”. She is also a guitarist, lutenist and has been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Spiegel’s musical interpretation of Johannes Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi appeared on the “Sounds of Earth” section of the Voyager Golden Record. Her 1972 piece “Sediment” was included in the 2012 film The Hunger Games. Her early musical experiences were largely self-directed, beginning with the mandolin, guitar, and banjo she had as a child, which she learned to play by ear. She became interested in electronics after using a tape-operated computer at Purdue University as part of a high school class field trip. At the age of 20, she taught herself Western music notation, after which she began writing down her compositions. Laurie Spiegel is best known for her use of algorithmic composition techniques. She worked with Buchla and Electronic Music Laboratories synthesizers and digital systems, including Bell Labs’ GROOVE system (1973–1978), the Bell Labs Digital Synthesizer (1977), the alphaSyntauri synthesizer system for the Apple II computer (1978–1981), and the McLeyvier (1981–1985). In various pieces, Spiegel has used musical algorithms to simulate natural phenomena, emulate tonal harmony rules of earlier musical eras, and sonically represent large data sets. In her piece Viroid, for example, she used the genetic code of a simple organism to determine the pitches produced by a synthesizer. Spiegel views algorithmic music as a natural extension of the rule-based systems of traditional Western music, such as counterpoint and voice-leading.

Carlfriedrich Claus is one of the most important representatives of international visual and phonetic poetry. In the 1950s, he began examining language and writing in terms of their tonal and visual content, based on his first experimental poems. At the time, writers and artists around the world were exploring similar questions, and a network of like-minded individuals developed, in which Claus was a highly regarded figure despite being isolated in the German Democratic Republic. Claus understood his life, and with this also his artistic work, as a continuous self-experiment. He created his first acoustic works in the late 1950s as an extension of his written sound notations. His speech exercises, in which he superimposed his own voice with ambient noises, broke with traditional articulation techniques. At the same time, he produced intricate drawings that visualise the process of speech and vibrations in the body. From the 1960s onwards, Claus processed his theoretical reflections on phonetics and human communication in the form of his speech sheets. He always considered these works to be a distinct form of literature. Combining symbolic elements with legible and illegible writing, they stimulate viewers’ thought processes. After a break, Claus only continued his work on acoustic literature in the 1980s. Independent of the written or spoken word, he investigated pre-linguistic processes – the sounds that arise before articulation and thus capture emotional states. Through this work, he explored themes such as human consciousness and subconsciousness, both in his written pieces and in his sound processes. His self-experiments were intended to continue to stimulate the audience and encourage self-reflection. In 1995, he developed the Lautprozessraum (Sound-Processing Room), a sound installation at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz that allowed visitors to control sound events independently through their movements. Carlfriedrich Claus (1930 – 1998) was an artist and philosopher who crossed borders. His work unfolds between poetry, drawing, graphics, and acoustics in language and sound. He saw his work as a tireless experiment and explored the media in their inner contexts, their origins, and anthropological justification and meaning. Claus drew his “language sheets”, which are both image and text and refer to various sources, in a linear style: In addition to Jewish mysticism, natural science, and cybernetics, the artist often also reacted to political events related to the time. His historical-philosophical reflections were oriented towards holistic models of the world between Paracelsus, Marx, and Ernst Bloch. Carlfriedrich Claus never made a secret of his basic utopian-communist attitude. He was concerned with overcoming alienated existence through the “naturalisation of man and the humanisation of nature”.

Gerard Lebik was a composer, improviser, sound artist, and curator working in the fields of experimental music and sound art. He was the founder of Sokołowsko Music Lab and the creator of the Sanatorium of Sound Festival (2015–2024), exploring experimental and new music held in Sokołowsko, near the Czech-Polish border. His work explores various sound sources and musical practices, including electroacoustic composition and non-idiomatic improvisation. His installations and sonic interventions investigate themes such as the perception and propagation of sound waves, temporal distortion, psychoacoustics, and the relationship between sound, architecture, and urban space. Lebik died in 2025.

Corrupted is a Japanese sludge/doom band, active since 1994. They are notable for slow doom metal with lyrics mostly sung in Spanish (though some songs contain sections in Japanese or English) and their antipathy towards any form of mainstream attention, even within their own genre, especially their adamant refusal to do any form of interviews or professional photo shoots. Along with their native Japan, they have toured Europe and the United States with a career spanning over 20 years. Despite their reclusive nature, they are critically acclaimed among doom and sludge circles. Much of Corrupted’s discography appears on split albums, which they share with other doom metal bands or often with grindcore bands. The band is known for its ability to produce songs of virtually any length; their longest album “El Mundo Frío” consists of a single song substantially longer than an hour, while their shortest song, “Reset”, recorded for a homeless benefit compilation, clocks in at 1:46. The band has worked in spoken word, acoustic breaks and ambient passages into their nadir of sludge as well. Corrupted’s albums typically contain extensive liner notes in the form of bleak black-and-white photographs, often real-life scenes of war-torn areas or other depictions of human suffering.

Oswald Wiener (1935-2021) was a radical Austrian writer, cyberneticist, and artist, known for his experimental work with the Vienna Group (Wiener Gruppe), authoring the novel Die Verbesserung von Mitteleuropa (The Improvement of Central Europe) and exploring themes of cybernetics, language, and art in complex, influential texts and projects like the “Bio-Adapter”. He studied diverse subjects, played jazz, worked in data processing for Olivetti, and later taught, leaving a legacy as a profound critic of conventional science and art.
Team of Jeremy Roht, West Dawson, Yukon-Territory was released by Supposé in 2001. It refers to an experimental audio work, part of his “Animal Music / Tiermusik” project, capturing sounds of animals in the Yukon for listeners, exploring primal drives like hunger and pleasure, and questioning aesthetic experience for non-humans.

V/Vm was an alias of English musician Leyland James Kirby born in 1974. Leyland Kirby began producing music under the V/Vm alias in 1996, mostly under his own label, V/Vm Test Records. Alongside the work of the V/Vm project, Kirby also recorded as The Caretaker. Early releases were electronic in nature, including a split 12″ release on Fat Cat Records. In 1999, V/Vm released the EP Pig, consisting mostly of the sound of pigs feeding, which some critics mistook for the sound of pigs dying. From 1996 to 2008, Kirby ran the V/Vm Test Records label, which released records from About This Product, Goodiepal, Jansky Noise, and Fast Lady, among many other experimental musicians. The label used to give away free audio via the V/Vm Test Records. V/Vm was one of the most exciting, mythical, and obscure outcomes of the late 1990s. He currently resides in Kraków.

Dj Travella is a young producer born Hamadi Hassani, responsible for the most exhilarating music of recent years, injecting crackling cybernetic energy into singeli, a genre which has resulted in some of the most important developments in electronic music in the last half decade. For those of you paying attention, partially thanks to devoted online support from patron saint of the experimental Arca and esteemed music meme lord La Meme Young, “Crazy Beat Music Umeme 2” has been one of the defining tracks of 2022, a turbo-charged transmission of full throttle, red-lining, hyperactive rave polyphony. Between the release of Travella’s essential album, “Mr Mixondo”, on Nyege Nyege Tapes, his own Instagram documentation of ecstatic street parties in his hometown of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, and his recent run of European performances, which have seen him brandishing his trusty Bluetooth keyboard like Herbie Hancock shredding a keytar solo.

Yann Leguay lives and works in Brussels. He focuses on the notions of dematerialization, the use of interfaces, and everything about the materiality of memory. In his sound practice, he was defined as a ‘media saboteur’ by the Consumer Waste label, seeking to fold the sound materiality in on itself using basic means in the form of objects, videos, and performances. Since 2007, he has also produced installations, sculptures, and editions that integrate a critical approach to the meaning of technological evolution. In concerts, he pushes the boundaries of accepted norms of audio behavior, using uncommon machineries for the playback of audio media: opened hard drives as turntables, an angle grinder as a microphone, the sound of the electricity, and so on… His records release activity is equally unusual, releasing readable silkscreen records, a 7” single without a central hole, or a record composed from recordings of vinyl being scratched by a scalpel. His Phonotopy label proposes a conceptual approach to recording media, and he curates the DRIFT series on the Artkillart label. He is also involved in different collective projects as sound and music curator, and participates in graphical designs for books and revues.

Nina García is a Parisian musician born in 1990. Since 2015, she has been researching and creating around the electric guitar, halfway between improvised music and noise. Her set-up is reduced to a minimum: a guitar, a pedal, and an amp with which she sculpts sound and delves into chaos to bring out the unheard-of. Her concerts draw audiences into an immersive sonic space where power and fragility intersect with communicative intensity. In just a few years, she has attracted the attention of numerous international stages. After a decade of performing concerts under the Mariachi guise, Nina has finally unveiled her unique approach in ‘Bye Bye Bird‘, her first album under her name, released by Ideologic Organ. With no pretence or demonstration, the album is a captivating blend of chiaroscuro, melodies, and raw emotion. Nina also plays with Arnaud Rivière in Autoreverse, in a duo with Danish trombonist Maria Bertel, with percussionist Camille Émaille, and in the rock band Mamiedaragon. Since 2019, she has been a member of the improvisation ensemble Le Un. She has also performed with Sophie Agnel, Méryll Ampe, Stephen O’Malley, Leïla Bordreuil, Antoine Chessex, and Fred Frith. Since 2023, she has been developing concerts for children and families, where she presents adapted but not cropped music, making herself available to break down gestures, allowing people try out the guitar and its objects, explain her approach, and desacralize experimental music.

Vica Pacheco was born in Oaxaca, Mexico in 1993. She lives and works in Brussels. Pacheco studied Fine Arts at La Esmeralda in Mexico City before graduating from Villa Arson in France in 2017. Her practice is rooted in experimental music and composition, but she also has a practice in ceramics and 3d animation. Her work is above all eclectic and energetic, inspired by mythological crossbreeding, prehispanic technologies, and syncretism; she likes to arrange the most heterogeneous or hazardous elements between them, to produce sound performances and installations. Vica Pacheco seeks to create a dialogue between animism, ritual, and technology in her series of works, Animacy. Revolving around the whistling vessel, a hydraulic sound instrument that existed in pre-Columbian times throughout Mesoamerica, the series presents a symbiosis between two types of technology: one contemporary, electronic and digital; the other pre-Columbian, made of mud, fire, air and water. The residency program of iii is supported financially by the Creative Industries Fund NL and the Creative Europe program of the European Union. The residency of Vica Pacheco at iii is organised in collaboration with Rewire, Overtoon, STUK, and iMal.

Oscar Powell is a UK producer and DJ. He established Diagonal Records in 2011 alongside Jaime Williams, as a platform for releasing his first two offerings: “The Ongoing Significance of Steel” & “Flesh and Body Music” EPs. With a diverse sound that incorporates New York no wave, industrial/EBM, post-punk, late 90s drum n’ bass, and ascetic European electronics, Powell’s thoroughly emaciated, obtuse, and primitivist take on club music, noise, and experimental electronics. His DJ sets melt jungle, post-punk, techno, and EBM, with a similarly brazen and varied approach to A&R-ing Diagonal Records, an imprint that has become an idiosyncratic position and a reference for today’s electronic music production.

ABADIR (Rami Abadir) is a music producer and sound designer born in Cairo, Egypt. His work focuses on experimental, glitch, and ambient music, and he’s one half of the duo 0N4B. Together with the visual artists Nurah Farahat and Islam Shabana, he co-founded the audio/visual collective Mapping Possibilities, which has been active in promoting A/V events since 2016. ABADIR is also the editor of the electronic music section of the Arabic music webzine Ma3azef, where he also contributes as a writer on critical theory, music history, reviews, and interviews. Previously solo released on Hush Hush Records, Yerevan Tapes, Kaer‘Uiks, D.M.T. Records, and through 0N4B on Kaer’Uiks, ANBA, Aural Electronics.

DJ Smiley Bobby is an electronic producer from Maharashtra State in Western India. First formed by the late Shri Appasaheb Pendse in the 1960s, Dhol Tasha Drum exercises were originally performed on a sort of acoustic kettle drum but became electronically adapted in recent years thanks to the likes of DJ Smiley Bobby and peers including DJ Aasif, DJ Ammy, and DJ TSR.

Under diverse pseudonyms and multiple collaborations on labels such as Editions Mego and Diagonal, Stefan Juster performs tirelessly at Festivals, researching the boundaries of techno and dissociative computer music. Under the moniker Jung An Tagen, he tests and develops strategies of physical disorientation and forceful sonic phenomena, encouraging minds and bodies to calculate and intuit their own place in spacetime. Jung An Tagen invites us to reflect on the diffuse but persistent term “experimental” not as deviation from aesthetic orthodoxy, but as the design and implementation of compositional systems that offer unpredictable results; “electronic” as an annulment of the previous instrumental tradition, and as a simultaneous reversion towards aesthetic openness; as the fragmentation of a theoretical or mythical musical syntax by obsessive repetition, sequential motivic mutations, aleatoric arrays, pareidolic illusions and moiré effects; “electronic” as the ultimate split, dehumanisation, mechanic strangeness. In 2020, he founded the netlabel ETAT.xyz. Setting aside any hint of expressionist gestures, one is left with form and abstract sound, emotional alienation: “dissociative, psychoacoustic, computer music”. Jung’s body of work as a filmmaker stands squarely in the tradition of abstract, conceptual, and experimental filmmaking. Since 2019, Jung An Tagen has been collaborating with filmmaker Rainer Kohlberger on audio-visual performances that conquer the observer’s perceptual apparatus and transport the audience into the presence of an immediate immensity, where boundaries of self and world become obscured.

Kali Malone was born in Colorado in 1994. She is currently based between Stockholm and Paris. Her Music is patient and focused, built on a foundation of evolving harmonic cycles that draw out latent emotional resonances. Letting go of expectations of duration and breadth offers a space for reflection and contemplation. Molone’s experimental reinterpretations of centuries-old polyphonic compositional methods and historical tuning systems become portals to new ways of perceiving harmony, structure, and introspection. Malone’s music for pipe organ, choir, chamber ensembles, and electroacoustic formats has quickly risen to international critical acclaim. She has performed extensively, presenting her music at Lincoln Center, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Philharmonie de Paris, Radio France, Rockefeller Chapel, Grace Cathedral, Thomaskirche Leipzig, The Southbank Center, Bozar, Schauspielhaus, Berghain, Unsound Festival, Berlin Atonal, Primavera, and Kanal Pompidou amongst many other museums, contemporary art spaces, concert halls, churches, and festivals throughout Europe, North America, Japan and Australia. Her commissioned work and residencies include the Ina GRM, The Venice Biennale, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Orgelpark, and Lafayette Anticipations. She has collaborated and performed with various artists, including Stephen O’Malley, Lucy Railton, Caterina Barbieri, Macadam Ensemble, Leila Bordreuil, and Drew McDowall.

Charmaine Lee is an Australian vocalist based in New York, born in 1991. Using the voice, feedback, and live processing, Lee’s practice is primarily concerned with risk-taking, playfulness, and improvisation. She has been recognized as “extraordinary” by The New Yorker and has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wire Magazine. As a composer, Lee has collaborated with leading ensembles including Kronos Quartet and the Wet Ink Ensemble. Her long-standing collaborators include Conrad Tao, Eric Wubbels, and Ikue Mori (MacArthur Fellow). Lee frequently guest lectures on building a personal language and creative agency at undergraduate and graduate-level composition programs, including Princeton University, Stanford, and the New School. Lee serves on the Artistic Advisory Council at ISSUE Project Room and co-runs a record label with Randall Dunn, Kou Records, dedicated to artists who have developed singular musical languages. Lee is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow (2025), an Emergent Ventures winner (2024), ISSUE Project Room Artist-in-Residence (2019), and a Roulette Van Lier Fellow (2021).

Michel Blancsubé was born in France in 1958. He began his career as an assistant curator in Marseille’s Contemporary Art Museum between 1996 and 2001. From 2001 to 2012, he was head of the registration department at Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, where he curated the exhibits: Esquiador en el fondo de un pozo (2006); Entre patio y jardín (2007); Schweiz über alles (2008); In memoriam Albert Hofmann (2008); Les enfants terribles (2009); ¡Sin techo está pelón! (2010); Poule! (2012), and Turn off the Sun (2013). His independent curatorial exercises include the exhibits: Yäq, La Planta, Guadalajara, 2007; El norte del sur, Baró Cruz Gallery, São Paulo, 2008; Carlos Amorales. Vivir por fuera de la casa de uno, Museo Amparo, Puebla, 2010; Mónica Espinosa. El peso del mundo, Casas Riegner Gallery, Bogotá, 2010; antes/después, Caja Blanca, Mexico City, 2011; Juan Pablo Macías. Tiempo muerto. Economías del deseo, MUCA Roma, Mexico City, 2012, Mario de Vega 2003-2013, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City, 2013, and Sobre Negro, marso and Torre de los Vientos, 2015. He has been part of the jury of the Eighth Contemporary Art State’s Encounter, Puebla, 2008; the 13th Northwest’s Visual Arts Biennial, Culiacan, 2011; the Artemergente Biennial, Monterrey, 2012, and he has also been a member of the nominations committee for the Yanghyun Art Prize 2013. He has also been a lecturer in several forums such as the “Collecting in the Present”, Castilla and Leon’s Contemporary Art Museum, Musac 2007; “Curators in movement”, Feria CIRCA ’08, San Juan, Puerto Rico; “Curators of Latin American Art: agendas and challenges” arteBA Fair, Buenos Aires, 2011, and in the Ch.ACO Fair, Santiago de Chile, 2012; among others. Blancsubé has collaborated in several periodicals: Mouvement, Espacio, Fahrenheit, La Tempestad; as well as in art catalogues such as Dieter Roth: La bibliothèque; Mathieu Briand. Derrière le monde flottant; Pablo Vargas Lugo: Vision antiderrapante; Fernando Ortega, Revolution of the Ordinary. The Order of Things: Franz West. El elefante blanco; Resisting the Present. Mexico 2000-2012 and Germinal, among many others.

Miriam Schickler works at the interface of sound, research, performance, and education. She studied social and cultural anthropology in London and Berlin. Her artistic practice emerged and then developed in activist and queer-feminist collective contexts and has always been based on collaboration with others. This collaborative approach is aimed at creating new forms of knowledge based on a variety of experiences and practices. The works created in this way primarily concern the connection of different spatio-temporalities and attempt to emphasize overlooked or silenced historical entanglements. Between 2016 and 2020, she co-founded and developed the “Foundation Class of Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin”.

Martin Kuentz is a German artist born in 1975, based in Berlin. In 2002, he founded the Salon Bruit, a concert series on improvised, electroacoustic, and noise music. He organized the DIENSTbar event on M.S. Stubnitz (Rotterdam) in 2001, and took part in the “White Ears” exhibition of Expo 3000 (Lagos Art Festival). He has participated in several music-related projects, including radio transmitting performances as Transmitting Object Behaviour (T.O.B.), Berlin free radio campaign, Blind Operators, Unkuentz vs. Trodza. Kuentz founded ‘apostrov recordings and he does several workshops for DIY micro-fm-circuits and DIY sound-modules in Europe.

Anish Kapoor is an Indian-born British sculptor known for his use of abstract biomorphic forms and his penchant for rich colours and polished surfaces. He was also the first living artist to be given a solo show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. During the 1980s and ’90s, Kapoor was increasingly recognized for his biomorphic sculptures and installations, made with materials as varied as stone, aluminum, and resin, that appeared to challenge gravity, depth, and perception. In 1990, he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale with his installation “Void Field?, a grid of rough sandstone blocks, each with a mysterious black hole penetrating its top surface. The following year, he was honoured with the Turner Prize, a prestigious award for contemporary art. Kapoor continued to explore the idea of the void during the remainder of the decade, creating a series of works that incorporated constructions that receded into walls, disappeared into floors, or dramatically changed depth with a simple change in perspective. In the early 21st century, Kapoor’s interest in addressing site and architecture led him to create projects that were increasingly ambitious in scale and construction. For his 2002 installation Marsyas at the Tate Modern gallery in London, Kapoor created a trumpet-like form by erecting three massive steel rings joined by a 550-foot (155-metre) span of fleshy red plastic membrane that stretched the length of the museum’s Turbine Hall. In 2004, Kapoor unveiled Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park; the 110-ton elliptical archway of highly polished stainless steel—nicknamed “The Bean”—was his first permanent site-specific installation in the United States. For just over a month in 2006, Kapoor’s Sky Mirror, a concave stainless-steel mirror 35 feet (11 metres) in diameter, was installed in New York City’s Rockefeller Center. Both Cloud Gate and Sky Mirror reflected and transformed their surroundings and demonstrated Kapoor’s ongoing investigation of material, form, and space. In 2022, a retrospective of Kapoor’s work was held at the Galleries of the Academy of Venice, along with an exhibition at the nearby Palazzo Priuli Manfrin. The latter was a former mansion in Venice that the Anish Kapoor Foundation began renovating in 2021 to house its headquarters, an exhibition space, and a studio. Both shows debuted several Kapoor’s highly anticipated sculptures painted with Vantablack, considered the blackest black paint because it absorbs nearly all light.

Jane Chardiet, also known as Jane Pain, is a New York-based 35mm photographer, writer, and musician, focusing on documenting ‘now’ through the lens of her own life. Jane is also the front vocalist of the Extreme Metal band Melissa. Her photography is often disturbing and shocking, yet always fascinating and eye-catching. The common theme is that her art remains prominent in an ever-crowded landscape today, and she has the rare power to make the viewer/listener gasp, laugh, and even dance.

Tania Aedo is a Mexican cultural producer and curator with a long trajectory in the development of projects at the crossroads of knowledge, especially between art, science, and technology. She is currently the coordinator of the Max Aub Chair, Transdiscipline in Art and Technology at UNAM, and is a fellow of CIFAR (Canadian Institute for Advanced Research) for the collective project Future Flourishing. She directed the Laboratorio Arte Alameda and the Multimedia Center of the Centro Nacional de las Artes. She hosts and coordinates the podcast »Prototipos para navegar« at Cultura UNAM. She received a Degree in Art Education from the Escuela Superior de Artes de Yucatán and completed the Senior Management Program in Museums (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, Instituto de Liderazgo en Museos, and the Getty Leadership Institute). She has received several grants, including a Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller-Ford-MacArthur Foundation and a grant for Creative Residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, awarded by FONCA. She has participated in selection committees in the field of art and new media for different institutions, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Arts). She has carried out several curatorial projects, including Surrounded (2009) at the School of Art, Media and Design at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore; Archaeology of Autonomy (2018) at Laboratorio Arte Alameda and Fiamma Montezemolo: Soñar con bisontes (2019) at Laboratorio Arte Alameda.

Vinyl-terror & -horror is a collaboration between Camilla Sørensen (b.1978) and Greta Christensen (b. 1977), both of whom graduated from the Royal Danish Art Academy in Copenhagen in 2007. The core of Vinyl-terror & -horror is sound and sculpture based on breaking down systems and building new ones. The sculptural material – aside from a vast use of hi-fi equipment and technology – consists of familiar objects whose form and function are altered and reworked into new contexts. In their installations, they often create a dark, post-apocalyptic atmosphere infused with moments of absurd humor. In the absence of a human body, mechanical sculptures are imbued with human traits, performing specific actions linked together in a narrative sequence – supported by an atmospheric cinematic soundtrack. Besides their installation work, which is primarily shown in art institutions, Vinyl-terror & -horror also give concerts at music festivals, and create permanent installations in public spaces. A characteristic of their turntable performances and compositional work in general, the duo approaches the vinyl medium from a sculptural perspective, using the turntable itself and the vinyl material as compositional agents that lead to unexpected outcomes. Vinyl-terror & -horror use manipulated records, including broken, baked, collaged ‘cut-ups’ on multi-pickup turntables – blending a wide range of culturally diverse musical genres in a non-hierarchical mix, such as classical, opera, folk, schlager, spoken word, hammond organ interpretations as well as horror film sound effects, pan flute bird imitations, etc. into an abstract cinematic sound narrative.

Nam June Paik was born in Seoul in 1932. In 1950, he emigrated to Japan, where he studied Music, Art History, and Philosophy at the University of Tokyo. He completed his studies in 1956 with a thesis on Arnold Schönberg. He then moved to Germany, studying History of Music at the University of Munich (1956-57) and Composition, under Wolfgang Fortner, at the Hochschule für Musik, Freiburg (1957-58). Paik taught at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, from 1979 to 1996. In 1987, he became a member of the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Berlin. He received numerous awards and prizes, including the Guggenheim Prize, awarded in New York, the Rockefeller Foundation Prize, the American Foundation Institute Prize, the ‘Kaiserring’ bestowed by the city of Goslar (1991), the Picasso Medal awarded by UNESCO (1992), and, most recently, the ‘Goethe-Medaille’ awarded by the Goethe-Institut (1997). During the 1960s, Paik, together with Joseph Beuys and George Maciunas, was one of the leading figures in the Fluxus movement. Paik was able to acquire a broad knowledge of the technological possibilities opened up for music by the new media through his participation, in 1957 and 1958, in the International Summer School for New Music held annually in Darmstadt, and through working with Karlheinz Stockhausen in the studio for electronic music at the WDR broadcasting channel in Cologne. Using a video camera, Paik then attempted to translate his ideas from the realm of music into that of the visual arts. In 1970-71, working with Shuya Abe, he developed a video synthesizer that could be used to process and manipulate videotaped images. In 1963, at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Paik exhibited his first works incorporating specially adapted television sets. In 1964, he started working with the cellist Charlotte Moorman, who played Paik’s compositions during their joint performance pieces. The largest installation Paik has made was produced to mark the Olympic Games held in Seoul in 1988 and included one thousand and three monitors. In his performance art of the 1980s, Paik made use of satellite technology in order to transmit electronic images to specific receivers all around the world.

BJ Nilsen is a Swedish sound artist and composer based in Amsterdam. His work explores the intersection of field recording, sound, space, and perception. Through subtle electronic manipulations and detailed editing, Nilsen transforms environmental recordings into layered, immersive soundscapes that inhabit the space between reality and sublimation. His upcoming release, True than Nature (2025) on Ideologic Organ, continues a 30-year career spanning original scores and sound design for music, film, visual arts, and performance. His most recent album, Irreal (2021), was released on Editions Mego. Nilsen began releasing music in 1991 under the moniker Morthond on Sweden’s Cold Meat Industry. Between 1998 and 2015, he released work as Hazard and under his own name on the UK label Ash International / TOUCH. His wide-ranging collaborations include projects with Karl Lemieux, Stilluppsteypa, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Anla Courtis, Janitor, Ragnar Jónsson, Judith Hamann, Chris Watson, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Franz Graf, Claudia Schumann, Anthea Caddy, Z’EV, choreographer Örjan Andersson, and visual artist Femke Herregraven.

Valerio Tricoli works as a Musique Concrète music composer, improviser, sound installation artist, producer, sound engineer, and curator. Long involved in musique concrète and free improvisation using vintage analog electronic instruments, his work is considered pivotal to the new wave of Italian music. Tricoli plays live music with electronic instruments. Valerio’s live setup includes a modified Revox A77 tape machine, loudspeakers, microphones to catch sound to be “live processed” with the tape machines and effects, a mixer, light effects, and ultrasonic speakers; an array ever changing in response to the performers and performance space. Tricoli was born in 1977 in Palermo and is based in Munich. He has been investigating the complex relationship between self, sound, and devices for more than a decade; psychic processes translated into soundscapes, and vice versa. He has a radical interest in how reality, virtuality, and memory relate to each other during acoustic events. He is one of the founders of the Bowindo label/collective, and of the band 3/4HadBeenEliminated, a super-group drawn from Italy’s improvisational community that carries on the mantle handed down by This Heat, intertwining musique concrète and free improv with rock dynamics.

Born in 1978 in Osaka, Teji Sawai is a Japanese sound artist, designer, and director known for creating interactive sound and light experiences, working across product design, web, film, and advertising, and co-founding the creative studio Qosmo, Inc., with a career spanning major in festivals, art institutions like MoMA, and collaborations with artists like Daito Manabe and teamLab. Sawai began his activities as an audiovisual unit called portable[k]ommunity in 2000. Since then, he has produced ACO’s (SONY MUSIC) album “irony,” designing electronic instruments for EYE from Boredoms and media artist Daito Manabe. Taieji is also a member of the art collective teamLab, representing one of the driving forces behind the electronic sound scene in Japan in recent years.

Die Tödliche Doris was a performance art and music group based in West Berlin from 1980 to 1987. It was founded by band members Wolfgang Müller and Nikolaus Utermöhlen, and later joined by Käthe Kruse, Chris Dreier, Dagmar Dimitroff, and Tabea Blumenschein. DTD was part of the Geniale Dilletanten movement (Ingenious Dilletantes (spelling error intentional)), a merger of the new wave and post-punk scene, which combined influences like Frieder Butzmann, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Malaria!. The head of the band, author, musician, and artist Wolfgang Müller, wrote the book Geniale Dilletanten for the Merve publishing house. This was known for the first German publisher of French postmodern philosophers. Rather than constructing a consistent identity, typically essential for pop music groups, Die Tödliche Doris challenged the notion of “convention” or “stereotype”. Instead, they tried with each music piece and production not to follow a “style” or “image”. Inspired by the post-structuralism of Baudrillard, Foucault, Guattari, and Lyotard, Die Tödliche Doris’ approach was amusical, or non-musical, in which an invisible sculpture should become the body of Doris itself. The first 12-inch LP of Die Tödliche Doris has no title, but is known as “7 tödliche Unfälle im Haushalt” (7 deadly accidents in the household). Afterwards, they published the LP “Die Tödliche Doris” (1981). On this LP are 13 tracks, which seem to have nothing in common: a “funny” song followed by a “serious” song, followed by a “banal” one, a “cruel” one, a “soft” one, a “noisy” one, etc. Nothing seems to fit together; all styles or themes are strictly separated from one another. So Doris consists – like human beings – of a lot of different, contradictory characteristics, which exist in one body, but not co-instantaneously.

Shelley Hirsch was born and raised in East New York. She is a vocal Artist, performer, composer, storyteller, writer, and interdisciplinary artist. She has been pushing boundaries with her unique vocal art in her compositions, improvisations, readings, and performance work, drawing on life experiences and memory. She has received multiple awards, residencies and honors including 4 NYFA Fellowships in Music composition, New Forms, Performance and Music Sound categories; the DAAD Residency in Berlin; A Creative Capital Grant in Music Performance; 6 Residencies at Harvestworks Studio Pass; The Herb Alpert/ UCross Residency prize; residencies at YADDO; the Montalvo Arts Residency; The John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition in 2017; The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists 2017; a NYSCA Music Commission in 2021; NYSCA Women’s Fund for Recording in 2022 and a grant in 2023 from the MediaThe Foundation to create a new interactive device for performance.

Rogelio Sosa is a Mexican musician, artist, and experimental music promoter born in Guadalajara in 1977. His artistic practice includes instrumental and electroacoustic compositions, electroacoustic improvisation, audiovisual and stage collaborations, as well as performances and sound installations. He studied composition with Julio Estrada and Ignacio Baca Lobera in Mexico. Abroad, Sosa continued his studies of electronic music at the Ateliers UPIC and the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. In 2003, he obtained a master’s degree in music and technology at the University of Paris VIII. He was a programmer and sub-director of the Radar Festival from 2005 to 2007, as well as director from 2007 to 2009. He was curator of sound art at Ex Teresa Arte Actual from 2005 to 2007. Among the most important awards and distinctions he has received are the Sistema Nacional de Creadores, FONCA (2012 and 2016), Premio Nacional de la Juventud en Artes (Mexico, 2000), the SCRIME Electroacoustic Music Contest (Bordeaux, France, 2000), the IMEB Electroacoustic Music Contest (Bourges, France, 2001), the New Resonances Prize (Mexico, 2001), the Luigi Russolo Electroacoustic Music Contest (Varese, Italy, 2002), the EAR Electroacoustic Music Competition (Budapest, Hungary, 2003), Apoyo a la Producción e Investigación en Arte y Medios del Centro Multimedia (Mexico, 2006) and the Visiones Sonoras award (Mexico, 2008), the artistic residency at the Montalvo Arts Center (California, 2009), the artistic residency at the EMS Studio in Stockholm (Sweden, 2014) and the support of the Programa de Fomento de las Músicas Iberoamericanas IBERMÚSICAS (2019). His work has been presented in more than 50 cities around the world and has been published on the Bocian Records, Mode Records, Important Records, and Sub Rosa.

Mabe Fratti is a Guatemalan cellist and vocalist born in 1992. Fratti works in a wide variety of genres. Her work includes collaborations with artists such as Belafonte Sensacional, and she is part of avant-garde music collective Amor Muere. Raised in a Pentecostal family, Fratti was classically trained in cello. She began creating her own music as a teenager, and upon leaving the church, expanded into playing styles as varied as reggae, blues, and funk, with the cello she uses now being a gift from her school. In 2015, a Goethe Institute residency took her to Mexico to work on her music. Through this residency and move, she performed with more musicians, such as established artists Libertad Figueroa, Gudrun Gut, and Julian Bonequi, and got involved in the Mexico City improvisational music scene. In 2019, Fratti produced her first album, “Pies Sobre La Tierra”, citing W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn as inspiration. This was followed up by “Será Que Ahora Podremos Entendernos” in 2021, collaborating on an album with composer Claire Rousay and the experimental band Tajak, and the album being described as “referencing Arthur Russell”. Fratti’s subsequent 2022 album “Se Ve Desde Aquí”. In 2023, Amor Muere, with artists Concepción Huerta, Gibrana Cervantes, and Camille Mandoki, released “A Time to Love, a Time to Die”.

After emigrating from Syria to Europe in his youth, Rashad Becker began experimenting with sounds in empty buildings in Berlin. He presented his ideas, among other things, in the form of sound installations. As a sound engineer, he also participated in several theater productions. He describes the sounds in his live performances as »entities«, as narratives describing states of affairs. The sources of the sounds he produces are difficult to identify since, although Rashad Becker works exclusively with synthetic sound generation, the result often has an organic appearance. For him, his live sets represent an attempt to break through conventional forms of reception by rendering them more abstract. On Discogs, there are just two releases under Rashad Becker’s name, but there is another 978 where he is in the credits. As an engineer at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering, he has mastered and cut at least 1200 dance, electronic, and experimental albums. Working from his own studio called Clunk, he has made one of the most discussed albums in 2013. Traditional Music Of Notional Species Vol. 1, Rashad Becker’s full-length debut on PAN label, is a rewarding challenge. A seasick suite of buzzes, rumbles, growls, and blasts unconstrained by any easily identifiable melodic or rhythmic structures. Furthermore, Rashad Becker runs the mastering studio Clunk.

Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist, composer, and theorist based in Rotherham, UK. Renowned for his rigorous and conceptual approach to electronic music and sound art, Fell’s work explores the limits of structure, rhythm, and perception through a blend of computational systems, philosophical inquiry, and cultural critique. Emerging from the experimental music scene in Sheffield during the 1990s, Fell first gained prominence through his collaborations with Mat Steel as SND, a duo whose sparse, algorithmic techno helped define a new minimalism in digital sound. As a solo artist, he has released influential works on labels such as Raster-Noton, Editions Mego, and The Death of Rave, with key albums like Multistability and UL8 establishing him as a critical voice in the evolution of electronic composition. Beyond recorded music, Fell’s practice spans installation, performance, curation, and academic research. His multi-speaker sound environments, often rejecting illusionistic spatialization, foreground a “non-representational” aesthetic that challenges conventions of immersive media. These works have been featured in major international institutions, including the Serralves Foundation, Pirelli HangarBicocca, and V‑A‑C Foundation. In 2022, Fell published ‘Structure and Synthesis, The Anatomy of Practice’ with Urbanomic Press, bringing together the various strands of his philosophical and political thinking into an analysis of creative practice.

From 1959 to 1984, Hans Otte served as music director for Radio Bremen. From the early 1960s onwards, Otte frequently presented contemporary experimental American composers in his Bremen radio festival, Pro Musica Nova, among them people like John Cage, David Tudor, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young, who were then relatively unknown. Otte was a composer, pianist, radio promoter, and author of many pieces of musical theatre, sound installations, poems, drawings, and video. His catalogue of compositions contains more than 100 works. Some of Otte’s works, especially his extended suites for solo piano, are characterized by very minimal means but are nevertheless quite subtle and sophisticated in their architecture and expression. “Das Buch der Klänge (The Book of Sounds, 1979–82)” and “Stundenbuch (Book of Hours, 1991–98)” are his best-known pieces in this genre, and Otte often performed them himself. His last public recital was given in Amsterdam in 1999. Recordings of these works, with Otte as performer, are available on CD.

Dieter Kovačič is best known as dieb13, but he has also performed and recorded under the monikers Takeshi Fumimoto, Echelon, Dieter Bohlen, and dieb14. He sprang into action in the late ’80s, as the Viennese avant-garde scene was picking up momentum. Since then, he has been one of the European key figures in the harnessing of tape players, vinyls, CDs, hard disks, and IP protocols as instruments. He is also involved in programming software for the visualization of musical phenomena. His rare solo releases are complemented by several collaborations with the likes of Billy Roisz, Boris Hauf, Werner Dafeldecker, Martin Siewert, and Christof Kurzmann, all artists revolving mainly around the Viennese labels Charhizma and Durian. Kovacic was born in 1973. He is the founder of the klingt. orchestra and runs the internet platform klingt.org. Apart from his solo career, dieb13 collaborates with artists such as ErikM, Ignaz Schick, Billy Roisz, dieb13 vs. Takeshi Fumimoto, The John Butcher Group, Phil Minton, Jason Kahn, and Mats Gustafsson. Performances at phonoTAKTIK Vienna, Sonic Acts Amsterdam, Beyond Innocence Osaka, LMC Festival London, Electrograph Athens, MaerzMusik Berlin, Witten Tage für Neue Kammermusik, Donaueschingen Festival, Wien Modern, Turning Sounds Warsaw, Piksel Bergen, Donaufestival Krems, Batofar Paris, among others.

Vía Láctea was a band from the 1970s Mexican underground that could be contextualized as cosmic music. It was led by Carlos Alvarado and Miguel Angel Nava. The music featured classic synthesizer excursions strongly influenced by Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, more discreet and quiet, restrained and Ambient-like, with sometimes Ethnic / Prehispanic influences. After the first album, Miguel Angel Nava left the band, leaving Alvarado as the sole member. He continued to release albums, sometimes helped by fellow experimentalists Jorge Reyes, Arturo Meza, and others.

Mark Harwood is an Australian-born, Berlin-based musician and artist with a long history working at the intersections of experimental music, performance, music distribution, and the visual arts. He is also the mind behind the label Penultimate Press, a platform that deliberately operates beyond conventional genre logics, bringing together influences from noise, literature, conceptual art, and a wide range of contemporary media. Harwood’s works are compelling, utilizing a variety of sonic and performative elements, including field recording, cut-ups, and electronics, resulting in works that are developed as a means of bypassing the cliches embedded within these disparate worlds to coerce a sound world that is simultaneously contemporary, foreign, and engaging. His live performances encompass a variety of procedures incorporating the immediate surroundings where improvised actions yield spontaneous results, leaving both performer and audience in unexpected predicaments, a state of mild hypnosis, and potentially even laughter. He has released four critically acclaimed recordings. His release Inland (2014) came second in the outer limits category for record of the year in The Wire’s 2014 summary. Harwood has also made collaborative recordings with Graham Lambkin, Timo Van Luik, and Matthew P. Hopkins, among others.

Giuseppe Ielasi is an Italian artist born in 1974, living near Milan since 1990. He started playing the guitar in 1988 and has worked for many years in the ‘improvised music’ sector. Since 2007, he has mainly focused on studio work, working on compositions for CDs and records, theater, and film. He has abandoned the guitar and his performances are now based on multi-channel diffusion and recomposition of pre-existing pieces and fragments, to create complex site-specific sound works. He has collaborated with the Austrian video artist Michaela Grill and regularly presents performances and installations with Renato Rinaldi and Armin Linke. He plays in Bellows (with Nicola Ratti), whose Handcut was included in the ‘best of 2010’ by Wire magazine, Oreledigneur, and Eselsohr (with Jennifer Veillerobe). In 1998, he founded the Fringes recordings label, which closed in 2005. He is the co-founder of Schoolmap Records in 2006. At the moment, he is in charge of – together with Jennifer Veillerobe – Senufo Edizioni. Giuseppe Ielasi has appeared in many festivals around the world and on tour in Europe, the United States, and Japan. He releases his musical works on Senufo Editions, 12k, Erstwhile, Alga Marghen / PLANAM, Entr’acte, Dekor- der, and Editions Mego, among others.

Artur Żmijewski is a Polish visual artist, filmmaker, and photographer born in Warsaw in 1966. During the years 1990–1995 he studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Since 2006, he has been artistic editor of the “Krytyka Polityczna”. His solo show “If It Happened Only Once It’s As If It Never Happened” was at Kunsthalle Basel in 2005, the same year in which he represented Poland at the 51st Venice Biennale. He has shown in Documenta 12 (2007), and Manifesta 4 (2002); Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2012, 2005); National Gallery of Art Zacheta, Warsaw (2005); Kunstwerke, Berlin (2004); CAC, Vilnius (2004); “Moderna Museet”, Stockholm (1999). Earlier this year, he presented Democracies at “Foksal Gallery Foundation”, Warsaw, and is making new work for The Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York as part of their Projects Series in September 2009. “Cornerhouse”, Manchester, presented the first major UK survey of Zmijewski’s work, spanning his practice from 2003 to the present day. He was the curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale in 2012, of which he opened the curatorial process as a collaboration. Żmijewski is considered to be one of the most prominent radical figures on the Polish art scene, and his oeuvre reflects his concern with wide-ranging social problems. He frequently examines mechanisms of power and oppression within the existing social order – as well as social conflicts bordering on violence – while exposing the instinctive human inclination towards evil. Moreover, his works examine the relationship between extreme emotions and their physical expressions. Berek (The Game of Tag), for example, was a work from 1999 that has repeatedly brought controversy as the piece depicts nude adults playing tag in the gas chamber of the Stutthof concentration camp.

Tristan Perich is a contemporary composer and sound artist from New York City born in 1981, who focuses on electronic one-bit sound. Perich received his B.A. from Columbia University in 2004 and went on to earn a master’s degree from New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Perich composed a series of works as well as sound art installations with one-bit electronics, which Perich describes as being music that never has more than one bit of information being played at any given time. In Denmark he was an artist in residence, where he built a series of sculptures called Interval Studies consisting of large numbers of small speakers, each sending out its own frequency. The blending of all of these independent frequencies generates white noise, or other forms of colored noise. His other works include Machine Drawings and 1-bit Video. Together with Kunal Gupta and Katie Shima he forms the group Loud Objects. This group performs electronic music by soldering.

Matteo Marangoni was born in Florence in 1982 in a mixed Italian and American family of artists. He studied music performance, sound engineering, and cultural management before receiving a masters diploma from the ArtScience Interfaculty in The Hague in 2011. In his art practice, he focuses on creating sensory experiences that connect sound, space, image, and the body. His performances and installations present physical processes, sensory phenomena, and machines in ways that are both musical and theatrical. He works combine DIY electronics, digital systems, robotics, architectural spaces, humans, and other life forms. With these elements, he composes poetic rituals addressing the space between subject and object, nature and technology, materiality and transcendence, the absurd, curiosity, invention, and contemplation.

Paul DeMarinis is an American composer, sound artist, and media artist whose pioneering work spans electronic music, interactive installation, and technological experimentation. A key figure in the experimental music scene since the 1970s, he has explored the physical and historical dimensions of sound through custom-built instruments, obsolete technologies, and telecommunications media. His installations often combine humor, historical research, and poetic reflection, addressing themes such as communication, memory, and the materiality of sound. DeMarinis has exhibited widely in museums and festivals worldwide and is considered a major influence in sound art and media archaeology.

Edgar Válcárcel was a Peruvian composer and one of the most important figures in the Latin American musical avant-garde of the 20th century. His work combined experimental composition, electroacoustic music, graphic notation, and political expression, often reflecting social conflict and authoritarian repression in Peru. Active from the 1960s onward, he was associated with international contemporary music movements and incorporated indigenous, electronic, and theatrical elements into his compositions. Válcárcel’s legacy lies in his role as a radical innovator who expanded the boundaries of academic and experimental music in Latin America.

Prayers is an American goth rock / post-punk band formed in San Diego, California, in 2013. The project is led by Rafael Reyes, also known as Leafar Seyer (his name spelled backward), who is the band’s primary songwriter, vocalist, and creative force. Prayers blend darkwave, post-punk, industrial, and deathrock with themes drawn from religion, violence, redemption, love, and Chicano identity. Their music is notable for its stark emotional intensity, minimal yet driving arrangements, and Reyes’s deep, spoken-sung vocal style. The band gained underground recognition with albums such as The Bad Seed (2013) and Sea of Indifference (2016), earning a dedicated following in the global goth scene. The Prayers are also known for their strong visual aesthetic and connections to fashion and art, including collaborations with designers and artists. Prayers are widely regarded as a distinctive voice in contemporary dark music, merging personal history and cultural identity with classic gothic sound traditions.

Arrigo Barnabé was born 1951. He is a Brazilian composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist known for his innovative fusion of avant-garde classical music, rock, and Brazilian popular music. Born in Londrina, Paraná, he studied music at the University of São Paulo, where he became deeply influenced by atonal and dodecaphonic (twelve-tone) techniques, especially those of Arnold Schoenberg. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Barnabé emerged as a key figure in Brazil’s Vanguarda Paulista movement, challenging traditional song structures with complex rhythms, dissonant harmonies, and theatrical storytelling. His landmark album Clara Crocodilo (1980) is considered a classic of Brazilian experimental music. Alongside his work as a performer and composer, Barnabé has written film scores and orchestral music. He is widely regarded as one of Brazil’s most original and intellectually daring musicians.

Andrey Smirnov is an interdisciplinary artist, independent curator, collector, and writer based in Thessaloniki, Greece. Since 2023, he has been a special scientific associate at the MOMus Museum of Modern Art, Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki. He is the founder of the Theremin Center in Moscow (1992), Rodchenko Sound Lab and the Rodchenko Art School in Moscow (2017), and Zerkalo Art Space in Thessaloniki (2025). He teaches courses on the history and aesthetics of electroacoustic music, sound design and composition, new musical interfaces, and physical computing. He has conducted numerous workshops and master classes in the U.S., Europe, and Russia and participated in various festivals and conferences. His collection of historical documents and early electronic musical instruments has been combined with extensive research into the history of music technology, with broad experience in composition, interactive performance, and curatorial activities. He is the author of the monographs ‘Sound In Z: Experiments In Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia’ (London, 2013) and ‘In Search of Lost Sound. Experimental Sound Culture in Russia and the USSR in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’ (Moscow, GARAGE, 2020) (The Book of the Year Award at Innovation 2021, Moscow).

Evgeny (Eugene) Alexandrovitch Sholpo (1891–1951) was a Soviet inventor, musician, and pioneer of early electronic and optical sound technology. Born in the Pskov region of Russia, he became a leading figure in experimental sound research during the 1920s–1940s. Sholpo is best known for inventing the Variophone, an early optical sound synthesizer that generated music by photographing drawn waveforms onto film and converting them into sound via photoelectric cells. Developed around 1930 in Leningrad, the Variophone could produce complex, polyphonic electronic music and was used in film soundtracks and experimental compositions. He directed graphical sound laboratories at Soviet film studios and later headed a research lab for graphical sound recording. Much of his work was disrupted by World War II and postwar institutional changes. Although little known outside specialist circles during his lifetime, Sholpo is now recognized as an important precursor to modern electronic music and sound synthesis.

Arseny Avraamov [Арсений Авраамов] aka Revarsavr (Revolutionary Arseny Avraamov), Ars, Arslan Ibragim-ogli Adamov, was a composer, music theorist, performance instigator, expert in Caucasian folk music, outspoken critic of the classical twelve-tone system, and commissar for the arts in Narkompros (the People’s Commissariat for Education) just after the Revolution, who also helped set up Proletkult – encouraging the development of a distinctly proletarian art and literature. According to some of his own accounts, his original name was Krasnokutsky [Краснокутский], although he denied it in other notes of his.

Asa-Chang & Junray is a band founded by Japanese percussionist ASA-CHANG, who was the founder and original bandmaster of Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra. After leaving the group in 1993, he formed ASA-CHANG & Junray in 1998 with programmer and guitarist Hidehiko Urayama. They were joined in 2000 by tabla player U-zhaan. Live, the group used a portable sound system called ‘Jun-Ray Tronics’, hence the name; the word ‘junray’, however, also means ‘pilgrimage’. In 2002, the British label The Leaf Label released Jun Ray Song Chang, which compiled the group’s first two Japan-only albums. It was followed a year later by the mini album Tsu Gi Ne Pu. The group’s song ‘Hana’ was featured on Fabric Live 07, while ‘Tsuginepu To Ittemita’ was included on The Wire Tapper CD. The group’s 2005 album, Minna no Junray, featured vocals by singer and actress Kyōko Koizumi.

Dariush Dolat-Shahi is an Iranian-American composer and instrumentalist on the tar, the traditional Persian lute. His compositions include electronic and instrumental music as well as music for traditional Persian instruments. Dolat-Shahi studied classical Persian music at the Tehran Conservatory before leaving Iran for the Amsterdam Conservatory of Music and eventually earning a Ph.D from the legendary Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, where he studied under Mario Davidovsky, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Alice Shields, amongst others.

Otto Sidharta is an Indonesian Composer known for his electronic music since the early seventies. Otto Sidharta finished his post-graduate study in composition and electronic music at the Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam under the guidance of Professor Ton de Leeuw. Sidharta’s interest in using environmental sounds to express his musical ideas developed when he was a student at the Jakarta Institute of Arts (Institut Kesenian Jakarta). He performed his first electronic music piece, Kemelut, based on water sounds in the First Indonesian Young Composer Festival (Pekan Komponis Indonesia) in 1979. In 1982, he collected some nature and animal sounds on Nias, in the Borneo (Kalimantan) jungle, and other remote places in Indonesia. These sounds were used as material for some of his works, such as Ngendau, Hutan Plastik, and East Wind.

Halim Abdul Messieh El-Dabh [ حليم عبد المسيح الضبع ] was an Egyptian-American composer, musician, ethnomusicologist, and educator who had a career spanning six decades. He is particularly known as an early pioneer of electronic music. In 1944, he composed one of the earliest known works of tape music, or musique concrète. From the late 1950s to the early 1960s, he produced influential work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. While still a student in Cairo, El-Dabh began experimenting with electronic music. El-Dabh first conducted experiments in sound manipulation with wire recorders there in the early 1940s. By 1944, he had composed one of the earliest known works of tape music or musique concrète, called The Expression of Zaar, pre-dating Pierre Schaeffer’s work by four years. Having borrowed a wire recorder from the offices of Middle East Radio, El-Dabh took it to the streets to capture outside sounds, specifically an ancient zaar ceremony, a type of exorcism conducted in public. Intrigued by the possibilities of manipulating recorded sound for musical purposes, he believed it could open up the raw audio content of the zaar ceremony to further investigation into “the inner sound” contained within.

Makoto Moroi was born in Tokyo. He studied composition with Tomojirō Ikenouchi at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, graduating in 1952. He also studied Gregorian chant privately with Paul Anouilh, and Renaissance and Baroque music with Eta Harich-Schneider. He was one of the leading composers who introduced Japanese audiences to new musical styles and devices, including twelve-tone technique, serialism, and aleatory music. He was one of the first Japanese composers to embrace electronic music, and also introduced traditional Japanese instruments like the shakuhachi into his compositions. He died in 2013, aged 82.

Toshiro Mayuzumi was born in Yokohama in 1929. He studied composition with Kunihiko Hashimoto, Tomojiro Ikenouchi and Akira Ifukube at the Tokyo Music School and the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. He first came to attention in Japan with his Divertissement pour 10 Instruments, composed in 1948, and internationally in 1950 with the appearance of his work Sphénogrammes, which was selected for performance at the ISCM International Festival of Contemporary Music. In 1952 he travelled to France to study at the Paris Conservatoire, where he was taught by Tony Aubin. After leaving France he pioneered work in Japan in the fields of musique concrète and electronic music. In 1953 he formed the Sannin no Kai (Group of Three) together with Yasushi Akutagawa and Ikuma Dan and established the 20th Century Music Research Institute with leading figures in the Japanese musical world such as Hidekazu Yoshida. While deepening his knowledge and experience of Japanese traditional musical genres such as Gagaku and Shōmyō he also became active as a composer of large-scale film scores. In 1964 he began planning and presenting the long-running Japanese television series Daimei no nai ongakukai (‘Untitled Concerts’). He was appointed lecturer at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and advisor and trustee to the Urasenke Tankōkai Federation. He also held positions including chairman of the Japan Federation of Composers and of the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC). He died in 1997.

Valentine Goncharova was born in 1953 in Kyiv. She started music education when she was 3 years old. Her first piano teacher was her grandmother. Three years later, Valentina took a violin in her hands, and since that moment, she has never left it. Since 1969, Valentine studied in St. Petersburg (Leningrad). 1969 – 71, she was a student of the Leningrad special musical school. From 1971 to 1976, a student of the Leningrad conservatory (by Professor M.I. Vajman). Between 1980 and 1983 she took a course of postgraduate in the Leningrad conservatory by the professor B.L. Gutnikov. For several years, Valentina was a soloist of the Philarmonic societies (in Ulan-Ude 1976-77, in Tver 1978 – 83, in Tallinn 1985-91). She has been living in Estonia since 1984. Between 1984 and 2002, she worked as a teacher at Music College by the name of Georg Ots, in Tallinn. Besides the abovementioned, Valentina is a journalist, music critic, and broadcaster. She is a member of the Estonian Union of journalists and the International Federation of journalists.

Sapto Raharjo is a composer of music for performance, theater, television and radio, integrating traditional techniques, modes and sounds with electronics and computer technology. He was born in 1955, in Jakarta, Indonesia. As a child in the 1960s, Raharjo studied gamelan and Javanese dance as a member of the dance and karawitan group, Arena Budhaya, in Yogyakarta. During the 1970s, he became a rock and folk guitarist and began to explore joining “pentatonic (gamelan) and diatonic instruments and make music with instruments made by tin / used canned goods.” He was also an announcer at Radio Suara Padmanaba, in Yogyakarta. Rahario began working with synthesizers in 1977. His work at Germonimo FM Broadcast Station (Jakarta) and as a festival organizer has played a significant role in promoting contemporary gamelan music, a task for which he has received support from the Ford Foundation. He has composed music for theater, television, gamelan ensemble and electronics. He has served as Secretary General of Asosiasi Komponis Indonesia (Association of Indonesian Composers) and as organizer of gamelan festivals and concerts. In the mid-1980s, with his newly-formed Dampitt Group (1986), Rahario began to combine synthesizers with gamelan, tuning his electronics to the slendro-pelog scale. In the 1990s, he began digitally programming gamelan sounds. He has continued to be active with gamelan, electronic music, and the intersection of the two. His music has been performed throughout France, Indonesia and elsewhere. Raharjo has served as a musical ambassador for his country, performing and giving workshops with Ben M. Pasaribu, I Wayan Gde Yudane and other noted Indonesian musicians.

Francis Bebey was a Cameroonian-born writer, guitarist, and composer, one of the best-known singer-songwriters of Africa. He is sometimes called the father of world music. Bebey began performing with a band while a teenager in Cameroon. In the mid-1950s, he traveled to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, and during this time he was influenced by classical guitarist Andrés Segovia. After attending New York University, Bebey in 1960 settled in Paris, where he worked on several radio stations and was later hired by UNESCO to research and document traditional African music. Bebey continued composing his own music, gaining notice for his poetic lyrics and expressive voice. By 1967, he had made several recordings and had performed in New York City and Paris as well as in Africa. Highly experimental, Beby often incorporated Latin American, Western, and African sounds into his music. His numerous recordings include Akwaaba (1985), Amaya (1987), and Dibiye (1998).

Anthony Pateras is an Australian composer and musician. Active since 1999, his practice spans modern classical, electroacoustics, piano improvisation, experimental rock, and film soundtrack. 
Aural hallucination and polytemporality are the main foci of his work, creating sonic realities which open musical perception, often through intertwining bespoke electronic materials with idiosyncratic instrumental writing. His music has been presented in prestigious venues such as the Sydney Opera House, Walt Disney Concert Hall (LA), Martin-Gropuis-Bau (Berlin), Centre Pompidou (Paris), BBC Maida Vale (London), Berliner Festspiele, Foundaçao Serralves (Porto), Haus der Musik (Innsbruck), Zitadelle Spandau (Berlin), National Gallery of Lithuania (Vilnius), Henie Onstad (Oslo), CIVICAN (Pamplona), Haus Konstruktiv (Zürich), Logan Center for the Arts (Chicago), Tempo Reale (Florence), Roy Thomson Hall (Toronto), Great American Music Hall (San Francisco), Teatro Fondamenta Nuove (Venice) and Hamer Hall (Melbourne). Pateras has released 45+ albums on labels such as Tzadik, Editions Mego, Shelter Press, Another Timbre, Ipecac, Futura Resistenza, Hallow Ground, Superpang, Penultimate Press, and his own Immediata, including two 5CD box sets of his concert music.

Juan Blanco, born in 1919, was the first Cuban composer to utilize electroacoustics, spatial music, and multimedia. Blanco’s first pieces, composed in the 1950s, such as “Triptico Coral”, “Cantata de la paz”, “Elegía”, and “Divertimento,” conveyed a nationalistic theme. This first composition, titled “Musica Para Danza”, was produced with an oscillator and three tape recorders. In 1970, Blanco began to work as a music advisor for the Department of Propaganda of ICAP (Insituto Cubano de Amistad con Los Pueblos). In this capacity, he created electroacoustic music for all the audiovisual materials produced by ICAP. After working for nine years without payment, Blanco finally obtained financing to establish an Electroacoustic Studio. He was appointed as Director of the Studio, under the condition that he should be the only one to use the facility. After several months, he opened the studio to all composers interested in working with electroacoustic technology, thus creating the ICAP Electroacoustic Music Workshop (TIME), where he provided direct training to participants. In 1990, the ICAP Workshop changed its name to Laboratorio Nacional de Música Electroacústica (LNME), with the objective of promoting and supporting the work of Cuban electroacoustic composers and sound artists.

Born in Ukraine, Dana Montana is an up-and-coming techno DJ and producer. Her DJ sets showcase the sassy energies from banging Techno and Electro to Ghettotech and Hardcore. Coming up and out in Belgium, Dana fell in love with the club scene when she started going to Ampere, a nightclub in the bustling city of Antwerp. She regularly attended their infamous Drag Me to Hell nights and found a home in the underground LGBT community.

Gaelynn Lea Tressleris an American folk singer, violinist, public speaker, and disability advocate born in 1984. Gaelynn Lea was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, a genetic condition that causes complications in the development of bones and limbs. Lea became impassioned by classical music from an early age, and in fourth grade, a teacher took notice and encouraged Lea to pursue music after she had the class’s only perfect score on a music listening test. Lea developed a technique for violin which involved holding the bow “like a bassist” with the body of the instrument placed in front of her, like a cello, and attached to her foot so it wouldn’t slip when she played. Her parents also owned and operated a dinner theater while Lea was growing up, and she would often usher and do lighting for productions. Lea attended Macalester College, where she majored in political science; prior to her music career, she had planned to pursue a career as a lawyer and disability rights advocate.

Macedonian artist Robert Gligorov works across a variety of media: video, photography, installations, and paintings. His primary sources are all types of images: from drawings to movies, graphics or logos, and comics. The admiration for art history masters – like Matisse, Piero Della Francesca, and Bacon – also nourishes his oeuvre. Formerly more focused on the body, its metamorphosis, and performance, Gligorov’s current research focuses on social and political issues. In his own words: ‘my goal is to investigate the meaning of things and stubbornly seek beauty and seduction of things’, despite the chosen medium and content. Very often, his works provoke intentionally shocking or disturbing short circuits, leaving the viewer to reflect on existence and common suffering. Since 2014, he has been running ‘Hystery’ magazine, a container of unreleased works of an intense visual impact. Images that speak of politics, society, art obsessions, and poetry.

Clare Cooper is an Australian musician born in 1981 who plays pedal harp and guzheng (large Chinese zither). Over the past 10 years, she has performed in 16 countries both as a soloist and collaborator, notably the Musee des Beaux Arts (Nantes), AMAT Festival (Valencia), Strasbourg Contemporary Art Museum, Blaest (Trondheim), Offsite (Tokyo), and Volksbuehne (Berlin). Cooper’s compositions have been featured on Germany’s SWR, Australia’s ABC Radio, and the UK’s BBC Radio. She’s ferocious with strings and sticks, her sound inspired by synthesizers and broken boom boxes. In 2007, she relocated to Berlin, where she has been a founding member of several ensembles, most recently, the Splitter Orchestra – a 25-piece improvising ensemble. Cooper has also been a guest programmer and curator at Ausland and Radialsystem V. Aside from solo performance, Clare’s key projects are Germ Studies (with pianist Chris Abrahams), LVSXY (with bassist Clayton Thomas), Nevers (with electronics musician Jean-Philippe Gross), and Hammeriver. She is also a member of the Splitter Orchestra (Berlin), The John Butcher Group (UK), Kim Myhr’s Trondheim Jazz Orkestra (Norway), and the Splinter Orchestra (Sydney).

Born in Peru and based in New York, Maria Chávez is best known as an abstract turntablist, sound artist, and DJ. Coincidence, chance, and failures are themes that unite her work across mediums, including improvised performance, sound and marble sculpture, visual art, book objects, and an extensive history with multi-channel installation. Maria performs with a rare needle known as the RAKE Double Needle. This special device contains two needles on one head, allowing it to read two different segments of a single record at the same time. Paired with her inimitable ability to create unforgettable sonic experiences from shards of broken records, each performance is truly unique.

Florian Hecker is a German artist who works with synthetic sound, the listening process, and the audience’s auditory experience. Recent exhibitions and performances include TEMPLEXTURES, Galerie Neu, Berlin, Germany; FAVN, Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Formulations As Texture, horizontal and vertical crossings, Simian, Copenhagen, Denmark (all 2022); and Resynthesizers, Equitable Vitrines, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2021). Hecker has an extensive discography, including: Syn As Text [AC] (Etat, Vienna, 2021); Synopsis Seriation (Editions Mego, Vienna, 2021); Statistique Synthétique (GRM Portraits, Paris, 2020); Inspection II (Editions Mego, Vienna & Urbanomic Falmouth, UK, 2019); and A Script for Machine Synthesis (Editions Mego, Vienna, 2017). Articulação Sintetico (Editions Mego, Vienna, 2017) and Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera (Pan, Berlin, 2015). Florian Hecker has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich since 2024.

Stavanger-born vocalist Stine Janvin is active in experimental music, sound, and audiovisual performance, with a special interest in the ambiguous and unrecognisable qualities of the voice. Janvin’s 2018 album, Fake Synthetic Music, released on interdisciplinary label PAN, brought the artist international critical acclaim for her singular examination of how the voice can be disconnected from its natural, human connotations. The record is but one of many iterations that test the resonant possibilities of spaces, from theatres to clubs to galleries, through a driving vocal imitation of melodic synth sequences. Janvin has collaborated with artists such as Holly Herndon, Catherine Lamb, and Adam Linder, and has toured extensively throughout Europe, including performances at INA-GRM, Paris; The Long Now, Berlin; Elevate, Graz; CTM Festival, Berlin; Issue Project Room, NYC; Unsound Festival, Krakow; Terraforma, Milan; and many more.

Born in 1965 in Glasgow, Susan Philipsz currently lives and works in Berlin. She received a BFA in Sculpture from Duncan of Jordanstone College in Dundee, Scotland, in 1993, and an MFA from the University of Ulster in Belfast in 1994. In 2000, she completed a fellowship at MoMA PS1 in New York. She received the Turner Prize in 2010 and was awarded an OBE in 2014 for services to British art. Since the mid-1990s, Philipsz’s sound installations have been exhibited at many prestigious institutions and public venues around the world. She has presented solo exhibitions at Yi Museum, Hangzhou, China (2025), Goodwood Art Foundation, United Kingdom (2025), FJK3-Contemporary Art Space, Vienna (2024), Aros Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark (2023), Kunstmuseum Brandts, Odense, Denmark (2023), Kunstmuseum Bonn (2021), Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (2019-20), Castello di Rivoli in Italy (2019), Tate Modern (2018) and Tate Britain (2015) in London, Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (2018), Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm (2017), Kunstverein Hannover (2016-17), Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria (2016), Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2014), the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (2013), K21 Standehaus Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dusseldorf, Germany (2013), Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2011), Aspen Art Museum in Colorado (2010-11), Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State in Columbus, OH (2009-10), Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany (2009), Institute of Contemporary Art in London (2008), among others. Installations by Philipsz were included in Skulptur Projekte Muenster in 2007, the 55th Carnegie International in 2008, and the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial in 2020.

NMO is the project between drummer Morten J. Olsen and synthesis aficionado Rubén Patiño. N.M.O. is an acronym that serves to frame the work of a rolling computerized ceremonial aerobics unit operating in a hybrid territory between club music, performance, and inventive forms of sound spatialisation. What the duo calls “military danceable space music and/or fluxus techno” is a unique blend of repetitive percussive patterns and synthetic sounds that, combined with performative aspects, explodes during their live shows. From a club night intermezzo concept that begins with a bleep test from the the middle of the dancefloor, to a site-specific hybrid lecture that reduces the sound pressure level of a club performance but increases the degree of interactivity with the audience (incorporating the game of musical chairs), to outdoor performances with coloured smoke grenades and flares—all permutations attempt to question standardized formats of electronic music and break down the pattern of passive listening. To follow three EP releases, N.M.O. have also released a proto-techno-tinged concept 12″ on Where To Now? and a double 12″ for Powell’s Diagonal Records. Their LP Nordic Mediterranean Organization/Numerous Miscommunications Occur came out on Diagonal in October 2016, followed by the Vinyl Factory EP release, Nassau Molasses Office/ Deutsch Am Fuß in 2017.

Virgin Prunes were an Irish post-punk/gothic rock band formed in 1977 in Dublin. They disbanded in 1986 after the departure of singer Gavin Friday. The other members continued under the name The Prunes until they split up in 1991. Known for their outrageous and controversial stage performances, led by theatrical singer/songwriter Friday, the band began playing small shows in Dublin, gaining them a cult audience. Pod left the group and was replaced by Haa-Lacka Binttii (né Daniel Figgis). With Binttii on drums, tape loops, and keyboards, the band secured a deal with Rough Trade Records. They released their first single, “Twenty Tens” on their own Baby Records label (distributed by Rough Trade) in 1981, followed by a second single, “Moments and Mine (Despite Straight Lines)”, in the same year.

Iannis Xenakis was a Romanian-born Greek-French avant-garde composer, music theorist, architect, performance director, and engineer. Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music, such as applications of set theory, stochastic processes, and game theory, and was also an important influence on the development of electronic and computer music. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces and designing spaces to be integrated with specific music compositions and performances.

Catharina “Nina” Hagen is a German singer, songwriter, and actress born in Berlin in 1955. She is known for her theatrical vocals and rise to prominence during the punk and Neue Deutsche Welle movements in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Also known as “The Godmother of German Punk”. Born and raised in the former East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, Hagen began her career as an actress when she appeared in several German films alongside her mother Eva-Maria Hagen. Around that same time, she joined the band Automobil and released the Schlager single “Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen”. After her stepfather Wolf Biermann’s East German citizenship was withdrawn in 1976, Hagen followed him to Hamburg. Shortly afterwards, she was offered a record deal from CBS Records and formed the Nina Hagen Band. Their self-titled debut album was released in late 1978 to critical acclaim and was a commercial success, selling over 250,000 copies. The band released one more album, Unbehagen, before their break-up in 1979.

Erin Sexton is a Canadian artist and radio amateur based in the woods near Oslo in Norway. Her practice explores dimensionality, perception, language, and psychology via sci-fi abolitionist metaphysics. Besides ionospheric radio, her work includes sculpture, installation, video, and social practice. Pentadomen is an experimental project space that she co-curates with her drag persona MacGyv’r. They dissolve boundaries and subvert hierarchies using absurdist humour, painful honesty, and shameless trolling of the ‘rich and famous’. As a curator, MacGyv’r says yes to almost everything… a real giver and party animal, sometimes to his detriment. He is also quite skilled at doing everything with almost nothing. They work closely with Sator Æris, an elven revolutionary tactician and astral architect. She is the lead designer of The Astral Spa and also likes to play Dungeons & Dragons as an elf warlock. They use hyperstitional identity fractals as discursive techne, but are allergic to philosophical jewelry. They work to transmute the experience of paradox into a catalyst for collective liberation.

Abbas Zahedi is an artist working at the intersections of sonic and sculptural forms, exploring systems of care, thresholds of experience, and the social architectures of our time. His practice has been described as a form of dissociative realism — moving between intimacy and estrangement, and attuned to forms of meaning that sit beyond the purely material. A former medic with training in psychiatry, Zahedi holds an MA in Contemporary Photography and Philosophy from Central Saint Martins. Recent awards include the Stanley Picker Fellowship (2024), Artangel: Making Time (2023), Frieze Artist Award (2022), Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award (2021), and the Khadijah Saye Memorial Scholarship (2017). He is an Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London, and has taught widely in the UK and internationally.

Tomoko Sauvage is a Paris-based Japanese composer and artist who is best known for her long-time musical and performance practice on her original instrumentarium, assembling water, ceramics, and electronics. She animates the inanimate through tuning water and vessels, making them vibrate and magnifying their tiny sounds that are otherwise quasi-inaudible. Her work centers on the tactile materiality of vibrant objects, metaphorical listening, and the use of chance as a compositional method. For two decades, she has been performing internationally at institutions and festivals such as Barbican Centre (London), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Maerz Musik (Berlin), Musée d’art moderne (Paris), Haus der Kunst (Munich), Nyege Nyege Festival (Uganda), and Wonder Cabinet (Palestine), among many others.

Gil Delindro is a Portuguese sound & visual artist. His site-specific research, namely on worldwide challenging landscapes, isolated communities, and extreme geological and weather patterns. Some of these include the Sahara Desert (TWOM, 2015), Rainforests of Brazil (Resiliência, 2017), Siberia, Russia (Permafrost, 2018), Vietnam ethnic villages (Blind Signal, 2019), the Rhone Glacier (La Becque, 2019), the Auvergne Volcanoes (ArtistesenResidence, 2021) and the Northumberland National Park ( Visual arts for Rural Communities, UK 2022). His work is present in both private and public collections such as the European Patent Office and Lower Silesian Society for the Arts, and has been exhibited in Europe, North and South America, and Asia, with awards by institutions such as EPO art Award (NL), Berlin Masters Award (DE), VARC (Visual Arts for Rural Communities, UK), ENCAC (European Network for Comtemporary Av Creation), EMARE (European Media Art), EDIGMA Semibreve (media art award, PT), Gulbenkian Foundation (PT), Berlin Senate for Kultur(DE), STEIM foundation (NL), Francoise Meier Foundation (La Becque, CH), EOFA (Embassy of Foreign Artists, CH), DGartes (Portuguese Ministry for Culture, PT).

Mireille Chamass-Kyrou was a Musique Concrète composer born in Cairo in 1931. She studied piano with Brigitte Schiffer at the State Institute for the Education of Women in Fine Arts in Cairo. In 1955, she moved to Paris and studied under Oliver Messiaen. In 1958, she joined the Groupe de Recherche Musicale, founded by Pierre Schaeffer. She worked with the GRM for four years, contributing to the system of musical notation for musique concrète that was eventually published by Schaeffer. She left GRM in 1961. Her Etude 1 (1960), which employed instruments including a comb and a feather, was included on the album Musique Concrète (Philips, 1964) and other compilations of GRM music. She also composed the soundtrack to Adonis Kyrou’s short film La Chevelure (1960), based on the short story by Guy de Maupassant. Her Film Musique, written in the 60s for an unknown project, was released in 2019 on the album Experimental Lineage.

Phill Niblock was an American composer, filmmaker, and videographer. In 1985, he was appointed director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York with a parallel branch in Ghent, Belgium. Niblock’s first musical compositions date from 1968. Unusually, even among the avant-garde composers of his generation, he had no formal musical training. He cited the musical activities of New York in the 1960s (and occasional memorable performances, such as the premiere of Morton Feldman’s Durations pieces) as a stimulus. All of his compositions were worked out intuitively rather than systematically. His early works were all done with tape, overdubbing unprocessed recordings of precisely tuned long tones played on traditional instruments in four, eight, or sixteen tracks. His later works are correspondingly more dense in texture, sometimes involving as many as forty tracks. Niblock also made several films and videos, including several in a series titled “The Movement of People Working”. The series was filmed primarily in rural environments in many countries and regions of the world (China, Brazil, Portugal, Lesotho, Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, the Arctic, Mexico, Hungary, the Adirondacks, Peru) between 1973 and 1991. The films look at everyday work, frequently agrarian or marine labor, and are notable for their stark realism, consistent use of long takes, limited camera movement, and striking juxtaposition of non-fiction content and vivid colors. These scenes of the movement of human manual labor are treated abstractly without explicit anthropological or sociological commentary. As in his music, Niblock counters the static surface of the work with an active, varied texture of rhythm and form achieved by the bodies in motion within the frame; this is what Niblock considered to be the ultimate subject matter of his films. Phill Niblock died in New York City in 2024.

Cristina Maldonado is a Mexican intermedia artist based in Prague (CZ), working in the fields of immersive art, participatory and relational art, video-performance, performative writing, and site-specific performances. For the last two decades, she has been working independently, directing, performing, mentoring, and leading workshops and collaborations. Currently, she is focused on the concepts of mediation and uncharted human relationships. She works with devised theater and dialogical methodologies, and she is researching how to bring art further into the process of creating knowledge. Cristina is an Associate artist of IN SITU, the European platform for artistic creation in public space, in the frame of the project (UN)COMMON SPACES, co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union, and member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores del Arte, 2021-23.

Bárbara Lázara was born in Mexico City in 1976. Starting from her early days of exploration in the performing arts (1999), passing through different crossovers of live presentations, concerts, on-site actions, or performances, her work reveals at least two vital elements that distinguish and articulate it: the translation of possibilities of space, and the principle of confusion. These aspects usually lead to a series of twisted communions with the tools that Lázara has been exploring and developing, which have become increasingly dislocated and expansive throughout the more than two decades of sailing between every performative, sonorous, and discursive element of the body, the voice, and space in which Lázara connects an uncertain dalliance with the unspeakable, even the phantasmagorical and empyrean; propitious grounds on which to trigger critical reflections on history, gender, and memory, where the active receiver has the opportunity to open a nurtured dialogue from different paths, detached from the imposition that words usually offer.

Ellen Fullman is an American composer, instrument builder, and performer. She was born in 1957 in Memphis, Tennessee, and is currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is known for her 70-foot (21-meter) Long String instrument, tuned in just intonation and played with rosin-coated fingers. Fullman studied sculpture at the Kansas City Art Institute before moving to New York in the early 1980s. In Kansas City, she created and performed in an amplified metal sound-producing skirt and wrote art songs, which she recorded in New York for a small cassette label. In 1981, she began developing the Long String Instrument at her studio in Brooklyn, consisting of dozens of metallic strings played with rosin-coated fingers and producing a chorus of organ-like partials. This instrument has been compared to the experience of standing inside an enormous grand piano. She has recorded extensively with this unusual instrument and has collaborated with such luminary figures as composer Pauline Oliveros, choreographer Deborah Hay, the Kronos Quartet, and Frances-Marie Uitti. In 1985, she was in residence at the Apollohuis in the Netherlands, where she recorded The Long String Instrument (LP) for Apollo Records.

Shelley Trower works in the English and Creative Writing department at the University of Roehampton. Since 2004, she has taught in literature departments at Birkbeck and the Universities of Westminster, Northampton, Plymouth, and Hull. She has also worked in the field of oral history from 2006 onwards, and became a Researcher for the AHRC-funded project Mysticism, Myth, and ‘Celtic’ Nationalism at the University of Exeter (2008-2011), before starting at Roehampton in 2012. Research interests span nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, along with oral history. Publications include “Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History” (2011), “Senses of Vibration” (2012, shortlisted for the British Society for Literature and Science book award), and “Rocks of Nation” (2015, shortlisted for the European Society for the Study of English book award), along with co-edited collections, chapters and articles.

Rainford Hugh Perry, known as Lee “Scratch” Perry OD, Lee “Scratch” Perry was a Jamaican producer, songwriter, singer, and DJ who helped reshape reggae music. He was among the first Jamaican producer-musician to use the studio as an instrument, and he pioneered the reggae instrumental form known as dub, in which sections of a rhythm track were removed, and others emphasized through echo, distortion, repetition, and backward tape looping. Perry’s debut recording in the early 1960s, “The Chicken Scratch,” earned him his nickname. At Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One in Kingston, he produced hits for reggae singers such as Justin Hines and Delroy Wilson as well as recording his own material. After scoring an instrumental hit with “The Upsetter” in the late 1960s, he named his label and band after it and played an important part in the early success of Jamaica’s biggest group, the Wailers (including Bob Marley and Peter Tosh). But his greatest innovations came after he built Black Ark studio behind his home in Kingston in 1974. He began experimenting with drum machines and space-age studio effects that would usher in the dub era and influence production techniques in reggae, hip-hop, and rock for decades afterward. A legendary eccentric, he was known to blow marijuana smoke on his finished master tapes to give them the proper “vibe,” and he reportedly burned down Black Ark in 1980.

Keiji Haino is a Japanese musician and singer-songwriter whose work has included rock, free improvisation, noise music, percussion, psychedelic music, minimalism, and drone music. Haino was born in Chiba in 1952. Inspired by Antonin Artaud, he initially aimed to work in theater, but an encounter with The Doors changed his direction to music. He has studied and absorbed a wide range of expressions from early blues, especially Blind Lemon Jefferson, to European medieval music, to popular songs throughout the world. In 1970, he joined the group Lost Aaraaf, named after an Edgar Allan Poe poem, as vocalist. Meanwhile, he started to work on home recordings and taught himself guitar and percussion. In 1978, he formed the rock band Fushitsusha. Since 1988, after a recuperation period from 1983 to 1987, he has been internationally active in various formats, including solo, groups such as Fushitsusha, Nijiumu, Aihiyo, Vajra, Sanhedrin, Seijaku, Nazoranai, and The Hardy Rocks, and as a DJ under the name “experimental mixture.” He has also collaborated with artists from different backgrounds in performances that take the possibilities of guitar, percussion, hurdy gurdy, string instruments, wind instruments, indigenous instruments from around the world, and DJ gear to the extreme through his idiosyncratic techniques. He has released more than 200 recordings and performed live over 2,000 times.

Venzha Christ is the founder of HONF Foundation, v.u.f.o.c. lab, Indonesia Space Science Society (ISSS), the International SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Conference, and VMARS (v.u.f.o.c Mars Analogue Research Station). In collaboration with artists, scientists, astronomers, astrophysicists, and engineers in Indonesia, he has established the ISSS as a framework for the exploration of space from a different perspective. Providing a compelling encounter with space through its focus on Space Science and Space Exploration research, the ISSS actively collaborates with more than forty countries and institutions, space agencies, observatories, and universities in this field worldwide, such as NASA, VIRAC, OCA, LAM, NARIT, JAXA, CEOU, SCASS, KARI, SpaceX, SETI, CSC, CERN, CPPM, IRAM, KEK, ELSI, CNES, ESA, etc. Recent projects include VMARS, a Mars Analogue (2020-present), Simulation of Human Isolation Research for Antarctica-based Space Engineering – SHIRASE (2019), MARS Desert Research Station – MDRS (2018), Resident Researcher at IMeRA – Institute for Advanced Study (2017), and the exhibition of NASA – “A Human Adventure” (2016). Through these projects, the ISSS attempts to uncover space as a continuous source of inspiration that compels practitioners from all disciplines to understand the universe we live in, using tools and ideas from both space science and art.

Alejo Duque is an artist based in Bogotá. Duque’s individual practice is primarily based on analog photography and sound art. He also works collaboratively on participatory art projects that focus on crossing the boundaries of new, old, and unstable media. Duque works in network-based art and as an amateur radio operator under the call sign -HK4ADJ-. He is the founding member of networks such as Bricolabs, dorkbot, labSurlab, un\loquer, and Pnode. He is currently active on Radiolibre and Coomunarte. Duque is the director of the CK:\WEB, an audiovisual experimental station at the Bogota Planetarium.

Raviv Ganchrow is an artist and sound researcher based in Amsterdam. His work investigates the interdependencies between sound, place, and listening, aspects of which are explored through installations, writing, and the development of pressure-forming and vibration-sensing technologies. His work examines spatial-material operations of sound, in situated conditions such as environmental infrasound, ocean acoustics, telluric currents, radio transmission, and anechoic chambers. Recent installations employ in-situ circuits patched directly into localities, relaying features of contextual dynamics. He publishes, gives workshops, and lectures broadly on auditory contexts and sonic agency and is currently a faculty member at the Institute of Sonology, University of the Arts, The Hague.

female:pressure is an international network of female, transgender, and non-binary artists in the fields of electronic music and digital arts, founded by Electric Indigo in 1998. A worldwide resource of talent that can be searched after criteria like location, profession, style, or name. The platform was founded as an information resource and network for improving communication and representation of its members. It is notable for raising the profile of women and their work, including through festivals and media campaigns. Since 2013, female:pressure biannually publishes the Facts Survey, a data collection to survey the gender ratio of artists performing at important international electronic music festivals and in the electronic music scene.

Douglas Kahn is an acclaimed Australian historian and theoretician born in 1951. He has written extensively on the use of sound in the avant-garde experimental arts, noise music, and the history and theory of media art. His writings have been influential in the scholarly area of sound studies and the practical area of sound art. He was a former editor of Leonardo Music Journal and has written in The Wire, The Guardian, October (magazine), Art & Text, InterCommunication, Music Today Biannual, Musicworks, Parachute, Performing Arts Journal and Experimental Musical Instruments; among others, and in the books Critical Issues in Electronic Media, Radio Rethink, In the Spirit of Fluxus and Sound by Artists. He lives in Katoomba, New South Wales, Australia.

Samon Takahashi is an artist based in Paris known for his extensive sound composition and production as well as his video directing and acting. However, in 2004, Takahashi was able to try his hand at something new when he joined 18th Street’s international residency program. While in Los Angeles, he started to combine sound and visual elements in a project entitled “Cortical House.” This house was a utopian idea of a living place that would be an extension of the owner’s brain. It was a formal pretext to the elaboration of new forms and concepts to enhance the interface between an individual (his way of thinking) and his surroundings, as it was an attempt to find an ideal living place that followed one’s needs and even anticipated them. The project involved various fields and disciplines such as design, architecture, cybernetics, behaviour, theory of information, theory of groups, semiotics, biometry, neurology, psychoanalysis, new energies, and ecology, among others.

Jan-Peter Sonntag is a German sound artist and composer. Since the 1990s, he has repeatedly cooperated with scientific laboratories. Alongside the examination of human perception, the question at the centre of his artistic work concerns the visions of modernity – an unfinished project. He studied fine arts, art history, music theory, composition, philosophy, and cognitive science and, in 2002, founded N-solab. He is a cofounder of hARTware-projects / HMKV, oh Ton, unerhört, and the sound-art-edition HORCH. He received several grants and participated in international exhibitions. In 2008, he was awarded the German Sound Art Prize, the Cynet Art Award, and he opened the Ars Electronica in Linz with his sonArc::project – which ended in a book and DVD about the essence of electricity and modulating high voltage plasma in 2009.

Mark Bain is an American sound and installation artist residing in the Netherlands. His work focuses on the investigation of vibrational mechanics at the threshold between sound, science, and architecture, often through the means of site-specific installations. He has also worked as a musician and founded Simulux, a research center for audio-visual practices. From 1986 to 1990, he attended the Cornish College of Art. After that, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he enrolled in the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at the School of the Art Institute. In 1998, he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, ME), before obtaining a Master of Science degree in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that same year. Later, in 1999, he moved to Amsterdam for a two-year residency at the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten and has lived and worked there. Bain’s artistic vocabulary features a multidisciplinary approach that mixes elements from sound and video art practices, usually culminating in the creation of site-specific installations. The main object of his work and artistic research deals with investigating acoustic spaces that are usually out of the human hearing range. Some of his most notable endeavours show a particular concern with the sounds of architectural sites, having resorted to the amplification of the infrasounds that inhabit these structures or to making them vibrate using frequency oscillations that resonate with them in order to address his artistic focus.

Leif Elggren is a Swedish artist born in 1950 who lives and works in Stockholm. Active since the late 1970s, Leif Elggren has become one of the most consistently surprising conceptual artists to work in the combined worlds of audio and visual. A writer, visual artist, stage performer, and composer, he has many albums to his credit, solo and with the Sons of God, on labels such as Ash International, Touch, Radium, and his own Firework Edition. His music, often conceived as the soundtrack to a visual installation or experimental stage performance, usually presents carefully selected sound sources over a long stretch of time and can range from quiet electronics to harsh noise. His wide-ranging and prolific body of art often involves dreams and subtle absurdities, social hierarchies turned upside-down, hidden actions and events taking on the quality of icons. Together with artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff, he is a founder of the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland (KREV), where he enjoys the title of king.

Julián Carrillo was a Mexican composer, a leading 20th-century exponent of microtonal music: Sonido 13. (i.e., music using intervals smaller than a halftone, or half step). He was born in 1875 in Ahualulco of Indian descent. Throughout his life, he toured extensively in both Western Europe and the United States. From 1905 on, he held many important music positions in Mexico as composer, conductor, teacher, writer on music, and administrator. Carrillo’s interest in microtonal music was stimulated in 1895 by a class in Mexico on acoustics. He realized that the musical whole tone could be divided not only into two semitones (as it had been for centuries) but also into three third tones, four quarter tones, and so on. In the 1920s, he began intensive investigations into the possibilities of composing with these microtonal intervals, through sixteenth tones, which he considered the smallest interval listeners could readily hear. He created a new system of music notation and had special instruments built on which his microtonal works could be performed.

Louie Rice is a London-based sound artist who plays electronic and acoustic systems, utilising the physicality of the medium, signal chain, and spatial context to create disruptive audio, performance, and installation. In addition to his partnership with Luciano Maggiore on event scores, he’s a member of the trio VA AA LR with Vasco Alves and Adam Asnan, a radical experimental formation that explores the textures, physicalities, and instabilities of electroacoustic mediums, expanding the concept of musique concrète. As a producer for the Hideous Replica label and one of the organisers of the Hideous Porta series of events, he has honed his tastes in electro-acoustic music, abrasive textures, and eclectic synth-based work.

DJ Stingray, born Sherard Ingram, is the founder of Urban Tribe and an associate of legendary Detroit electro duo Drexciya. As both a DJ and producer, Ingram specializes in futuristic electro, preferring fast tempos and inventive beat patterns to more accessible, club-friendly rhythms. Taught how to DJ by Kenny Dixon Jr. (Moodymann) in the mid-1980s, he gradually developed and perfected his dense, high-speed mixing style while DJing at biker bars (such as The Outcast) in Detroit, slipping bits of techno tracks in with Miami booty bass and West Coast electro and hip-hop. DJ Stingray and James Stinson, the late member of Drexciya, met in the late 1980s while working at the record shop Buy-Rite Music.

Ghédalia Tazartés was born into a Judaeo-Spanish family in Paris. He quickly ascended into a musical career, with musician David Fenech defining his music as “unclassifiable”. He rarely performed in concerts and released a few albums, but was still able to make a living from dance, theatre, and cinema. Tazartès was often perceived to be in the musique concrète genre, thanks to his manipulation of Revox tapes, although he later discovered the works of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. He collaborated with Michel Chion on the albums La Ronde and Diasporas / Tazartès. According to Pierre Hemptinne, “What interests him is what these sound objects have to say about the world around us, the tangible and intangible world, the world of commercial and non-commercial exchange. It makes them more talkative, it makes them talk by plunging them into arrangements that are foreign to them. He cuts and edits sound images according to the techniques used in cinema, and this technique brings out their meaning”.

Francesco Cavaliere is an Italian visual artist, writer, and sound producer. He lives and works between Berlin and Turin. His works are capable of enlivening his listeners’ inner states through a polymorphic activity that combines writing, sound, voice, drawing, and sculpture, undertaking long journeys crossed by ephemeral presences. He writes sound stories and music based on particles of sound, noise, and language, often integrated with installation and scenographic elements or live performance, showing a particular taste for the most diverse forms of exoticism.

Minoru Sato, also known as -m/s, is an artist working in the interdisciplinary realm related to sound, light, and other natural phenomena. He was born in 1963 in Sendai and lives and works in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan.

He is interested in the relationship between the description of nature and artistic representation, creating artworks as physical phenomena presented through various conceptual frameworks. In 1994, he established the label WrK for creative activities, which he ran until 2006.

Sato produces music as a solo artist and through projects under the name SASW, as well as in collaborative projects with ASUNA, IL GRANDE SILENZIO, and f u r.

Alongside his artistic practice, he curates contemporary art exhibitions and events. He worked as an art curator at the Kawasaki City Museum from 1991 until 2011, and at Sendai Mediatheque from 2011 until 2013.

Yan Jun has no classical music training. Instead, he has been educated and shaped by thriving rock and broader art and culture scenes, in which he has played a vital role both as a musician and artist, and as a curator and organizer in China.

Yan Jun grew up in Lanzhou, in the province of Gansu, where during his teenage years he began writing poetry. He has lived in Beijing since 1999, where he worked as a music critic, focusing primarily on Chinese underground rock music.

In 2000, he founded the record labelSub Jam, which has since produced a significant body of alternative and experimental Chinese music. He began making his own music in 2004. While this may be considered a relatively late start, music-making represents only one strand of Yan Jun’s broader practice, which also includes performance, poetry, writing, and curating.

Yan Jun’s aesthetic reflects a borderless, non-hierarchical musical environment in which a wide range of possibilities coexist. His primary sonic materials are field recordings and noise.

Arturo Castillo is a record collector based in Mexico City and the founder of the first and only platform in Mexico specialized in the promotion and distribution of experimental music. He is also the founder of Mexican Rarities, a record label and archive dedicated to preserving and promoting Mexico’s sonic heritage. The platform was officially established in 2021 by Arturo Castillo and Alfredo Martínez, and later joined by Víctor Garay and Juan Pablo Villegas. Mexican Rarities emerged with the mission of recognizing and highlighting the rich musical diversity of Mexico through various formats, including vinyl records, cassettes, and digital platforms. The Mexican Rarities Archive boasts a collection of sound recordings, encompassing a wide diversity of genres and styles. From indigenous music and historical corridos to works by iconic composers like Julián Carrillo, recognized for his innovations in microtonal music, the archive represents a treasure trove of Mexico’s musical heritage. However, only a fraction of this collection has been digitized and is available on their online platform. This digitized material includes photographic documentation and information generated and compiled by Mexican Rarities, as copyright restrictions prevent the publication of audio recordings. The digitalization of these materials is a crucial step to ensure they are not lost over time and can be enjoyed and studied by future generations.

Maryanne Amacher (1938–2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called sound art, although her thought and creative practice consistently challenge key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of this nascent genre. Often considered to be part of a post-Cagean lineage, her work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies. The Maryanne Amacher Foundation was established in 2020 by a group of Amacher’s key friends, peers, and collaborators brought together by Blank Forms in order to promote and preserve Amacher’s work and legacy. Through the creation of exploratory seminars, research opportunities, public programs, and publications, the mission of The Maryanne Amacher Foundation is to broaden the greater public’s understanding of Amacher and her work.

Metahaven is a research and design studio founded by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden based in Amsterdam. Metahaven’s work – both commissioned and self-directed – reflects political and social issues in collaboratively produced graphic design objects and media. In addition to international presentation of design and research projects, Metahaven has written and edited numerous publications such as ‘Uncorporate Identity’, a design anthology for our dystopian age, ‘Can Jokes Bring Down Governments’, and a forthcoming book ‘Black Transparency’. The studio was awarded the CoBRA Art Prize 2013. Select exhibitions include ‘Islands in the Cloud’, MoMA PS1, New York; Gwangju Design Biennale 2011, Gwangju, Korea; ‘Graphic Design: Now in Production’, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain.

Fabio Carboni is an Italian producer based in Milan, co-founder of the Die Schachtel label, and owner of Soundohm distribution, an international online mailorder that maintains a large inventory of several thousand titles, specializing in Electronic/Avantgarde music and Sound Art, highly collectible original items, and in addition rare, out-of-print and sometime impossible-to-find artists’ records, multiples and limited gallery editions. Established early 2003 by Bruno Stucchi and Fabio Carboni, Die Schachtel is a label focused on early Italian electronic composers before expanding its interest in contemporary and open-form music, sound poetry, and artists’ projects on record. Die Schachtel releases are often limited editions, and sometimes numbered & signed editions, as for the Art series.

Cornelius Cardew was an English experimental music composer and founder (with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons) of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. Having won a scholarship to study at the recently established Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, Cardew served as an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1958 to 1960. He later rejected experimental music in 1973. Cardew’s most important scores from his experimental period are Treatise (1963–67), a 193-page graphic score which allows for considerable freedom of interpretation, and The Great Learning, a work in seven parts or “Paragraphs,” based on translations of Confucius by Ezra Pound. The Great Learning instigated the formation of the Scratch Orchestra. During those years, he took a course in graphic design, and he made his living as a graphic designer at Aldus Books in London.

Akio Suzuki was born in Pyongyang, North Korea, in 1941. Since his infamous “Throwing Objects Down a Staircase” event at Nagoya Station in 1963 and the subsequent self-study events, where he explored the processes of “projection” and “following” in the natural world, Suzuki has pursued listening as a practice. In the 1970s, he created and began performing on several original instruments, including the echo instrument Analapos. In 1988, he performed his piece “Space in the Sun”, which involved purifying his ears for twenty-four hours in nature on the meridian line that runs through Amino, Kyoto. In 1996, he began his “o to da te” project, where he seeks out echo points in the urban environment. Has performed and exhibited at many venues and music festivals around the world, including Documenta8 (Germany, 1987), the British Museum (2002), Musée Zadkine (France, 2004), Kunstmuseum Bonn (Germany, 2018), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo(Tokyo, 2019), etc.

Richard Serra was an American artist known for his large-scale abstract sculptures made for site-specific landscape, urban, and architectural settings, and whose work has been primarily associated with postminimalism. Described as “one of his era’s greatest sculptors”, Serra became notable for emphasizing the material qualities of his works, exploring the relationship between the viewer, the work, and the site.

Helga de la Motte-Haber is a German musicologist focusing on the study of systematic musicology. Haber was born in Ludwigshafen am Rhein as the first child of Paula Haber, née Kilian, and the physicist and mathematician Gustav Haber. She survived the Second World War and the post-war period, according to her own statement, “in the back of the Palatinate” (Winseln, Leutershausen and Frankelbach) – a few kilometres from the French border and the Siegfried Line. In 1957, Haber began studying psychology at the University of Mainz with Albert Wellek, a representative of the Gestalt psychology of the Leipzig School. Her fields of work were music psychology and synaesthesia.

Robert Piotrowicz is a Polish composer, improviser, and sound artist. His work spans a broad range of electroacoustic and experimental music, frequently blending acoustic elements with electronics. Modular synthesizers serve as a central tool in his practice, enabling him to create unique, often microtonal sound structures.

Rudolf Eb.er is a performance artist based in Japan known for producing obscure and challenging audio work under the name Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck. His work explores the human psyche, death, and reality by combining outsider art and actionism with extreme sonics, psychoactive acoustics, and cut-up compositions. Eber’s research and work delve deep into the nethermost regions of the human psyche. Combining abreactive and cleansing actionism with sonic rituals and psychoactive acoustics, Eb.er generates audio-environments into which he plants grotesque psycho-magic rituals and tantric exercises to trigger a higher awareness.

Carsten Seiffarth was born in 1963 in Berlin and has worked since 1991 in various freelance projects as a curator and producer for sound installation art and contemporary music. He curated numerous solo and group exhibitions in Germany and beyond. He is the editor of several books, such as singuhr – hoergalerie, Tesla Media Art Lab Berlin, or Paul DeMarinis. From 2005 to 2007, he was a member of the artistic direction of the Media Art Laboratory TESLA in Berlin. In 2011/12 he was the artistic director of Sound Exchange: Experimental Music Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, and from 2010 to 2021, he was curator and artistic director at «bonn hoeren». He works and lives in Berlin.

Gascia Ouzounian is a historian and theorist of sound, working at the intersection of sound studies, architecture and urban studies, and science and technology studies. She is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, Fellow and Tutor in Music at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. At Oxford, Ouzounian has taught courses on Acoustic Cities, Sound and Space, Sound Art and Environment, and the History of Experimental Music. She holds degrees in music technology and violin performance from McGill University and a doctorate in critical studies and experimental practices in music from the University of California, San Diego.

Don Bradshaw-Leather moved through the London underground of the early 1970s, leaving behind only a single, self-released double LP in 1972, entitled “Distance Between Us”. It is a record that feels less issued than discovered, an artifact drifting in from the margins. Even without tracing the tangled stories of its making, the music stands with quiet authority. A singular collision of Krautrock pulse, psychedelic drift, and avant-garde abandonment, the album unfolds as a one-time event. Structure loosens, direction frays, and the music seems perpetually on the verge of slipping away from itself. Born Donald Bradshaw, unconcerned with discipline, systems, or outcomes. An engine and its fault line. Like so many outsiders, Bradshaw-Leather never sought a path toward proper circulation. The record was already a mysterious aura at the time, without passing quietly out of view.

Mama Bär, born Andrea Katharina Ingeborg Göthling, is a German sound recordist and visual artist based in Flensburg. A self-taught artist, she began making music in 1999 and visual art in 2006. Ingeborg often works together with her husband Kommissar Hjuler, as Kommissar Hjuler und Frau. Mama Bär has a vast number of music releases available through independent labels such as Ultra Eczema, Intransitive Recordings, Nihilist Records, Obskyr Records, and others. She shares albums with Bomis Prendin, Franz Kamin, Philip Krumm, Wolf Vostell, and others.

Los Paranos emerged from the late 1970s underground, forging a beat-driven minimal synth language marked by cold wave. Conceived by Christophe Petchanatz (Klimperei), the project circulated primarily through cassette releases during the 1980s. The 2013 Vinyl on Demand release “Living on a Red Line 1983–85” unearthed a significant body of rare recordings, reaffirming Los Paranos as an obscure yet emblematic presence in European minimal synth history.

Schnäbi Gaggi Pissi Gaggi was a “band” consisting of Rudolf Eb. er on vacuumvocals, Joke Lanz on ventilatorbass, and Céleste Urech on percussion – Joke Lanz’s son, having a 3-year-old when this was recorded.

Released in 2006 by Tochnit Aleph (Tochnit Aleph Punk Series Volume Four).
Performed and recorded live in Kölliken, Switzerland, 93-02-27 3 PM.
Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M.
Written by Céleste Urech (3 years of age) except Elisabeth Kopp by Joke Lanz & Rudolf Eb.er.

Bad Brains is an American punk rock band formed in Washington in 1976. They are widely regarded as pioneers of hardcore punk, though the band’s members have objected to the use of this term to describe their music. Rolling Stone magazine called them “the mother of all black hard-rock bands”, and they have been cited as a seminal influence to numerous other subgenres in addition to hardcore punk, including various subgenres of Metal music. Bad Brains are followers of the Rastafari movement.

Le Sony’r Ra, better known as Sun Ra, was one of the most unusual musicians in the history of jazz, moving from Fletcher Henderson swing to free jazz with ease, sometimes in the same song. Portraying himself as a product of outer space, he “traveled the spaceways” with a colorful troupe of musicians, using a multitude of percussion and unusual instrumentation. An outsider who linked the African-American experience with ancient Egyptian mythology and outer space, Sun Ra was years ahead of all other avant-garde musicians in his experimentation with sound and instruments, a pioneer in group improvisations and the use of electric instruments in jazz. Since Sun Ra’s death, the Arkestra has continued to perform under the direction of Allen.

Also known as Ø, Mika Vainio was the co-founder of Finnish techno duo Pansonic (known as Panasonic until 1998), whose innovative brand of blistering rhythmic noise and uncompromising minimalism transformed them into one of the most popular exports from the Northern European techno underground. Pan Sonic disbanded in 2009. Vainio died in Trouville-sur-Mer, France, after falling six meters off a cliff into the sea.

Annette Wolfsberger is the director of W139, a leading artist-driven production and presentation space for contemporary art in Amsterdam, and project coordinator of Re-Imagine Europe– a transnational co-creation and circulation project of fourteen interdisciplinary art organisations across Europe–at Paradiso (NL). She holds an MA in Political Science from the University of Vienna.

Germano Celant was an Italian art historian, critic, and curator who coined the term “Arte Povera” in 1967. He wrote extensively on the subject, including the Flash Art piece “Appunti Per Una Guerriglia” (“Notes on a guerrilla war”), which would become the manifesto for the Arte Povera artistic and political movement.
In 2014, Celant curated “Art or Sound”, an exhibition conceived as an investigation of past and present times, exploring the relationship between art and sound and the way it has developed from the 16th century to the present day, examining the iconic aspects of musical instruments, the role of the artist-musician, and the areas in which the visual arts and music have intermixed.

Sleaford Mods are an English post-punk music duo, formed in 2007 in Nottingham. The band features vocalist Jason Williamson and, since 2012, instrumentalist Andrew Fearn. They are known for their abrasive, minimalist musical style and embittered explorations of austerity-era Britain, culture, and working-class life. The duo has released several albums to critical praise.

Socorro Alvizar Fajardo is a multi-instrumentalist, one-man band, and an Internet personality from Michoacán, Mexico. Alvizar Fajardo offers musical services for weddings, public, and private events with a unique blend of harp, keyboards, voice, karaoke, and Christian songs.

DJ Loui from Jupiter4 was born and raised in Buenos Aires. He studied Electronic Arts at the Technological Institute ORT. In 2018, he founded Jupiter4 Records. Probably this could be seen as one of many self-defined examples of the South American diaspora in Europe, approaching shifts between genres, creating new realities, and questioning the boundaries of Bass Music.

Carlos Giffoni is a Venezuelan experimental musician and writer living in Los Angeles. During the 2000’s he was running No Fun Fest and No Fun Productions in New York. Giffoni works with modular synthesizers, computer software, and found physical objects to create expressive abstract sonic landscapes. Giffoni also works as a sound designer for the video game industry, where he has worked on projects for League of Legends, South Park, The Daily Show, Ugly Americans, and many others. As a musician, he has toured the world performing his own electronic music compositions and has also performed live improvisations with Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Jim O’Rourke, Merzbow, and Zeena Parkins, among others.

Roc Jiménez de Cisneros was born in 1975 in Barcelona. He is part of the computer music group EVOL together with Scottish artist Stephen Sharp. Their work considers processes of deformation applied to post-acid house culture. Their recordings have been published by record labels such as Diagonal, Editions Mego, Presto!?, iDEAL, Hypermedium, and others. Much of his work interprets music in morphological terms: mutated forms, spatial relationships, and elasticity, both metaphorical and literal. Since 2013, he has been pushing this spatial-material approach to music in different ways, originally drawing connections between holes and music, then extending that to folds and folding, to produce a series of pieces, talks, light installations, and publications that propose a reevaluation of musical phenomena as volumetric and topological structures.

The Gerogerigegege was founded by Juntaro Yamanouchi in 1985, performing noise sets in BDSM clubs in Japan. Over the years, The Gerogerigegege has included many members, probably one of the most notable and consistent, other than Yamanouchi being Gero 30, was Tetsuya Endoh, aka Gero 56, an exhibitionist known to masturbate onstage during live performances.
Yamanouchi is known for releasing records with unusual concepts, such as 1989’s “Showa”, which features a recording of people having sex to “Kimigayo”, the Japanese national anthem.

Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin in 1974. She studied composition with John Maxwell Geddes at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Kevin Volans in Dublin, and graduated from Northwestern University, Chicago, with a doctoral degree in composition in 2002. She has received commissions from organisations including Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), Südwest Rundfunk (SWR), the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt, MaerzMusik, Musik der Jahrhundert, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Dresdener Tage der zeitgenössischen Musik, Wien Modern, the Dresden Semperoper, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, the Irish Chamber Orchestra, Crash Ensemble, the Project Arts Centre and the National Concert Hall, Ireland, as well as commission awards from the New Music Scheme of the Arts Council of Ireland and the Scottish Arts Council. Jennifer Walshe is currently professor of composition at the University of Oxford.

Pan Daijing is a Chinese artist and composer based in Berlin who primarily engages with performance, installation, sound, and moving images in her practice. Drawing on the capacity of music to exceed the limits of language and distort the passage of time, Daijing’s work seeks to communicate physical, psychological, and sonic depths and to invoke a collective experience of solitude. Alongside her three studio albums, Daijing has developed and exhibited several performance artworks and installations, including the five-act opera “Tissues” at Tate Modern, London.

Ursula Block founded gelbe MUSIK in 1981, a record store in Berlin that would occupy a unique position between the worlds of avant-garde music and art for the following three decades. It sold artists’ records and experimental music but also functioned as a gallery space for scores, sound sculpture, and other intersections of visual art and music. Ursula Block organized several exhibitions of artists’ records outside Gelbe MUSIK, including Extended Play (1988), co-curated with Christian Marclay, and Broken Music, named after an album by the Fluxus artist Milan Knížák. The book Broken Music, meant to be both a reference work and the show’s catalogue, became legendary as a resource for artists’ records and record artworks from the twentieth century.

Big Gucci Berry (Brian Waterbury) is a unique internet personality known for his wild, unfiltered, and often bizarre comedy skits, especially those involving “nut-kicking,” family antics, and his distinctive appearance with face tattoos, gaining fame on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat.

Ruhail Qaisar is a self-taught artist from Leh, Ladakh. His work focuses on sound, analog photography, and experimental film, examining threads of local memory, death, and mythos. Ruhail’s work is made of gestures, hoisted upon liminal registers of field recordings, conversations, voice, and fixed sounds.

Alberto de Campo is Professor for Generative Art / Computational Art at the Institute for Time-Based Media at UdK in Berlin. His research focuses on computer music, computational and generative art, audiovisual performances with complex systems, sonification of scientific data, and interdisciplinary arts and practices. He studied jazz guitar, electronic music, and composition at the University of Art in Graz, undertook research and taught at CREATE, UC Santa Barbara, IEM Graz, and KHM Cologne. Alberto de Campo holds the Edgard Varèse guest professorship for electronic music at TU Berlin.

Peter Fengler is a Dutch musician, performer, and visual artist. He is the artistic director of De Player label and Ultra Hobby Complex. His work musicalizes performances, in which grim absurdism, daily sounds, and concrete poetry form an aesthetized collage. He conceives vinyl as sculptures, performances as publications, and unconscious association as a technique for composing.
Apart from his solo works, he is also a member of cult-I-media group Coolhaven.

Ata Ebtekar, better known as Sote, is an electronic music composer and sound artist based in Tehran. His wide-ranging approach to sound is embodied in diverse paths such as hardcore club sounds, collaborations that straddle (traditional) acoustic and electronic instrumentation, and solo experimental electronics – making Ebtekar equally at home in concert halls, galleries, or clubs. Over the last three decades, he has released on labels such as Warp, Diagonal, SVBKVLT, Sub Rosa, Morphine, and Opal Tapes.

Hijōkaidan (非常階段; emergency staircase) is a Japanese noise and free improvisation group with a revolving lineup that has ranged from two members to as many as fourteen in its early days. The group is the project of guitarist Jojo Hiroshige (JOJO広重), its one constant member, who is head and owner of the Osaka-based Alchemy Records. Other regulars include Jojo’s wife Junko and Toshiji Mikawa (also of Incapacitants).

J.H. Guraj is the nom de plume of Dominique Vaccaro, a musician active in the field of improvisation on analogue devices, guitar, and reel-to-reel recorders since 2000. J.H. Guraj offers vibrant, deep, and resonant melodic music that helps us listen more than just strings. Vaccaro is based in Bologna.

Otim Alpha is a musician from Gulu, northern Uganda. He is the pioneer of Acholitronix, which mixes traditional instruments used by the Acholi tribe with electronic music. He has long worked as a wedding singer, writing bespoke songs for hundreds of couples across his home region. Otim Alpha has toured across Europe, North and East Africa.

Billie Eilish is an American singer and songwriter known for her genre-defying pop. She gained international fame with her debut single “Ocean Eyes” and her album “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”, characterized by whispery vocals, dark production, and introspective lyrics. Eilish is recognized for her distinctive style, innovative music videos, and influence on contemporary youth culture. Billy Eilish has 124M followers on Social Media.

Hanatarashi [ ハナタラシ ], meaning “sniveler” or “snot-nosed” in Japanese, was a noise band created by later Boredoms frontman Yamantaka Eye in Osaka in 1983. The other core member during the early years was later Zeni Geva drummer and Boredoms co-founder Ikuo Taketani. Hanatarash used a variety of unusual noise-making objects on stage, including power tools, drills, and heavy machinery.

Sonoscopia is an art association based in Portugal that creates, produces, and promotes artistic and educational projects, focused on experimental music, sound research, and its interdisciplinary intersections. Since its inception in 2011, Sonoscopia has produced over 600 events, art projects, educational activities, and publications. Sonoscopia operates at the intersection of avant-garde music, performance art, and instrument design.

Israel Kamakawiwoʻole, also known as “IZ”, was a Hawaiian musician and singer renowned for his ukulele playing and soulful voice. He is best known for his medley of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World,” which gained international acclaim. Kamakawiwoʻole’s music blends traditional Hawaiian styles with contemporary influences, and he is celebrated for promoting Hawaiian culture, language, and identity through his songs.

Jeff Mills is an American DJ, producer, and composer, widely regarded as one of the pioneers of Detroit techno. Known for his fast, precise mixing style and futuristic productions, Jeff Mills has been influential in shaping the global electronic music scene. Beyond the club, he has composed scores for films, orchestras, and multimedia performances, blending techno with avant-garde and cinematic elements.

Ai Aso [ 朝生愛 ] is a Japanese psych-pop singer/songwriter. She’s closely affiliated with The Stars and Boris, bands from the underground Japanese rock scene. Her eerie, avant-garde folk has been released on The Stars’ imprint, Pedal Records, as well as Ideologic Organ. Her solo work, infrequent collaborations with White Heaven members You Ishihara and Michio Kurihara, Yurayura Teikoku, and Boris bring a level of fragility and hypnotism to the stage, recalling lost memories.

Acezantez, founded by the versatile Croatian composer and instrumentalist Dubravko Detoni, is a contemporary Croatian masterpiece. Originally released in 1977, the album comprises rich textural pieces constructed from an unnotatable, intricate interplay of percussive squeals, scrapes, and rattles, parched and pitchless woodwinds, and dislocated keyboards, with stylistic affinities with early Nurse With Wound.

Dr. Lena Ortega is a sound artist, researcher, and designer whose line of inquiry joins the concepts of resonance and embodied experience in the relationship between non-human and human animals and their environment. Member of the Art+Science interdisciplinary research group of UNAM, Mexico. Oretega hosts the radio show: “Surfaceless, the skin is not the limit”, dedicated to the active practice of listening, which presents work in the field of sound ecology, soundscape, and experimental music.

Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong (1901–1971) was an American jazz trumpeter, vocalist, and bandleader, widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of jazz. Rising from New Orleans to international fame, he helped shape jazz as a soloist’s art form with his virtuosic trumpet playing, distinctive gravelly voice, and charismatic stage presence. Armstrong’s recordings and performances transformed popular music and left a lasting impact on jazz, swing, and vocal performance worldwide.

Aya (Aya Sinclair) is a British experimental electronic producer known for her genre-blending sound, released on Hyperdub, exploring themes of trauma, addiction, gender, and identity through abrasive, cathartic soundscapes, with acclaimed albums like “Im hole” and “hexed!” showcasing her unique fusion of soundsystem culture, post-hardcore, and internet aesthetics. She previously produced as LOFT, gaining recognition for challenging, visceral music that reflects intense personal experiences, rooted in her Yorkshire upbringing and explorations of substance use, queer identity, and escaping traditional expectations. Her music intensely explores addiction (ketamine, cocaine), trauma, mental health, and her journey as a queer, trans woman, often using fragmented lyrics and disorienting sounds to reflect these struggles. Sound: A unique mix of heavy electronics, soundsystem culture, post-hardcore, rave, and experimental textures, aiming for music that “breathes” and avoids being sterile.

Knoott Qsovreli [ קסוברלי נוט ] is a body modification artist, performer, provocateur, clothing designer as Samaya Gorgona, and singer-songwriter based in Jerusalem. Knoott is a lysergic mix of punk-rave cocktails blended with songs for acoustic guitar and voice.

Mieskuoro Huutajat (translated as The Shouting Men’s Choir) is a Finnish performance choir founded in 1987, known for delivering texts by shouting rather than singing. Their repertoire includes political speeches, manifestos, everyday texts, and abstract material, presented with strict choral discipline and deadpan staging. The group operates at the intersection of music, performance art, and social commentary, and has performed internationally in both art and music contexts.

Marianne Teixido is an artist, musician, and developer. Her practice lies at the intersection of art, technology, and critical theory, exploring code as poetic and political material. Her work materializes in live coding performances, electroacoustic compositions, interactive installations, and theoretical research that challenges hegemonic narratives of technology, proposing instead cyberfeminist and non-binary practices of creation.

El Urda is the stage name of Andrés Urda, a Colombian content creator from Sincelejo. A widely followed internet personality with over one million followers, his work often takes the form of public social experiments that occupy shared spaces. These actions frequently use sound as a tool to provoke disruption, reaction, and commentary on everyday social behavior.

Vincent Dallas is the solo harsh noise project of Dries Beernaert, an artist based in Kortrijk, Belgium. Rooted in primal feedback and a fiercely hands-on approach to pedals and circuitry, the project embraces noise as both physical force and ecstatic playfulness. Beernaert’s performances and recordings unfold as raw confrontations with sound: crude, loud, and unapologetically tactile. Layers of distortion collapse into each other, oscillating between chaos and control, where feedback becomes a living presence rather than a by-product. Vincent Dallas thrives on immediacy and excess—an exploration of noise as play, abrasion, and release—producing sonorities that are abrasive yet strangely euphoric, brutal yet intimate, leaving behind the residue of sound pushed to its breaking point.

Hatebeak is an American death metal band formed by Blake Harrison and Mark Sloan, distinguished by one of the most singular voices in extreme music: Waldo, a grey parrot (b. 1991). Widely regarded as the first band to feature an avian vocalist, Hatebeak occupies a space where brutality, humor, and conceptual provocation collide. Waldo’s piercing squawks cut through distorted guitars and blast beats like serrated air—neither parody nor novelty, but a feral counterpoint to the genre’s obsession with extremity. His presence transforms the band into something both confrontational and strangely tender, reminding listeners that metal’s violence is often theatrical, while the voice remains stubbornly alive and untrained. Signed to Reptilian Records, Hatebeak exists largely outside the conventions of the live circuit. The band does not tour. In this refusal, Hatebeak becomes a studio-bound anomaly: a death metal project defined not by spectacle, but by care, constraint, and an uncompromising commitment to its most unlikely member.

SS was a Japanese punk band formed in 1977 in Kyoto. The band was part of the Kansai no wave scene and was later regarded as the first Japanese hardcore punk band. SS consisted of Tommy SS on vocals, Jun SS on guitar, Tsuyoshi SS on bass, and Takami SS on drums. The entire recorded output of SS consisted of two live albums, both released years after the performances. The songs on both albums are less than a minute long, with only a single track clocking in at more than two minutes. Most of the songs on these albums are originals, except for covers of “Blitzkrieg Bop” by The Ramones (played at both performances) and “First Time” by The Boys. Both songs were played faster than the original version.

Richie Culver is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice operates at the interstice of contemporary image culture, expanded sound, and post-documentary poetics. His work investigates the unstable architectures of memory, place, and digital subjectivity, examining how personal and collective narratives migrate across media and sediment within aesthetic form. Culver studied Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, an experience that catalyzed his engagement with expanded forms of image-making and established the conceptual foundation for his later intermedial inquiries.

Banks Violette is an artist based in Brooklyn. He studied at Columbia University and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Through sculpture and hyperrealist drawings – often linked to the New Gothic Art movement – he has recourse to Heavy Metal iconography on both the formal, aesthetic, and the level of content. He exemplifies the symbolism of death and decay, fluctuating between beauty and cruelty, as in scenes used by the subcultures of Black Metal music. The dark recesses and absurdities of American society provide the thematic basis of his work.

Eliza Douglas is an American artist working with painting, performance, music, sculpture, and photography. Douglas is a frequent collaborator with German artist Anne Imhof. She has been a constant performer in Imhof’s work since 2016, first performing in “Angst I” at Kunsthalle Basel in 2016 and “Angst II” at the Hamburger Bahnhof also in 2016. Douglas also co-created the music and performed in “Sex”, Imhof’s 2019 piece for the Tate Modern, and “Faust”, at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, which won the Golden Lion. For the 2021 Carte Blanche at Palais de Tokyo, Douglas wrote and produced the music, did the art direction, casting, styling, and performed for Imhof’s artwork titled “Nature Mortes”. The music of “Faust” was published in PAN in 2019.

Signe Lidén is a Norwegian artist based in Bergen and Amsterdam. Her installations and performances explore man-made landscapes and their resonance, investigating how places and their histories are reflected in memory, narrative, material, and sound. She is interested in how these resonances manifest ideologically and politically, shaping the territories we inhabit.

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU, sometimes typeset Ccru) was an experimental cultural theorist collective formed in late 1995 at Warwick University, England, which gradually separated from academia until it dissolved in the early 2000s. It garnered a reputation for its idiosyncratic and surreal “theory-fiction” which incorporated philosophy, cyberpunk, and occultism, and its work has since had an online cult following related to the rise in popularity of accelerationism. The CCRU is strongly associated with its former leading members, Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher, and Nick Land.

Bathory was a Swedish extreme metal band formed in Vällingby in 1983. Frontman, founder, and main songwriter Thomas “Quorthon” Forsberg was the sole constant member and was at times responsible for all instruments.
Named after Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory, Bathory is considered a pioneer of Black Metal (alongside Venom, Hellhammer, and Mercyful Fate), and Viking metal. The band stopped performing live early on in its career and never toured. Bathory dissolved when Quorthon died from heart failure at the age of 38 in 2004.

Dominic Richard Harrison, known professionally as Yungblud, is an English singer, songwriter, and actor. In 2018, he released his debut EP “Yungblud”, followed by his first full-length album “21st Century Liability”. In 2019, he released his second EP, “The Underrated Youth”, and the following year, he released his second studio album, “Weird!”, which peaked at the top of the UK Albums Chart and reached number 75 on the US Billboard 200. His third album, titled “Yungblud”, like his first EP, was released in 2022 and reached number 1 on the UK Album Charts, as well as number 45 on the Billboard 200 and number 7 on the U.S. Top Rock Albums chart.

Demna Gvasalia, known mononymously as DEMNA, is a Soviet-born Georgian fashion designer. Having served for a decade as the creative director of Balenciaga and the co-founder of Vetements, in March 2025, he was announced as the next creative director of Gucci.

Brett Wagg is a Berlin-based label owner, primarily working in the fields of Noise and Industrial Music. The sole operator of the label Total Black, founded in Montreal in 2012, and the Sentimental Youth brick-and-mortar record store in Berlin. Brett Wagg has been working in the DIY music community in North America and Europe for close to 20 years. He has been organizing and curating events since 2005, becoming increasingly interested in the importance of physical spaces for underground community building and in-person interaction and exchanges between the audience and the artists.

Daniel Löwenbrück is a German performance artist and curator. He founded the label Tochnit Aleph in 1994, publishing Musique Concrète, Sound Poetry, artist records, multiples, and Noise Music.

He has worked with and published works by Paul McCarthy, Hermann Nitsch, Artur Żmijewski, Rudolf Eb.er, Gerhard Rühm, Hartmut Geerken, Wolf Vostell, Jean Dubuffet, Marc Zeier / G*Park, Henri Chopin, Dieter Roth, Dorothy Iannone, Franz Mon, Michael Barthel, Dominik Steiger, Valeri Scherstjanoi, Toine Horvers, Roman Signer, and many others.

Since the late 1990s, Löwenbrück has performed internationally as part of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe (with Rudolf Eb.er, Dave Phillips, and Joke Lanz), as a duo with singer and performance artist Doreen Kutzke, as part of Ohne (with Tom Smith, Dave Phillips, and Reto Mäder, with Swedish conceptual artist Leif Elggren, and with Brazilian video and sound artist Marcellvs L. as Stallgewitter.

He also performs solo under the names Raionbashi and under his own name.

Sonido La Changa is a sonidero from the Tepito neighborhood in Mexico City, founded by Ramón Rojo in 1968. Rojo began a vinyl record collection with material from the Sonora Matancera after his uncle bought a record store in the Historic Center of Mexico City. He started as a DJ, providing music at dances using a turntable, a Radson tube amplifier, speakers (called “trumpets” in the sound system scene), and his two-record collection, thus giving rise to the sound system, a name that gradually became associated with the DJs.

Phurpa is a Russian performance group, recording and playing authentic ritual music of Bön, the oldest Buddhist tradition from Tibet, using ritual instruments and special tantric singing technique. Their tale is a captivating journey shrouded in Himalayan mysticism; from the shadow of the Kremlin to the pyramids of Egypt and further on into the vast emptiness beyond.

Born in Rabat, Morocco, Eric and Marc Hurtado founded in 1977 the band Etant Donnés that quickly became essential in the field of experimental films, performance, and musique concrete, recording approximately 30 albums and counting numerous collaborations with major artists of the international music scene and cinema, including Alan Vega (Suicide), Genesis P.Orridge (Throbbing Gristle/Psychic Tv), Michael Gira (Swans), Lydia Lunch, Philippe Grandrieux, Mark Cunningham, Bachir Attar (Master Musicians of Jajouka), and Vomir.
Étant Donnés was the last major artwork by Marcel Duchamp in 1966.

Étant Donnés:
1° The Waterfall
2° The Illuminating Gas)
Étant Donnés:
1° la chute d’eau
2° le gaz d’éclairage)

Junko is a Japanese vocalist and a longtime member of Hijokaidan, founded in 1978 by Jojo Hiroshige. The confrontational quality of Junko’s sound radically expands her audience’s interpretive capacities, working in a mode too improvisational to be punk, too chaotic to be free jazz, and yet too intimate to be dismissed. A blend of an anti-melodic and anti-symbolic pleasure in the varied textures of the human voice.

Putri Hijau is an Indonesian singer, entertainer, internet personality, and snake performer. An incomparable mix of character design, social provocation, gender discomfort, and political rebellion, using songs, voice, feedback, risk, and extreme volume as tools for public disruption and animated performance. Putri Hijau overexposes confrontational performances that challenge social norms and expectations. Putri Hijau’s appearances interlink the “grotesque” (Bataille) where excess, transgression, eroticism, and the abject function as mediums to break societal norms and achieve a kind of “sovereignty” or pure experience beyond reason and utility.

Los Frikis was a punk subculture that originated in the 1980s in Cuba. In the early 1990s, many Frikis knowingly injected HIV-positive blood into themselves to live together in public hospitals, where many bands were formed using speakers made from cardboard, electric guitars from East Berlin with strings made from telephone wires, and drum kits constructed from found materials. Los Frikis also congregated at a community centre in Havana called El patio de María. The venue was closed by Fidel Castro in 2003.

Alice Kemp is an artist exploring a unique and idiosyncratic praxis that involves public/private performance, sound composition, drawing, and fetish-object making induced by subtle states of trance, dream, and disturbance. She has presented live art internationally and released audio/musical works through labels such as Fragment Factory, Harbinger Sound, Erratum Musical, Tochnit Aleph, Helen Scarsdale Agency, Dead Mind Records, and Coherent States. Alice Kemp is based in Devon and London.

Rudolf Eb.er has been active since the mid-80s and is known for producing obscure and challenging audio works under the name Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck. His work explores the human psyche, death, and reality by combining outsider art and actionism with extreme sonics, psychoactive acoustics, and cut-up compositions. He generates audio environments into which he plants grotesque psycho-magic rituals designed to trigger a higher awareness of being and detach from the ego.
Rudolf Eb.er founded the SCHIMPFLUCH extreme-artists-collective in Zürich in 1987 and is constantly touring with fellow members. Their confrontational, physically demanding performances and actions have led to riots and the group being banned in certain countries. In 2013, he set up the label Schimpfluch Associates with Dave Phillips to focus on works by sound artists associated with Schimpfluch. He lives and works in Japan.

Sabbat is a Japanese black/thrash metal band formed in 1983 in Tokyo. They are considered pioneers of Japan’s extreme metal scene, known for their fast, aggressive riffs, dark atmospheres, and occult-themed lyrics. Sabbat’s early releases, such as Satanasword and Envenom, helped establish their reputation as one of the most influential Japanese black metal acts.

Anne Imhof was born in 1978 in Giessen, Germany. She lives and works in Berlin and Frankfurt. After studying at the Städelschule (Frankfurt, Germany), in 2013 she put on her first solo exhibition “Parade” in Portikus (Frankfurt, Germany). Since then, Anne Imhof’s work has been shown in particular at the Art Institute of Chicago (2019), the Tate Modern (London, 2019), the Hamburger Banhof (Berlin, 2016), Kunsthalle Basel (2016), the MoMA PS1 (New York, 2015) and the Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain in Nîmes (2014). She has also taken part in a large number of group exhibitions and festivals, including the MMK Frankfurt (2019 and 2014), Tai Kwun (Hong Kong, 2019), La Biennale de Montréal (2016), the Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2015) and the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2015). Anne Imhof represented Germany at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 where she won the Golden Lion for the best national participation, thanks to her performance “Faust”. She has also been awarded the Absolut Art Award (2017) and the Preis der Nationalgalerie (2015).

Burzum is a Norwegian music project founded by Varg Vikernes in 1991, widely regarded as a pioneering act in the Black Metal genre. Burzum’s music often explores themes of Norse mythology, nature, and paganism. The project has been highly influential in extreme metal, though it is also associated with Vikernes’ controversial criminal history.

Dorothy Iannone characterized her work as an “ecstatic unity,” encompassing multiple genres and media, including painting, photography, artist books, video, sound and text works, drawing, collage, and installations. Iannone’s works were repeatedly censored due to their alleged pornographic content, even within the international art establishment. Her candid depictions of human sexuality show the body as the focus of both personal and public negotiation of social taboos and power dynamics. In 1976, she received a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and moved to Berlin, where she remained, conveying her fondness for the city through love songs and calling it her home. Spanning six decades, Iannone’s body of work is characterized by her relentless pursuit of freedom and constant challenging of prevailing patriarchal norms. She championed equality and the free expression of love and sexuality, though she did not officially join any feminist groups. She cultivated close friendships and engaged in lively exchanges with other artists without affiliating herself with any particular art movement. Starting in 1985, she became deeply involved in Buddhism and progressively incorporated spiritual themes of unity into her artworks.

James Graham Ballard was an English novelist and short-story writer, satirist, and essayist known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the relations between human psychology, technology, sex, and mass media. Ballard first became associated with New Wave science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels such as “The Drowned World” (1962). He later courted controversy with the short-story collection “The Atrocity Exhibition” (1970), which includes the 1968 story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”, and later the novel “Crash” (1973), a story about car-crash fetishists. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes the novelist Ballard as a writer preoccupied with “Eros, Thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies”.

DJ Marcelle, whose real name is Marcelle van Hoof, is a Dutch DJ and producer renowned for her adventurous and diverse musical style. She often uses unconventional sampling techniques and vinyl records to create abstract, rhythmically intricate, and immersive soundscapes. Her performances and recordings are celebrated for their playful, improvisational, and exploratory approach to sound. She’s an artist with a mischievous, rule-bending and almost ironic approach to DJing, producing and radio hosting – cut with her trademark wit yet supported by an unquestionable amount of skills. DJ Marcelle makes compositions out of songs and symphonies out of mixes – colliding disparate genres, appropriated vocal snippets, and warped soundscapes into a giant Frankenstein-like melting pot. Her performances are inventive, euphoric, and above all, powerful.

Iakovos “Jake” Chapman and Konstantinos “Dinos” Chapman are British visual artists, previously known as the Chapman Brothers. Their art explores deliberately shocking subject matters; for instance, in 2008, they produced a series of works that appropriated original watercolours by Adolf Hitler.
In 2022, with the announcement of Jake Chapman’s solo show “Me, Myself and Eye”, it was disclosed that the Chapman brothers had ended their professional association. Jake Chapman referred to mutual “seething disdain” and told the Guardian they were both sick of the partnership and were no longer having fresh ideas together.

Destroy All Monsters was an American experimental rock and noise band formed in Detroit in 1973. The members of DAM met in the art department of the University of Michigan, right in between the best and the worst of times, between the era of full-benefit packages and the advent of Reaganomic downsizing. The original lineup comprised Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Carey Loren, and Niagara. The sound they synthesized from this radically polarized mix of reference points—which ranged from musique concrète to garage rock, auteur cinema to schlock horror (their name comes from a late-’60s Japanese B movie) and porn, Dadaist poetry to underground comix—is as “difficult” as one might expect yet also oddly consistent, at times almost tranquil.

Catherine Christer Hennix was a Swedish mathematician, composer, and visual artist known for her work in minimalist music, as well as her research in topology and mathematical logic. She was a key figure in the 1960s–70s avant-garde scene, collaborating with La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, and the Fluxus movement, creating drone-based compositions that explore extended duration, just intonation, and meditative sound structures. Hennix was affiliated with MIT’s AI Lab in the late 1970s and was later employed as a research professor of mathematics at SUNY New Paltz; she also worked with mathematician Alexander Esenin-Volpin.

Disband was an all-female No Wave performance group in New York City from 1978–1982. The core members were Ilona Granet, Donna Henes, Ingrid Sischy, Diane Torr, and Martha Wilson. Early band members included Barbara Ess, Daile Kaplan, April Gornick, and Barbara Kruger, who wrote a couple of their songs. The members were active in the downtown scene. Ilona Granet, Barbara Ess, and Daile Kaplan played in other bands like Static, the Y Pants, and The Gynecologists. Martha Wilson was the founder of Franklin Furnace, an exhibition space. Ingrid Sischy was editor of Artforum and Interview.
Modeled after a rock band, the members were artists rather than musicians. The band’s sound was a type of a cappella No Wave. Disband performed mostly at art venues like Public Arts International/Free Speech, Franklin Furnace, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and Hallwalls. Disband was popular with the Feminist art audience due to songs like “Every Girl”, “Hey Baby”, and “Fashions”.

Meredith Monk is an American composer, vocalist, choreographer, and performance artist whose work has fundamentally reshaped the landscape of contemporary experimental music. Since the 1960s, she has developed a singular artistic language grounded in extended vocal techniques and deeply interdisciplinary practice, weaving together music, movement, theater, and film. Her works often unfold as meditative spaces, exploring memory, embodiment, and the vast expressive potential of the human voice beyond words.
At the age of three, Monk was diagnosed with strabismus, an experience that led her to be enrolled in a Dalcroze eurhythmics program—a method that integrates music and physical movement. This early immersion proved formative, influencing the course of her entire artistic life. As Monk has noted, it is through this union of sound and motion that her work found its foundation, making dance, movement, and film inseparable from her musical compositions. Widely regarded as a central figure in avant-garde and experimental music, Monk’s practice continues to expand the boundaries of voice and performance, affirming the body itself as an instrument of profound expressive power.

Rie Nakajima is a Japanese sculptor living in London. She has been working on creating installations and performances by responding to the physical character of spaces using a combination of motorized devices and found objects. Fusing sculpture and sound, her artistic practice is open to chance and the influence of others. She has exhibited and performed worldwide. Her frequent collaborators include David Cunningham, Keiko Yamamoto, Pierre Berthet, Marie Roux, Billy Steiger, David Toop, and Akira Sakata.

Gruppo di Nun is a collective of psycho-activists dedicated to organizing forms of occult resistance against hetero-patriarchal dogma. Their work advances an alternative ceremonial practice grounded in non-dual Love—one that embraces entropy, dissolution, and the cosmic unmaking of fixed order.
“Revolutionary Demonology”, published in English by Urbanomic in 2022, emerges as a direct response to what esoteric traditions identify as the Dogma of the Right Hand: a ritualized system of control, hierarchy, and transcendence through denial. Against this paradigm, Gruppo di Nun reactivates the suppressed currents of a Left Hand Path, not as nihilism but as affirmation—an ecstatic commitment to the entropic disintegration of all creation. In this framework, darkness is not opposed to love but revealed as its most radical form. By making peace with the shadow and nourishing the Great Beast, Gruppo di Nun invokes a cosmology in which seals are broken, binaries collapse, and Cosmic Love is finally released from the constraints of order, purity, and fear.

Yasunao Tone [ 刀根 康尚 ] was a Japanese multidisciplinary artist born in Tokyo and working in New York City. He graduated from Chiba University in 1957 with a major in Japanese Literature. Tone was an important figure in postwar Japanese art during the 1960s. He was a central member of the early noise music collective Group Ongaku and was associated with several other Japanese art groups, such as Neo-Dada Organizers, Hi-Red Center, and Team Random (the first computer art group organized in Japan).
Tone was also a member of Fluxus. Many of his works were performed at Fluxus festivals or distributed by George Maciunas’s various Fluxus operations. Relocating to the United States in 1972, he henceforth gained a reputation as a musician, performer, and writer working with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Senda Nengudi, Florian Hecker, and many others. Tone is also known as a pioneer of Glitch music due to his groundbreaking modifications of compact discs and CD players.

Sister Iodine is a French band formed by Erik Minkkinen, Lionel Fernandez, and Nicolas Mazet in Paris in the early 1990s, blending noise rock and avant-punk influences. Their music is characterized by repetitive bass lines, abrasive guitar textures, and confrontational live performances. Erik Minkkinen is known for his many musical projects, among others Discom, Grifu, Minitel, Noyade, pFeM, Intertecsupabrainbeatzroomboyz, and also as an activist with Le Placard sessions since late 90s, a nomadic festival that presents concerts listened to solely with headphones, a novelty that has attracted an international following and given rise to an extensive network of enthusiasts, musicians, and promoters.

Diamanda Galás is a Greek-American avant-garde composer and performer whose work confronts the subjects of violence and despair with political conviction and austerity. Galás rose to prominence in the ‘80s and ‘90s with the recorded trilogy, “Masque of the Red Death”, and the performance work “Plague Mass”, which addressed the AIDS crisis in a time of deafening political silence and inaction. Often inspired by poetry, with a string of legendary albums from the 1980s, including “The Litanies of Satan” (1982), “Diamanda Galás” (1984), “The Divine Punishment” (1986), and “Saint of the Pit” (1986), her works fall into several categories ranging from power electronics to dark ambient to neoclassical darkwave while remaining singular. Her singing, while adjacent to contemporaneous practitioners of extended vocal techniques and sound poetry, remains rooted in traditional musics, bridging the past with the present, the sacred with the profane.