XX presents a concert featuring collaboration between women. Live motion tracking, video, performance art, sung poetry, amplified hair, a talking disklavier, delicate percussion, and gritty solo bass come together in a fabric that explores themes of radical biological forms, domestic violence and space, feeling at home, and fragility. The concert is configured partly as an homage to the late and great Pauline Oliveros, and features her work Bye-Bye Butterfly as well as her correspondence with various female collaborators.
Facebook Event
Fernanda Aoki Navarro is a musician born in Brazil based in San Diego, California. She works with acoustic and electroacoustic music and has been exploring performance art and multimedia installations. She's engaged with promoting experimental and contemporary music and worked as a producer and curator of concerts and music festivals.
She's a PhD candidate at UCSD, studying with Roger Reynolds and Rand Steiger.
She doesn’t believe in the idea that a bio makes music more interesting.
Fernanda doesn’t like to be reduced to a gender, doesn’t know how to samba, procrastinates to write program notes, doesn’t know how to react to compliments or critiques, goes to the cinema every week, drinks coffee every day.www.fernandanavarro.net
Barbara Byers is a vocal artist interested in folk traditions, extended technique and exploring the relationship between sound, movement and the environment.
Carolyn Chen has made music for supermarket, demolition district, and the dark. Recent projects include a story for ASL interpreter strung to chimes at a distance and a commission for Klangforum Wien. Her work has been presented in 22 countries and described by The New York Times as “the evening’s most consistently alluring … a quiet but lush meditation.” For a decade she has studied the guqin, the Chinese 7-string zither traditionally played for private meditation in nature, which has informed her thinking on listening in social spaces. www.carolyn-chen.com
Elisabet Curbelo is a Spanish composer and performer born in Gran Canaria. She studied piano pedagogy, voice and composition in her hometown, Madrid and Istanbul. Today she pursues a PhD in Composition at UC San Diego under the advisory of Roger Reynolds. Elisabet’s work and dedication has been valued throughout her career by international institutions, as she has been awarded numerous grants, prizes, and commissions. Her pieces have been performed in Spain, Turkey, USA, Germany, Switzerland and Holland. Her research focuses on the use of sensors to control electronics with movement and the development of extended techniques for voice based on Middle Eastern vocal techniques.
Fiona Digney is an Australian-born multi-faceted percussionist who holds both education and performance degrees and is currently based in California while she undertakes doctoral studies under the guidance of Prof. Steven Schick. She has enjoyed a wide-ranging freelance career over the last decade, performing in solo, ensemble, and theatrical settings in Australia, China, Canada, The Netherlands, Sweden, England, Mexico, and the United States. As an avid proponent of new music, she has commissioned and premiered various percussion works from composers across the globe and has been involved in many new music ensembles; most recently as on-stage percussionist in the European premiere of Anne Washburn’s highly acclaimed post-electric play, Mr. Burns at the Almeida theatre, London. Fiona has performed with West Australian Symphony Orchestra, Tetrafide percussion quartet (AUS), Ensemble 64.8 (USA), Het Zuiderlijk Toneel, and Diamantfabrielk theatre companies (NL), as well as a soloist at Club Zho and the launch of the Totally Huge New Music Festival (AUS). Fiona is a current member of red fish blue fish and is active in both the music and theatre departments at the University of California, San Diego.
Judith Hamann is a cellist currently based between Melbourne/San Diego. Her performance practice stretches across various genres encompassing elements of improvised, art, experimental, and popular music. Currently her work is focused on expressions of immersion and saturation: explored through durational, spatialised and electroacoustic approaches to sound, as well as an examination of psycho-physical materials through her work with Anthea Caddy.
She is a champion of new and rarely performed music, immersive approaches to sound, and engages with a range of interdisciplinary and experimental projects including the Amper&nd project (South Korea/Australia), and collaborative work with visual artists Keith Deverell and Sabina Marselli. She has been an artist in residence at Tokyo Wondersite Aoyama, Recollets (Paris), and Q-02 (Brussels). In the summer of 2017 she will be an artist in residence at Cité des Arts (Paris)
Judith is currently a Doctoral candidate at the University of California San Diego, studying with Professor Charles Curtis.
Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh Born in Taiwan and raised between New Zealand and Australia, Annie’s interest in composition focuses on the notion of space in musical, personal, and physical resonances. Hers works have been commissioned and performed by entities such as the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra,Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Arcko Symphonic Ensemble,Syzygy Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, Platypus ensemble, Quartetto Maurice, The Mivos
Quartet, Red Fish Blue Fish, ELISION Ensemble, and Thin Edge New Music Collective.
Annie is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of California, San Diego, working with Lei Liang and Katharina Rosenberger. Prior to joining UCSD, Annie completed her bachelor’s (first-class honours) and master’s degrees from University of Melbourne (2006, 2010), with Stuart Greenbaum and Brenton Broadstock. Annie will be joining Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Teaching Professor beginning in spring, 2018.
Lauren Jones is a vocalist hailing from Hartselle, Alabama and currently based in San Diego, California. A musician attracted to many genres, Lauren engages in many different performance settings such as opera, songwriting, contemporary and experimental music, jazz, and improvisation. She has performed leading and supporting roles in operas such as "Cis" in Benjamin Britten's Albert Herring, "Yum-Yum" in Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado, and "Papagena" in Mozart's The Magic Flute. As an improviser, she recently performed in Stephanie Richards' Phantom Station Conduction Series.Lauren is currently pursuing her Master's degree in Vocal Performance at University of California, San Diego where she studies voice with Susan Narucki. In 2015, she completed her Bachelor of Music degree in Choral Music Education from the University of Montevallo, studying under the vocal direction of Melanie Williams.
Caroline Louise Miller’s music is devoted to the exploration of affect, biomusic, labor, tactility, and glitch. Her latest large-scale work, How to Survive a 100-hour Workweek, explores intersections of late capitalism, rising work hours, and entrainment to technology; invoking willful failure as a joyful and resistive action. Following themes of tactility, labor, and violence, she has been commissioned by Denmark's SPOR 2017 festival to realize Vivarium, a work for two performers, fleshy fruits, electronics, and live projection. Caroline is the founder of Immersion@Birch Aquarium, an annual freeform concert that has drawn over a thousand people from the San Diego County community since its inaugural event in Spring 2013. Her music has appeared across the U.S. and internationally. In her free time, Caroline enjoys ping-pong; singing, whistling, and playing guitar; hiking; and organizing to smash fascism.
Kyle Motl is a bassist, composer, and improviser. Active in a variety of ensembles and settings, Kyle’s work crosses the boundaries between idioms as wide as free jazz, contemporary concert music, and extreme metal. Current interests include extended harmonic techniques for solo bass improvisation, electroacoustic performance with live electronics and improvising software, modular compositional schemes, recursive and generative structuring, and exploration of complex sonic spectra.
Celeste Oram - Celeste's works investigate new media and strategies for musical performance and notation: video, audio, and text scores prompt performers into scenarios where they confront sound, history, and digital realities. These works have been performed and recorded by ensembles including the Callithumpian Consort (Boston), wasteLAnd (Los Angeles), the Sydney Piano Trio, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, and the Song Company (Sydney). Celeste is the NZSO National Youth Orchestra composer-in-residence for 2017, and was the Auckland Philharmonia’s ‘Rising Star’ young composer-in-residence for 2013-14; her commissioned orchestral work macropsia was selected as a finalist in the 2014 SOUNZ Contemporary Award for excellence in New Zealand contemporary composition.
A third ongoing project is the renovation of histories of New Zealand music and sonic cultures. At present, this revolves around research into early 20th-century ham radio activity, and the figure of Vera Wyse Munro (1897-1966). This project is rapidly snowballing into an obsession with building re-creations of early radio circuits.
From Irvine CA, Ben Rempel is pursuing an M.A. in Music Performance at UC San Diego, where he studies with renowned percussionist Steven Schick. His artistic interests include sound and rhythm. Ben has bachelors degrees from Oberlin College in Percussion Performance and Computer Science, where he studied with Michael Rosen and Jamey Haddad.
Kiyoe K D Wellington received her Bachelors of Music Degree in Classical Double Bass Performance from the New England Conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts. Since around the turn of the 20th century, the double bass has been increasingly recognized and utilized by contemporary composers for its ability to produce a plethora of non-traditional sounds, and Kiyoe's fondness for their music sprouted from her focus on music for the solo bassist. Having spent her childhood between Hawaii and Switzerland, Kiyoe's musical practice is influenced by a life spent in awe and appreciation of the natural world.
Hillary Jean Young is a singer and interdisciplinary artist. Hillary grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, and received their BMus in Voice Performance and their MMus in Opera from the University of British Columbia. Hillary is now in the third year of their DMA at the University of California, San Diego. Recent engagements have included Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia with the La Jolla Symphony Orchestra, the experimental opera project The Voice Machine; a collaboration between UCSD and Stanford Music departments, and the devised interdisciplinary dance work, Though It May Shift, directed by Erin Tracy. www.hillaryjeanyoung.com
