ANNE LE BARON’s compositions  embrace an exotic array of subjects encompassing vast reaches of space and  time, ranging from the mysterious Singing Dune of Kazakhstan, to probes into  physical and cultural forms of extinction, to legendary figures such as Pope  Joan, Eurydice, Marie Laveau, and the American Housewife. Widely recognized for  her work in instrumental, electronic, and performance realms, she has earned numerous  awards and prizes, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Alpert  Award in the Arts, a Fulbright Full Fellowship, an award from the Rockefeller MAP  Fund for her opera, Sucktion, and a 2009-2010 Cultural Exchange  International Grant from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs for The Silent Steppe Cantata. Also an accomplished harpist, LeBaron is renowned for her pioneering methods of  developing and implementing extended harp techniques, electronic enhancements,  and notation in compositional and improvisational contexts. She currently  teaches composition and related subjects, such as Concert Theater and  HyperOpera, at the California Institute of the Arts. Her new 2-CD recording of solo, duo, quartet, and trio improvisations, “1, 2, 4, 3″ will be released on INNOVA this fall.

MICHAEL DESSEN is a composer-improviser who performs on the slide trombone and computer. Active in a variety of ensembles as leader or collaborator, he creates music for improvisers and engages new technologies of telepresence and digital networking. His music can be heard on labels such as Clean Feed, Cuneiform, and Circumvention, and  current projects include his own electro-acoustic trio, the collective quartet Cosmologic, and telematic collaborations with Mark Dresser, Myra Melford and others. Dessen’s teachers include Yusef Lateef,  George Lewis, and Anthony Davis, and he has also been schooled through extensive freelance experiences ranging from salsa bands to avant-garde new music ensembles. He has published writings on music and culture, and is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the University of California, San Diego, from which he received a Ph.D. in Critical Studies and Experimental Practices (Music). In 2006, he joined the music faculty of the University of California, Irvine, where he recently co-founded a new MFA emphasis in Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology (ICIT).

MOTOKO HONDA, pianist/composer, marries classical, jazz, avant-garde and Pacific-Rim textures with 21st-century technology and emerges with musical soundscapes as profound as they are all-encompassing. Whether solo or in collaboration, live or in-studio, a Honda “comprovisation” is sound- and shape-shifting at its most thrilling and immediate. Honda’s musical virtuosity, coupled with a firm grasp of the multimedia arts, has taken her to European concert halls as well as jazz clubs, museums, and underground music venues in all over the United Sates and Japan.  

CARMINA ESCOBAR is a singer and multimedia artist from Mexico City that has collaborated in many different projects which explore a diversity of sonorous languages such as medieval music, opera, contemporary music, folk music, electronic music and experimental trends involving interdisciplinary collaborations and multimedia. As a soloist she has performed concerts of contemporary repertoire for solo voice, the premieres of works by young composers and performances of her own compositions. She has appeared in diverse forums and festivals all around the Mexican Republic as well as USA, collaborating with artists of diverse disciplines. She is an active improviser, as much in a solo context as in a group context, in which she involves, as part of her sonorous vocabulary, real-time processing of her voice and the use of concrète elements through electronic media. At the moment she resides in Los Angeles, CA.

EVE LUCKRING’s work takes form in video, sound, photography, poetry, and installation. It questions the assumptions– and experiments with the boundaries — that define place, body, and habit.   Her recent work translates traditional Japanese poetic forms into the visual realm to investigate how the psychological intersects with what is perceived to be external to the self. Luckring’s videos and installations have been exhibited internationally in traditional art venues (RedCat and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Lance Fung Gallery, New York; European Media Arts Festival, Germany; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA, Surrey Art Gallery, Vancouver) as well as in public spaces (Ekaterinburg, Russia; Sante Fe, New Mexico; Shanghai, China). Site-specific projects have addressed the social mechanisms at play in places such as porn shops, institutional community rooms, elevators, and nightclubs.  

CAROLE KIM’s work in time-based performance/installations combines digital technologies and the sensitivity of the improvisational live performer.  From many different angles, Kim has explored how to make video a live, malleable, responsive medium and how to spatially integrate the live presence of performers and viewers alike within these environments. The seamless cinematic distance of pre-edited film viewing is ruptured by the awareness that the moving image is being constructed in the moment. The performances are immersive environments that  support a reciprocal hybrid exchange between sound, image, movement, space.  Presenting venues include the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art-Los Angeles, REDCAT/Disney Hall, the Getty Center, Springwave Festival/LIG Performing Arts Hall (Seoul, Korea), Decibel Festival/Seattle, Trampoline: Platform for New Media Art (Nottingham, England), the Stanford Jazz Festival, Issue Project Room and Engine 27 (New York), Arizona State University-West Interdisciplinary Arts & Performance Program (Phoenix, AZ), the Knitting Factory (LA), ArtSonje Center (Seoul, Korea) plus numerous festivals and performance series. Kim was in residence at Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga and a Master Artist-in-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, FL. This fall she will be an artist-in-residence at the Holter Museum in Montana. (Please see www.carolekim.com)

JESSE GILBERT works in sound and software design, creating flexible tools that are activated in live performance, via network interaction, or in installation settings. His work has recently focused on multi-channel immersive environments, composing for film and video, and real-time electronic sound using custom sampling software. His engagement with the software design process centers around the deconstruction of rational processes, usually resulting in variable interfaces that emphasize intuitive, fluid modes of human/computer interaction. Gilbert’s work has been shown widely in the US and abroad; venues include Engine27 (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the New Museum (New York), net.congestion (Amsterdam), Ars Electronica (Austria), CEAIT Festival (Los Angeles), Kunstradio’s Recycling the Future (Austria), and PORT (MIT, Boston).  His work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Eyebeam Atelier, the National Performance Network, turbulence.org <http://turbulence.org> , the Studio for Creative Inquiry (Carnegie Mellon), the Jerome Foundation, Creative Capital, the Markle Foundation, the Beall Center for Art & Technology (UC Irvine), the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology (CEAIT).

*SPECTRAL is a visual instrument that employs an interactive software system to generate real-time 3D animation in response to live or recorded sound.  Employing a number of computational analytical tools, including Fourier analysis and oscilloscope-style waveform deformation, Spectral reveals the deep structure of sound in a visual language that is both intuitively and aesthetically linked to our emotional experience of music.  Spectral’s interface gives the performer the means to generate highly dynamic 3D scenes that place the observer in a visual relationship that both enhances and reflects on the process of listening.  In addition, Spectral’s ability to overlay digital media onto its 3D surface expands upon traditional notions of presentation of the moving image, and of the relationship between sound and image.