Sonic Commentary: Audio Series Volume 29

Email: manfred.werder@gmail.com. Web: www.manfred-werder.blogspot.com.

MANFRED WERDER, composer and performer. His performances, both indoors and outdoors, aim at letting the world’s natural abundance appear. Within an intrinsic practice of derive, he writes with a portable typewriter on found paper, actualizing words and sentences found in poetry, philosophy and the world. Earlier works include stück 1998, a 4,000-page score whose nonrecurring and intermittent performative realization has been ongoing since December 1997. Lives in situ.

Email: cta@caseyanderson.com. Web: www.caseyanderson.com.

CASEY ANDERSON is an artist working with sound in a number of media, including composition, improvisation, electronic music, saxophone, text and installations. Performances, exhibitions, and residencies include MOCA Los Angeles (CA), ISSUE Project Room (NY), STEIM (NL), Atlantic Center for the Arts (FL), Mass MOCA (MA), The Walker Art Center (MN), and The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (CA). He cofounded, and coedits, the Experimental Music Yearbook and owns and operates a wave press. He currently lives in Los Angeles, California, and teaches in the Media Design Practices and Humanities & Sciences departments at ArtCenter College of Design.

Email: travis@objectcollection.us. Web: www.objectcollection.us.

TRAVIS JUST (composer, codirector of Object Collection) is a composer based in Brooklyn, NY, U.S.A.. His work often uses text, objects and gesture in addition to instruments, voice and electronics. He has composed six operas: Problem Radical(s) (2009), Innova (2011) and NO HOTEL (2013), cheap&easy OCTOBER (2015), It’s All True (2016) and YOU ARE UNDER OUR SPACE CONTROL (2019). Travis received a BFA from the Mannes College of Music/New School University while studying with Andrew Cyrille. He received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and studied with James Tenney, Wadada Leo Smith and Michael Pisaro.

KARA FEELY (writer/director, codirector of Object Collection) is a writer, director, designer and performer for experimental theater and interdisciplinary performance. Her work draws inspiration from experimental writing and music composition strategies, and combines a variety of materials, from found text fragments and landscapes of objects, to recorded interviews and radio broadcasts. Additionally, her texts have been published in Antennae, a journal of experimental writing and performance, PLAY A JOURNAL OF PLAYS, and the Japanese imprint futow. Kara currently teaches and advises design in the theater department at Barnard College/Columbia University.

Email: ndiels@ucsd.edu. Web: www.natachadiels.com.

NATACHA DIELS’s work combines choreographed movement, improvisation, video, instrumental practice and cynical play to create worlds of curiosity and unease. Recent work includes Papillon and the Dancing Cranes, for construction cranes (2018); forthcoming is a TV miniseries with the JACK quartet. With a focus on collage, collaboration and the ritual of life as art, Natacha’s compositions have been described as “a fairy tale for a fractured world” (FOCI Arts/Music We Care About). Natacha is a member of the composer/performer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse and the performance duo On Structure. She teaches composition and computer music at UC San Diego.

Email: banhmiverlag@gmail.com. Web: www.banhmiverlag.com/callahan.

JOHN (JACK) CALLAHAN is a composer and sound engineer based in New York. He primarily works under the moniker die Reihe, taken from the journal edited by Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen. With this project he has released music with labels such as Anomia, Ascetic House, NNA Tapes and Salon. In 2013 he founded Bánh Mì Verlag, an imprint dedicated to contemporary experimental music and culture. As a composer his music has been performed and recorded by ensembles such as the S.E.M. Ensemble, the Wet Ink Ensemble and the Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra in such cities as New York, Amsterdam and Zürich.

Email: walkingmango@gmail.com. Web: www.carolyn-chen.com.

CAROLYN CHEN has made music for supermarket, demolition district and the dark. Recent projects include a hug quartet and commissions for Klangforum Wien and the LA Phil. Her listening is informed by playing the guqin, the Chinese zither traditionally used for private meditation in nature. Described by The New York Times as “consistently alluring . . . a quiet but lush meditation,” her work has been presented in 25 countries and supported by the Berlin Prize, the Fulbright Program, ASCAP’s Fred Ho Award, Stanford University’s Sudler Prize, Soros Fellowships for New Americans, MATA Festival and impuls Festival.

Email: sarah.l.hennies@gmail.com. Web: www.sarah-hennies.com.

SARAH HENNIES (b. 1979) is a composer and percussionist based in Ithaca, NY, whose work is concerned with a variety of musical and sociopolitical issues including psychoacoustics, love, intimacy and queer/trans identity. She is a recipient of a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation of the Arts and a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. She is currently Visiting Professor of Music at Bard College during the 2019–2020 academic year.