CONCERT | MIA ZABELKA, PHILL NIBLOCK & KATHERINE LIBEROVSKAYA
Renowned Austrian sound artist Mia Zabelka is joined by legendary New York-based intermedia artists Phill Niblock and Katherine Liberovskaya for an evening of experimental collaboration. In the first set, Phill Niblock will perform his music, composed of very loud drones that fill the air of the performance space and employ many microtones that shift the harmonics within the space. For the second set, Mia Zabelka and Katherine Liberovskaya will continue an on-going collaboration where gesture and image start a dialogue through surveillance technology.
Phill Niblock makes thick, loud drones of music, filled with microtones of instrumental timbres which generate many other tones in the performance space. Simultaneously, he presents films/videos which look at the movement of people working, slides, or computer-driven black and white abstract images floating through time.
Mia Zabelka’s work is an ongoing process of de- and re-construction of the violin’s sonic possibilities, expanding the range of the instrument using live electronic devices and preparing it through the insertion of alien objects between or on the strings; she is continuously exploring sound and music as physical phenomena, always pushing back the boundaries in experimental performances and compositions that question established notions, improving the available techniques and given structures.
Katherine Liberovskaya has been exploring improvised live visuals in the context of live music/sound concert situations since the early 2000s, collaborating with numerous music and sound artists; her live visuals seek to create improvisatory “music” for the eyes; they span a wide variety of approaches from straightforward real-time montage and processing of pre-recorded material to the use of diverse kinds of live cameras to capture live “events” on the concert stage and integrate them to the image mix.
ABOUT
Phill Niblock (b. 1933, USA) is an artist whose fifty-year career spans minimalist and experimental music, film and photography. Since 1985, he has served as director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York with a branch in Ghent, and curator of the foundation’s record label XI. Known for his thick, loud drones of music, Niblock’s signature sound is filled with microtones of instrumental timbres that generate many other tones in the performance space. In 2013, his diverse artistic career was the subject of a retrospective realized in partnership between Circuit (Contemporary Art Centre Lausanne) and Musée de l’Elysée. The following year Niblock was honored with the prestigious Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award. www.phillniblock.com / www.experimentalintermedia.org
Mia Zabelka is a sound artist, composer as well as an experimental violinist and vocalist from Vienna, with Czech, Jewish and French roots. Comprehensively educated in classical music from an early age, she continued to construct and explore the limits of sound and music in a language entirely her own. Recipient of highly regarded prizes (3-time winner of the Prix Ars Electronica) and awards, she was a guest of the DAAD’s (German Academic Exchange Service’s) international artists’ program in Berlin and the Fulbright Commission in New York. Recently Mia Zabelka was awarded THE AKADEMIA Music Award 2018 in the category “experimental music” for her composition “FOR PAULINE OLIVEROS”, composed for the ORF musikprotokoll and Austrian Cultural Forum New York’s Homages project in 2017. Mia Zabelka is currently the artistic director of Phonofemme Festival Vienna and Klanghaus Untergreith in the region of South Styria. www.miazabelka.com / www.klang-haus.at
Katherine Liberovskaya is an intermedia artist based in New York City and Montreal, Canada. Involved in experimental video since the 80s, she has produced many single-channel videos, video installation works and video, and music performances which have been presented at a wide variety of events and venues around the world. Since 2001 her work predominantly focuses on the intersection of image and sound, in solo video-audio installation/environments and often in collaborations with composers and sound artists notably in live video+sound performance. She has received over 30 grants and arts awards in Canada, U.S.A. and France. Katherine Liberovskaya curates and organizes the Screen Compositions evenings at Experimental Intermedia since 2005 and since 2006 the OptoSonic Tea salons with Ursula Scherrer at Diapason and in various nomadic locations, in New York, North America and Europe, with OptoSonic Tea On the Road. In 2014 she completed a Ph.D. in art practice entitled “Improvisatory Live Visuals: Playing Images Like a Musical Instrument” at the Universite du Quebec in Montreal (UQAM). www.facebook.com/liberovskaya