5.5 Questions for Laura Steenberge

1. What led you to the work you’re making now?

My current output is usually some reinvention of whatever my input was from a few years back. At that time, I was learning about medieval Byzantine chant and Japanese papermaking.

2. Who are some other musicians and/or artists you admire and why?

The Roches for their harmonies. Laurence Crane and Powerdove (Annie Lewandowski) for their austerity. Jerry Hunt for his commitment.

3. What are you listening to these days?

5.5 QUESTIONS FOR ODEYA NINI

1. A relationship between the body and voice is very present in your performances, but you also produce audio recordings. When conceiving new work, is there a point where you decide “this is going to be a performance” or “this is going exist solely as audio”, and how do you make that decision?

My earlier audio recordings were field recording collages, mainly. For a while I spent a lot of time fascinated by the sounds around me and tried…

5.5 Questions for Carmina Escobar

What led you to the work you’re making now?

For a while, I’ve been really interested in the phenomenon of resonance, and most of my personal work has been oriented towards exploring this physical event both conceptually and perceptually. I think this is because of the nature of my primordial instrument, the voice, and its production through an utter bodily experience .

Who are some other musicians and/or artists you admire and why?

I tend to admire the people I…

5.5 Questions for Odeya Nini

What led you to the work you’re making now?

My main focus in the last few years has been performing experimental vocals integrated with movement, a full bodied experience. The physical movement of the body is inseparable from the character of the voice. Integrating these two has led my vocalizing to be very dynamic and highly expressive, opening new possibilities of sound.

I arrived at this form of art over a long period of time spent singing as different personalities…

5.5 Questions for Mark Trayle

Mark Trayle

What led you to the kind of music you play?

Curiosity.

Who are some other musicians and/or artists you admire and why?

That’s always a difficult question to answer, because that list changes all the time as I discover or rediscover music and musicians. So, in late June of 2014: James Tenney – his piece Fabric for Ché was the inspiration for most of what you’ll hear in this concert. I’d heard this piece a few times before but it didn’t capture my…

5.5 Questions for Charles Curtis

What led you to the kind of music you play?

I grew up as a straight-ahead classical cellist, with the twist that my older brother, as a composer, was very into what we thought of as the avant-garde, ca. 1975 – that meant Cage, Berio, Stockhausen, Crumb – mostly music I am not so interested in any more. We got the records out of the local library – Gesang der Juenglinge, Indeterminacy – and marveled at the weirdness.…