Performers
Loré Lixenberg
mezzo-soprano
Loré Lixenberg has performed with experimental visual and sound artists STELARC, Bruce Mclean, ORLAN, Georgina Starr, Imogen Sidworthy and David Toop. Possibly the only mezzo to have performed the works of Berio with Bronski Beat and Radiohead, she has made numerous experimental opera series for BBC2 and Channel 4. Along with composer Frederic Acquaviva, she ran a Berlin-based art space devoted to exhibitions, installations and performances of vintage and current avant-garde.
As a performer of her own works, she has evolved a compositional practice based purely on voice, in pieces such as ‘Bird’ or her series of 'Singterviews' (PANIC ROOM) that was performed at The Armory, New York, among other locales. Her political opera installation Prêt à Chanter has been performed at The Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, and Ikon Gallery, UK. She published the artist book Memory Maps, the monographic CD, The Afternoon of a Phone, and the opera Singlr that takes the form of an app, to be premiered at the Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival 2021 in London. Her vinyl release, Nancarrow Karaoke, a record of Conlon Nancarrow piano rolls she transcribed for her own voice multi-tracked, has just been released on the Dutch De Player label.
Rosie Middleton
mezzo-soprano
Ebe Oke
tenor
Mezzo-soprano Rosie Middleton specialises in new music. In 2019 Rosie was artist-in-residence at Snape Maltings and The Banff Centre, where she collaborated with composers on voice(less) — a series for voice and electronics. Rosie is an experienced performer of contemporary opera, with works including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Royal Opera House) and #echochamber (Aequitas, Reykjavik/UK Tour). Highlights of 2020-21 include Laura Bowler’s Gold with Riot Ensemble, a Somerset House Residency with Catherine Kontz on 12 Hours, winning the Michiko Hirayama scholarship for excellence in experimental vocal music and Jamie Hamilton’s Versionland with Phaedra Ensemble. In 2022, Rosie will perform in Laura Bowler’s The Blue Woman at the Royal Opera House, and create microstories in collaboration with CHROMA ensemble.
Ebe Oke is a London-based composer and multimedia artist who studied composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen and, since relocation to England from the U.S., has concentrated on the scoring of dance, film and art installations. Their album SPECIES, which penetrates themes of identity, gender, healing and the non-human, uses bird and insect sounds which are processed as instrumentation alongside non-linear percussion, programming, string quartet and Oke’s voice pluralised through treatments to embody the multiple avatars. Among Oke’s other works is FIELD, commissioned by the artist AA Bronson, a founder of the artist collective General Idea. A sonic landscape in three parts which also features the sculpted vocals of Takako Minekawa, FIELD has been presented at Art Basel in Switzerland, Austria’s Salzburger Kunstverein, and the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin.
Oke was commissioned in 2018 by the artist duo Fredrikson Stallard to conceive the soundscape AVALON for an immersive installation housed in a collection on a ship, while DOKUMENT #2 is a collaborative live record culled from a week spent in a studio in Copenhagen in 2016 with Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno. Currently Oke is working on a commission from Tate St. Ives to create a generative sound installation working with bird sounds and artificial intelligence, which is due to go public in November 2021.
Mark Sanders
percussion
Mark Sanders’ career takes in many styles and genres. This history informs his now mainly free-improvisation-based work, but he also works in theatre, dance, contemporary classical and conceptual art situations.
He has worked with many world renowned musicians such as Evan Parker, Jah Wobble, Wadada Leo Smith and is a member of working groups with Nicole Mitchell, Elaine Mitchener, John Butcher, John Edwards, Elliott Sharp and Pat Thomas. He has a longstanding duo with Sarah Gail Brand which has featured on the BBC’s ‘The Stuart Lee Show’ and in the film ‘Taking the Dog for a Walk.’
He has his own groups ‘StaggerLee Wonders,’ which uses Black Radical Poetry and Prose, and the electronica-based group CollapseUncollapse.
Mark is a lecturer at Leeds Conservatoire and visiting lecturer at Birmingham Conservatoire and The Royal Academy of Music.