upcoming
June 24-29: Innovator Lab - Line Upon Line and Friends
Since 2018, Qubit has been running its annual Innovator Lab series—an artistic residency based in New York City—that offers funding, resources, and ultimately a public event to two composer/performer/sound artists. Moving forward, we have dramatically expanded the scale and scope of the program. Instead of focusing on inviting individual artists, we will now invite an ensemble to collaborate with these artists on a new piece over the course of a week.
For the upcoming 2022–2023 season, we are thrilled to highlight three composers: Dominic Coles, Laura Steenberge, and Ryoko Akama, the latter of whom will fly in from the UK for this occasion. The compositions by these composers will be performed by Line Upon Line, an Austin, Texas-based ensemble, at Mise-en-Place in Brooklyn from June 24-29.
Public events will include an indoor concert on June 29, featuring Line Upon Line, as well as sets by Dominic Coles and Laura Steenberge. More events will be announced soon.
Artists:
Dominic Coles is a composer based in Queens, NYC. His work investigates the interactions of place, personhood, and power as articulated in sound.
Laura Steenberge is a composer, performer and researcher at the crossroads of music, language, space and mythology. As a solo performer she develops pieces with viola da gamba, voice, found objects, contrabass and keyboard instruments. As a composer she has developed works collaboratively with ensembles and individuals including Rage Thormbones, Carolyn Chen, Heather Lockie, Argenta Walther, Carole Kim, Ursula Brookbank, KCM Walker, Carmina Escobar, Marco Fusi, Radical 2, Deso Duo, Tim Feeney, Tiffany Ng, Julia Holter, Catherine Lamb and Rebecca Lane. From 2017-2018 she presented The Imaginary Music Radio Hour on NTS.com, and since 2019 has been transcribing and recording 11th century Aquitanian Chant for the EnChanted Images project directed by art historian Bissera Pentcheva. Recordings of her work can be found on Harmonica Fables (Nueni Recs) and The Four Winds (Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, New Focus Recordings), and she has appeared as a performer on recent releases by Ghost Ensemble (Mountain Air), Tashi Wada (Nue) and Sarah Davachi (Pale Bloom). Her writings can be found in MusicTexte, Lateral Edition, The Experimental Music Yearbook, and Aural Architecture in Byzantium (Ashgate, 2018). She has taught about experimental sound practices and medieval chant at the California Institute of the Arts and Stanford University and currently resides in Asheville, NC.
Ryoko Akama is a Japanese-Korean working with installation, performance and composition, residing in Huddersfield, UK. Her works sculpt domestic appliances and scrap wastes with invisible energy, especially interested in heat, magnetism and gravity, into kinetic contraptions. Her site-specific works infuse both aural / visual occurrence as one entity, creating ephemeral situations that magnify silence, time and space. Interested in nature of relativity, culture and system, her artistic practice examines architecture, environment, conflict and fluidity.
She also composes and performs alternative scores and text works in collaboration with other artists and musicians worldwide. She is a member of the lappetites, electronic musician collective since 2000 and a member of the 9-piece band a.hop. She is an artistic director for ame c.i.c., supporting DIY culture and underground art/music scene. She also co-runs the independent publisher mumei publishing and melange edition. Selected installations include: not a matter but it really matters (Lo Pati, 2022, Spain), inefficient ways to comprehend the matter (Exhoraum, Austria, 2022), the way they are (Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2019, UK), composition of happiness (Spanien19C, 2019, Denmark), kosetsu (Stedelijk Museum, 2019, Amsterdam), ploughs and harrows (Konfrontation Festival, 2018, Austria), listening with the city (Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, 2018, Germany), odds and ends (Bunkier Sztuki Gallery, 2018, Poland), loiner or (Industrial Museum of Leeds, 2018, UK), Object Migration (Avant Art Festival + Sanatorium Dź wię ku, 2017, Poland) and 1→ 5 (Uppsala Art Museum, 2016, Sweden).
Line Upon Line: Formed in 2009 at The University of Texas at Austin, line upon line exists to champion living composers and pursue the musically unfamiliar. The Austin-based trio has premiered over 100 new works for percussion and has worked with composers in residencies at Harvard University, Stanford University, University of California at Santa Cruz, University of Texas at Austin, Kunstuniversität Graz, University of Huddersfield, University of Liverpool, City University of London and Monash University (Melbourne). Internationally, the group has performed at the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (Australia), Open Circuit Festival (Liverpool), Novalis Festival (Osijek), in Basel (Hochschule für Musik), Berlin (Unerhörte Musik), Cologne (Loft Köln), Freiburg (Hochschule für Musik), Graz (Open Music), Koper (Koper Biennale) and London (City, University of London), and has taught at the Conservatoriums in Melbourne and Sydney, London (Guildhall School of Music & Drama), Manchester (Royal Northern College of Music) and Tours (Le pôle Aliénor). Nationally, line upon line has performed and taught in twenty-three different states, at two Percussive Arts Society International Conventions, the Festival of New American Music (Sacramento) and The Myrna Loy Center (Helena, MT). In Texas, the group has performed at two Fusebox Festivals, the Menil Collection (Houston), Victoria Bach Festival and the International Festival-Institute at Round Top. line upon line consists of its three original members: Adam Bedell, Cullen Faulk and Matthew Teodori.