ZBIGNIEW KARKOWKSI & KASPER T TOEPLITZ @ Bilbao

Zbigniew Karkowski + Kasper T. Toeplitz

Ekainaren 4a osteguna / Jueves 4 de Junio
20 h / Bullitt (Dos de Mayo 3. Bilbao)
www.musicaexmachina.com

Zbigniew Karkowski was born in 1958 in Krakow, Poland. He studied composition at the State College of Music in Gothenburg, Sweden, aesthetics of modern music at the University of Gothenburg’s Department of Musicology, and computer music at the Chalmers University of Technology. After completing his studies in Sweden, he studied sonology for a year at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Den Haag, Netherlands. During his education, he also attended many summer composition master courses arranged by Centre Acanthes in Avignon and Aix-en-Provence, France, studying with Iannis Xenakis, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, and Georges Aperghis, among others. He works actively as a composer of both acoustic and electroacoustic music. He has written pieces for large orchestra (commissioned and performed by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra), plus an opera and several chamber music pieces that were performed by professional ensembles in Sweden, Poland, and Germany. He is a founding member of the electroacoustic music performance trio “Sensorband.” Zbigniew has lived and worked in Tokyo, Japan for the past eight years, and is active in the underground noise scene there. Karkowski is currently on a residency at UC Santa Barbara in California.

Kasper T. Toeplitz is a french composer and musician of polish origin, born in 1960. He lives in Paris. He has worked with academic research organizations, such as GMEM, GRM, IRCAM, and Radio-France, as well as with experimental musicians, such as Éliane Radigue, Zbigniew Karkowski, Dror Feiler, Tetsuo Furudate, Phill Niblock and Art Zoyd . Citing Scelsi and Xenakis as influences, his early work was mostly written for traditional instruments. He received several prizes and distinctions for these works: 1st prize in composition for orchestra at the festival of Besançon, 1st prize in the “Opéra Autrement/Acanthes” competition, Villa Médicis Hors-les-Murs in New York, prize Léonard de Vinci in San Francisco, Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto, and DAAD in Berlin. He has also written for his electric guitar orchestra, Sleaze Art. He then integrated computers into his work, via the programming language MAX. His experimentation with computers continued, in 2003, with the creation of an instrument he calls the BassComputer, an electric bass with 5 fretted strings and 4 unfretted strings, as in the harp guitar. The instrument is intended to be interfaced with a computer. In 2004, he commissioned a piece from Eliane Radigue called “Elemental II”, which he interpreted for the BassComputer. This was an opportunity for him to set up his own label, ROSA (Recordings Of Sleaze Art). He later commissioned Phil Niblock’s “Yam almost may” (Touch Records TO59), and Dror Feiler’s “Ousia”. He also recorded “Capture”, one of his own compositions, on ROSA (Rosa#2, 2005), as well as “ZKT”, by Le Dépeupleur, a laptop duet, formed with Zbigniew Karkowski, and which has been together since 1999 (Rosa#3, 2006).
He has also written for dance (Myriam Gourfink, Loic Touzé, Olivia Granville, Emmanuelle Huynh, Hervé Robbe, Artefact, Christian Trouillas, Jean-Marc Matos), as well as theatre; he has always shown a great interest in literature (“J’irai vers le nord, j’irai dans la nuit polaire”, his first opera, was based on Sylvia Plath’s texts, as was “Great Expectations” on Kathy Acker’s texts; “Ruine”, however, was composed on a François Bon text), and more recently he has developed “combined” pieces, mixing light and/or video images (“K_apture”, for computer solo, on Dominik Barbier’s videos). In 2007 he created, with Eryck Abecassis and Wilfried Wendling, KERNEL, a computer ensemble devoted to interpretation, live stricto sensu (without any samples or sequences), of electronic music compositions.