Composer & Improviser.  Sketches, album tracks, works in progress.  Electronic & Experimental

Kajsa Lindgren (b.1990) is a composer and sound-artist mainly working with field recordings and different ways to perform them, often through spatial, multichannel distribution. Her work includes electroacoustic compositions and sound installations, as well as compositions for acoustic traditional instruments. 

By using interviews as a method when composing and field recordings as the material, she has found a way to work with expectations and traditions when it comes to the process of composing and the performance itself. Combining interviews and field recordings has therefore shown to be an effective way for her to open up different ways to approach the process of exploring subjects and environments through sound.

Kajsa Lindgren is a composer educated in both western contemporary art music and electroacoustic composition and holds a Bachelor (2015) and Master (2017) in Electroacoustic Composition from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.

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This page is predominantly live recordings - please check out studio recordings here:
https://bekahsimms.bandcamp.com/
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Composer Bekah Simms hails from St. John's, Newfoundland and is currently based in Glasgow after nine years living and working in Toronto. Her varied musical output has been heralded as “cacophonous, jarring, oppressive — and totally engrossing!” (CBC Music), “tough, even gutsy...with a sure sense of original and vibrant colours” (Vancouver Sun), and lauded for its "sheer range of ingenious material, expressive range and sonic complexity" (The Journal of Music.) Propelled equally by fascination and terror toward the universe, her work is often filtered through the personal lens of her anxiety, resulting in nervous, messy, and frequently heavy electroacoustic musical landscapes. Recent interests in just intonation and virtual instruments have resulted in increasingly lush and strange harmonic environments.

Bekah's music has been widely performed across North America and Europe. She has worked with some of the top interpreters of contemporary music internationally, including Crash Ensemble - with whom she is currently an artist-in-residence - Riot Ensemble, Eighth Blackbird, and l’Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal. Bekah has also been the recipient of over 35 awards, competitive selections, nominations, and prizes, including the 2019 Barlow Prize and the 2023 JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year. The resulting work from the Barlow Prize, "metamold," was nominated for the 2022 Gaudeamus Award. Works from her debut album “impurity chains” were nominated in both 2019 and 2020 for the JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year. Her music has thrice been included in the Canadian Section's official submission to World Music Days (2016, 2019, & 2021), and in 2016 the CBC included her among their annual 30 hot classical musicians under 30.

Bekah is a Lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, following previous academic positions at the University of Toronto and University of Western Ontario.  Her principal teachers during academic studies were Gary Kulesha and Andrew Staniland, alongside significant private study with Clara Iannotta and Martin Bédard.

I understand my music as an emotive encoding. I write because I feel an emotional compulsion to write — to give form to fantastic or impossible colors and shapes as sound and as pleasure — and, yet, when I write, I am intensely aware of the fact that I am setting up and taking apart a code. I write for different combinations of instruments in chamber and orchestral settings and the written score is an important part of how I work. The act of score preparation is, for me, an emotional effort deeply concerned with the weight and energy and physical charge of raw and vibrant sounds, and, in equal measure, a type of work that is surpassingly symbolic, intimately bound up with the networks of potential meaning set up by marks on the page. I reject any dichotomy that pits the analytic against the emotional. Symbols can, and do, cut like knives. And I work for a music that is everywhere an emotional play of symbols, complete with all the almost unworkable contradictions such a play of symbols carries.

I don't understand either the societal or psychological parts of the composer role. And I would just as soon replace it with some other type of work carrying some other type of baggage. Sorcery, perhaps. A special appeal to concentration, with concern for a secret language of symbols, a secret way of reading the events and details of the natural world. I want music to be an intensely shared and public experience. And I want the intensity of that experience to result, at least in part, from an effort of decipherment, and translation, on all our parts.

My music comes back again and again to a constellation of images, and desire. The beauty of reflected and refracted light. The relationships between code and power and time. The assertion of power and importance in an everyday type of living. The delicacy of flowers and their parts. And networks of people and our relationships. I believe that there is something utterly human in rendering flashes of these ideas as symbols on the page, designed specifically for experience in some other, potentially unknown, place.

[American composer Trevor Bača (*1975) grew up in Texas. His concerns as a composer include lost and secret texts; broken and dismembered systems; sorcery, divination and magic; and the effects, action and beauty of light. Bača's music has been played throughout the world with recent performances in Barcelona, Berlin, Boston, Cologne, Curitiba, Darmstadt, Helsinki, Huddersfield, Leuven, Ljubljana, Los Angeles, Lyon, Maastricht, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, Thessaloniki, Tokyo, Trieste, Würzburg and elsewhere. Bača holds a PhD in music composition from Harvard University.]

http://www.ipekgorgun.com/
http://touch33.net/

Transgression Quartet is following