Sarah Hopkins is a unique Australian composer-performer, highly acclaimed for her visionary music and inspiring performances for cello, harmonic overtone singing, handbells, choir and the celestial Harmonic Whirlies of her own creation. With a strong background and training in classical music, over the years she has moved into the realm of holistic music and developed a very distinctive compositional voice.
When posed the question: „What could a musikFabrik be?“, a clever primary school child answered: „That is where they create music that hasn’t been made yet“. That basically sums up everything in a nutshell. MusikFabrik has been commissioning new works and performing unknown ones since 1991. It is never just a question of interpretation, but of taking new paths of development. The Cologne-based soloist ensemble has built up a close collaboration with prominent conductors and composers.
Latest release: http://bit.ly/EmergenceEP Composer, producer, graphic artist, collaborator and founder of record label bigo & twigetti,
Jim Perkins fuses traditional compositional structures with experimental instrumental and electronic timbres. He creates graphic art using his performance scores as the basis for the artwork, and applies systematic techniques to produce a visual encoding of the musical information.
Bill Frisell was born in Baltimore, but was raised in Denver, CO. Once a classical clarinetist, he established a firm base in his traditional harmonic knowledge early on in life. Throughout high school and college he also played guitar in various rock and R&B groups in the Denver area. During high school, however, he became profoundly interested in jazz guitar. In 1971 Frisell attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA, and also began studying with Jim Hall, one of the prominent jazz guitarists of the 1960s.
Alarm Will Sound is a U.S. twenty-member contemporary-music chamber orchestra. Members of the ensemble began playing together while studying at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and have diverse experience in composition, improvisation, jazz, popular styles, early music, and various traditional musics from around the world. Alarm Will Sound's repertoire ranges from European to American works, from the arch-modernist to the pop-influenced.
Mauricio Kagel (born in Buenos Aires, December 24, 1931, died in Cologne, September 18, 2008) was an Argentine composer who has lived in Germany for most of his career. He was most famous for his interest in developing the theatrical side of musical performance. Many of his pieces give specific theatrical instructions to the performers, such as to adopt certain facial expressions while playing, to make their stage entrances in a particular way, to physically interact with other performers and so on.
Three artists record under the name Vaccine. 1) Christine Vaccine is an electronic music producer from the United States
http://www.myspace.com/vaccinedub 2) Vaccine is a straight edge powerviolence band from Massachusetts, made up of current and former members of Think I Care, Glue, Relics, Failures, Orchid and Ampere.
http://www.vaccinexxx.blogspot.com/ 3) Vaccine were an alternative rock band from Germany (active 2001-2009) - follow-up projects of its members: VXHLL, Starpost, Reste von Gestern
Andrew Pekler was born in Samarkand, Uzbekistan (then U.S.S.R.). His family immigrated to the U.S., eventually settling in Monterey, California. In the mid 90s he moved to Heidelberg, Germany to attend university. Since 2000 he has been living and working in Berlin.
Under his own name he has produced two records for the ̃scape label, Station to Station (2002) and Nocturnes, False Dawns and Breakdowns (2004) as well as releasing Strings + Feedback (2005) on Staubgold. His latest album Cue, was released in June 2007 on Kranky (Chicago, USA).
John Abercrombie (b. 1944) is a U.S. jazz guitarist. Abercrombie was born on 16th December 1944 in Port Chester, New York. He first came to prominence with fusion-oriented recordings in the 1970s. His first album, Timeless, with Jack DeJohnette, and Mahavishnu Orchestra's Jan Hammer was an international success. He is also known for his work with Stark Reality, Billy Cobham, Ralph Towner, and the Brecker Brothers.