Oren Ambarchi

Australian guitarist, composer, and sonic innovator Oren Ambarchi is celebrated for his ability to blur the boundaries between instrumental music, drone, and electronics. His exploratory use of the electric guitar as a textural instrument has redefined its role in contemporary music. Ambarchi’s extensive solo and collaborative work have placed him at the forefront of experimental sound, making him the perfect partner to expand Karenina into uncharted territory.

Ora Clementi

Ora Clementi is the duo of Canadian sound artist crys cole and Australian composer/performer James Rushford. Distinct, disorienting and highly performative, their work examines voice and vocal mirroring through preconscious speech processes and the codified abstraction of found texts, supported by a vast battery of handmade instruments, electronics and hyper-colour processing. Their second full-length release Sylva Sylvarum (2021) draws its title and various textual elements from literary descriptions of utopias, while weaving together an eclectic selection of instruments and sounds that draw the listener into a magnificent, surreal and otherworldly space.

Previous performances include MONA FOMA Festival (Launceston), FOCUS GRM Festival (Paris), Issue Project Room (NYC), Sounds Like Festival (Saskatoon), M-hotel Festival (Bergamo), Q02 (Brussels), Café Oto (London) and Constellation (Chacago).

'Sylva Sylvanum feels imbued with an almost spiritual resonance. Folding real-world sounds into a landscape of dreams, this album holds your attention even when it confuses.' - Pitchfork

' ... an absolute triumph that reached toward the furthest possible heights of contemporary electroacoustic practice and vocal experimentalism.' - Soundohm

'Ora Clementi, the duo of crys cole and James Rushford, are architects, in a way, constructing a sonic Neverland from a synthetic mosaic of lucid digital ephemera and vocal hypnosis.' - Foxy Digitalis

Judith Hamann

Judith Hamann is a cellist and performer/composer from Narrm/Melbourne. They have “long been recognised as one of Australia’s foremost contemporary-music cellists” (RealTime Arts), and as a composer who “destroys the fiction of the musician who lives and works outside conventional parameters and puts in its place a series of compositions that are fundamentally humane” (WIRE). Their work encompasses performance, improvisation, electro-acoustic composition, site specific generative work, and micro-tonal systems in a process based creative practice.

In their recent research, Hamann examines the acts of shaking and humming as formal and intimate encounters; interrogates ‘collapse’ as a generative imaginary surface; and considers the ‘de-mastering’ of bodies, both human and non-human, in settler-colonial heritage instrumental practice and pedagogy. Their process-driven and embodied practice, considers the ways sound operates as a subject, object, and actant. Trained in contemporary classical performance, they frequently challenge the boundaries of their instruments, whether the cello, voice, or body, considering how sonic thresholds offer generative sites of instability and movement.

Judith likes working with and thinking-with other artists which has sometimes included people like Marja Ahti, Oren Ambarchi, Joshua Bonnetta, Dennis Cooper, Charles Curtis, Lori Goldston, the Harmonic Space Orchestra, Sarah Hennies, Yvette Janine Jackson, Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue, and La Monte Young. Judith’s work has previously been published by labels including Blank Forms, Black Truffle, Another Timbre, and Longform Editions. Judith is currently a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart 2021-22 and holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from UC San Diego.