Thursday 8 May 2025, 7.30pm
Charmaine Lee (b. 1991) is an Australian vocalist based in New York. Using the voice, feedback, and live processing, Lee's practice is primarily concerned with risk-taking, playfulness, and improvisation. She has been recognized as “extraordinary” by New Yorker and has been featured in New York Times, Washington Post, and Wire Magazine. As a composer, Lee has collaborated with leading institutions including Kronos Quartet and the Wet Ink Ensemble. Lee is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow (2025), Emergent Ventures winner (2024) and was an Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room (2019) and a Van Lier Fellow at Roulette (2021). Her long-standing collaborators include Conrad Tao and Ikue Mori (MacArthur Fellow). Lee frequently guest lectures on building a personal language and creative agency at undergraduate and graduate-level composition programs including Columbia University, Princeton University, Stanford, and the New School. Lee serves on the Artistic Advisory Council at ISSUE Project Room and runs a record label, Kou Records, dedicated to pioneering artists in music & sound.
Joke Lanz (turntable) and Ute Wassermann (voice + objects) have been performing as a duo at international festivals since 2016. Their performance takes the audience on a rollercoaster of vocal, physical and electronic actions. A tour de force of technoid rhythms, cartoonish scraps of speech, twisted melodic fragments, stop-and-go grooves and loops. Their legendary concert at the Konfrontationen festival in Nickelsdorf (2019) was recorded by ORF and released on the Klanggalerie label in 2021. The CD Half Dead Half Alive was longlisted for the 2021 German Record Critics' Award.
Turntablist Joke Lanz is known in particular for his internationally acclaimed project “Sudden Infant” and appreciated for his work in the area between performance/body art and improvisation/noise. He was born in Switzerland and now works from Berlin all over the world. He uses autonomous sound cells to create a personal language that is detached from any function. He combines ritualistic reductionism with anarchistic playfulness, atmospheric landscapes with fragmentary sounds and physicality with unpredictability: scratches, sound walls, grooves, loops, noises and vocal modulations.
Vocal artist Ute Wassermann is one of the outstanding contemporary vocal artists. She has been touring the world as an improviser and performer of contemporary music for many years. In the last ten years she has increasingly realized audiovisual performances/installations and compositions for soloists and ensembles. She combines composition, improvisation and performance art to create her own form of Gesamtkunst, in which environment-related issues play a role. Her multidimensional sound oscillates between electronic, an/organic, animal and human qualities. She masks her voice with bird whistles, a DIY drum and objects, transforming her human form with a seemingly impossible vocal technique.
