Luc Ferrari was a French composer of Italian heritage and a pioneer in musique concrète and electroacoustic music. He was a founding member of RTF's Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRMC), working alongside composers such as Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry.
Otomo Yoshihide is a Japanese composer and multi-instrumentalist. He mainly plays guitar, turntables, and electronics.
Christian Marclay is a visual artist and composer. He holds both American and Swiss nationality.
Voice Crack was a Swiss electronic free improvisation band. Formed in late 1972 by Andy Guhl and Norbert Möslang, Voice Crack began as a free jazz duo. Then they used pre-recorded tape effects and live sound processing. By 1983 they had eliminated normal instruments in favor of what they called "cracked everyday electronics". This included "radios, turntables, transmitters, dictating machines" and other items that are cracked open and manipulated to produce "new sounds using magnetic and radio waves in a complex system controlled by movements of their hands and by light."
poire_z was an electronic free improvisation music group formed in 1998. Its members all have long careers in improvised music; critic Fred Grand of Avant calls poire_z a "post-AMM supergroup."
Sachiko Matsubara, better known by her stage name Sachiko M, is a Japanese musician. Her first solo album, Sine Wave Solo, was released in 1999. Working in collaboration with Ami Yoshida under the name Cosmos in 2002, Sachiko released the two disc album Astro Twin/Cosmos (2) which was awarded the Golden Nica prize in Ars Electronica, 2003. She released Good Morning Good Night, a collaborative album with Otomo Yoshihide and Toshimaru Nakamura, in 2004.
Erstwhile Records is an independent record label devoted to free improvisation, particularly the electroacoustic variety, contemporary, experimental composed music, and combinations of both. Erstwhile was founded by Jon Abbey in 1999, whose personality and tastes are closely identified with the label.
Günter Müller is a German sound artist who originally performed as a percussionist and drummer, active primarily in free improvisation. He was born in Munich, West Germany, but has lived in Switzerland since 1966.
Kevin Drumm is an experimental musician based in Chicago, United States.
Oren Ambarchi is an Australian musician. He is a multi-instrumentalist who plays mainly electric guitar and percussion.
Kato Hideki is a Japanese musician and composer. He was a seminal member of the Tokyo Noise music scene of the late 80s and early 90s, collaborating with Japanese experimental musicians such as Otomo Yoshihide, Tatsuya Yoshida, Makigami Koichi, and Yamatsuka Eye. He led his own bands, Player Piano and Bass Army. He was a member of the original Ground Zero with Otomo and Uemura Masahiro. In 1992 Kato moved to New York City where he still resides.
Martin Brandlmayr is an Austrian percussionist, drummer, composer and electronic artist.
Catherine Jauniaux is a Belgian avant-garde singer. She has been described as a "one-woman-orchestra", a "human sampler", and "one of the best kept secrets in the world of improvised music". Her solo album, Fluvial (1983) is regarded as one of her most accomplished works. She was married to the late American experimental cellist and composer Tom Cora.
Burkhard Stangl is a composer and musician, currently residing in Vienna, Austria. Playing primarily guitar and electronics, he is a prolific performer in the world of electro-acoustic improvisation, having participated in over 50 recordings. One of his most noted recordings is schnee, a duet with Cristof Kurzmann, inspired by four films and a quote from writer Robert Walser. It has been recorded live, as schnee_live, and has spawned a similarly themed "meta-song suite," neuschnee. His 1997 opera Der Venusmond was recorded partially on the observation deck of the Empire State Building.
Dieb13 is the performing name of Dieter Kovačič, a Viennese-based avant-garde musician. He has also performed under the names Takeshi Fumimoto, Echelon, Dieter Bohlen, and dieb14. After appearing on several compilations documenting the burgeoning Viennese avant-garde scene of the late 1990s, he released his first solo album in 2000. He has gone on to perform in a number of collaborations with other notable performers, including Burkhard Stangl, erikm, Mats Gustafsson and the John Butcher Group.
Maria Chavez is an improviser, curator and sound artist born 1980 in Lima, Peru. Her family moved to Texas when she was two years old. The following year doctors found and released liquid in her ears alleviating what had been a serious impediment to her speech and hearing. By age 16 she began working with sound and turntables. Her sound installations, visual objects and live turntable performances focus on the values of the accident and its unique, complicated possibilities with sound emitting machinery like the turntable. Influenced by improvisation in contemporary art, her work extends outside of the sound world to straddle varied disciplines of interest. The sound installations and live turntable performances of Maria Chavez focus on the paradox of time and the present moment, with many influences stemming from improvisation in contemporary art.
Mikroton Recordings is an independent record label for experimental electronic music, founded by Kurt Liedwart and based in Biel, Switzerland. Mikroton works with a wide range of musicians working in the field of electronic music like sound artist Günter Müller, laptop improviser Christof Kurzmann, electronic musician Jason Kahn and pioneer of tabletop guitar Keith Rowe, turntablists Dieb13 and eRikm, sound artists Stephen Vitiello, Thomas Lehn, Marcus Schmickler, homemade electronics performer Norbert Möslang, guitarist Burkhard Stangl, composers of electroacoustic music Jérôme Noetinger, Angélica Castelló and others. It usually publishes drone, ambient, electronic, experimental music and works with mixed electronic and acoustic instrumentation, trying to research a land between electronic and acoustic fields. The label released two seminal compilation recordings for Austrian group of artists known as klingt.org, who work in the fields of electroacoustic, experimental music and free improvisation, and Echtzeitmusik scene from Berlin. In 2023 the label was rebranded as a label only for Techno music.
Record Without a Cover is an album by artist Christian Marclay. It was released in 1985 by Recycled Records. An improvised sound collage, the album was sold as an LP record with no cover or protective packaging, such that the damage from shipping, storing, and playing the record becomes a part of the work.
Christian Wolfarth is a Swiss jazz percussion player.
Norbert Möslang is a Swiss musician in the field of free improvisation and luthier.
