John Zorn is an American composer, conductor, saxophonist, arranger and producer who "deliberately resists category". His avant-garde and experimental approaches to composition and improvisation are inclusive of jazz, rock, hardcore, classical, contemporary, surf, metal, soundtrack, ambient, and world music. In 2013, Down Beat described Zorn as "one of our most important composers" and in 2020 Rolling Stone noted that "[alt]hough Zorn has operated almost entirely outside the mainstream, he's gradually asserted himself as one of the most influential musicians of our time".
Ikue Mori, also known as Ikue Ile, is a drummer, electronic musician, composer, and graphic designer. Mori was awarded a "Genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 2022.
Ben Neill is an American composer, trumpeter, producer, and educator. He is the inventor of the "Mutantrumpet", a hybrid electro-acoustic instrument.
Elliott Sharp is an American contemporary classical composer, multi-instrumentalist, performer, author, and visual artist.
Annie Gosfield is a New-York-based composer who works on the boundaries between notated and improvised music, electronic and acoustic sounds, refined timbres and noise. She composes for others and performs with her own group, taking her music to festivals, factories, clubs, art spaces and concert halls. Much of her work combines acoustic instruments with electronic sounds, incorporating unusual sources such as satellite sounds, machine sounds, detuned or out-of-tune samples and industrial noises. Her work often contains improvisation and frequently uses extended techniques and/or altered musical instruments. She won a 2012 Berlin Prize.
Thomas Henry Corra, better known as Tom Cora, was an American cellist and composer, best known for his improvisational performances in the field of experimental jazz and rock. He recorded with John Zorn, Butch Morris, and the Ex, and was a member of Curlew, Third Person and Skeleton Crew.
Susie Ibarra is a contemporary composer and percussionist who has worked and recorded with jazz, classical, world, and indigenous musicians. One of SPIN's "100 Greatest Drummers of Alternative Music," she is known for her work as a performer in avant-garde, jazz, world, and new music. As a composer, Ibarra incorporates diverse styles and the influences of Philippine Kulintang, jazz, classical, poetry, musical theater, opera, and electronic music. Ibarra remains active as a composer, performer, educator, and documentary filmmaker in the U.S., Philippines, and internationally. She is interested and involved in works that blend folkloric and indigenous tradition with avant-garde. In 2004, Ibarra began field recording indigenous Philippine music, and in 2009 she co-founded Song of the Bird King, an organization focusing on the preservation of Indigenous music and ecology.
Bernhard Gál is an Austrian artist, composer and musicologist.
Z'EV was an American poet, percussionist, and sound artist. After studying various world music traditions at CalArts, he began creating his own percussion sounds out of industrial materials for a variety of record labels. He is regarded as a pioneer of industrial music.
Hasidic New Wave is an American experimental klezmer music group. Its members, all of whom were improvisational jazz musicians from downtown Manhattan, formed for the purpose of fusing Hasidic musical styles with elements of jazz and avant-garde rock. Trumpet player Frank London sees Hasidic New Wave as evidence that Yiddish culture continues to thrive in the 21st century.
Rebecca Moore is an American musician, actress and animal rights activist. Notable for her participation at a very young age in performance art and experimental theater productions, and for her own music, she is also known to some as a muse of the singer Jeff Buckley. She is the daughter of Peter Moore, a photographer of experimental art and artists in NYC and his wife, Barbara, an art historian. After slightly over two decades of work devoted to experimental art, music and activist realms in NYC (1984–2007) Moore went to work in areas of animal rescue & care and animal rights advocacy.
Pamela Z is an American composer, performer, and media artist best known for her solo works for voice with electronic processing. In performance, she combines various vocal sounds including operatic bel canto, experimental extended techniques and spoken word, with samples and sounds generated by manipulating found objects. Z's musical aesthetic is one of sonic accretion, and she typically processes her voice in real time through the software program Max on a MacBook Pro as a means of layering, looping, and altering her live vocal sound. Her performance work often includes video projections and special controllers with sensors that allow her to use physical gestures to manipulate the sound and projected media.
Judy Dunaway is a conceptual sound artist, avant-garde composer, free improvisor and creator of sound installations who is primarily known for her sound works for latex balloons. Since 1990 she has created over thirty works for balloons as sound conduits and has also made this her main instrument for improvisation.
Bill Shannon is an American artist who resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Shannon holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Born with a degenerative hip condition, he developed a way to express himself through dance and skateboarding on crutches.
Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist. Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. Her work extends the traditional processes of fiber art to other media. Wilson is a professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Lynne Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances. Working from a feminist perspective, Sachs weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.
Intonarumori are experimental musical instruments invented and built by the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo between roughly 1910 and 1930. There were 27 varieties of intonarumori built in total, with different names.
Gustavo Matamoros is a Venezuelan composer, interdisciplinary artist, community organizer and educator who has established his residence in Miami, Florida, US, since 1979.
Michael Bruce Odland, known as Bruce Odland, is a composer, sound artist and sonic thinker. He is known for large-scale sound installations in public spaces, creating unique instruments that reveal music inherent in natural and urban environments, and for his pioneering work in theater, film and interactive multi-media. He lives and works in Westchester County, New York. Odland's musical sculptures and sound installations have been shown in major cities such as New York, Berlin, and Zurich; in art museums including the Denver Art Museum, the Field Museum and Mass MoCA; and at the international documenta14, Ars Electronica, Edinburgh International and Salzburg Festivals. Many of his installations are collaborations with Austrian sound artist Sam Auinger, with whom he formed an artistic partnership O+A in 1989. Together they have created more than 50 sound installations in Europe, North America and Asia.
Eric Singer is a multi-disciplinary artist, musician and software, electrical, computer, robotics, and medical device engineer. He is known for his interactive art and technology works, robotic and electronic musical instruments, fire art, and guerilla art.
