Biliana Voutchkova - violin, voice

Biliana Voutchkova is a dynamic, thoroughly engaged composer-performer, violinist, interdisciplinary artist, improvisor and curator with highly individual, unconventional artistic language. Through the prism of listening, her early education in classical music and the years of development as contemporary artist-performer, she explores states of spontaneity and intuitive resonance embodied in her multifaceted activities, focusing on the interconnection between inner world and sound space.

Biliana works internationally as a soloist and in collaboration with many renowned artists/ensembles. She is the founder and curator of the DARA String Festival, faculty at the Academy of Arts Bern, SHAPE+ Platform artist for 2022/2023, and recipient of multiple grants and awards (most recently the fellowship at Villa Aurora/Los Angeles). Her music has been released on the labels Unsounds, Another Timbre, Elsewhere, Relative Pitch Records, Confront Recordings, Inexhaustible Editions and Takuroku, amongst others.

www.bilianavoutchkova.net 

Ken Ueno - extended voice

Ken Ueno, is a composer, performer, sound artist, and scholar.  Leading performers and ensembles around the world have championed Ueno’s music. His piece for the Hilliard Ensemble, Shiroi Ishi, was featured in their repertoire for over ten years. Another work, Pharmakon, was performed dozens of times nationally by Eighth Blackbird during their 2001-2003 seasons. A portrait concert of Ken’s was featured on MaerzMusik in Berlin in 2011. As a vocalist, Ueno is known for inventing extended techniques and has performed as soloist in his vocal concerto with orchestras in Boston, New York, Warsaw, Vilnius, Bangkok, Sacramento, Stony Brook, Pittsburgh, North Carolina, and Berkeley. As a sound artist, his installations have been commissioned and exhibited by museums and galleries in Beijing, Guangzhou, Taipei, Mexico City, Art Basel, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong. One of his largest projects, Daedalus Drones, an installation (a fence-labyrinth housing a swarm of flying drones choreographed for performance with instrumentalists) was installed at the Asia Society of Hong Kong and featured on the New Vision Arts Festival in 2021.

Ueno currently serves as a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His writings have been published by the Oxford Handbook, the New York Times, Palgrave Macmillan, The Dance Review (TDR), and Wiley & Sons. His bio appears in The Grove Dictionary of American Music. www.kenueno.com