Luke Dubois + Sawako

Thu 17 Apr, 2008, 8pm
Old American Can Factory

R. Luke DuBois is a composer, performer, video artist, and programmer living in New York City. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University and teaches interactive sound and video performance at Columbia’s Computer Music Center and at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations including Toni Dove, Matthew Ritchie, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Bang on a Can, Engine27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and was the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season. He is a co-author of Jitter, a software suite developed by Cycling’74 for real-time manipulation of matrix data. His music (with or without his band, the Freight Elevator Quartet), is available on Caipirinha/Sire, Cycling’74, and Cantaloupe music, and his artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City.

Sawako is a sound sculptor, a timeline-based artist and a signal alchemist in the urban life environment who understands the value of dynamics and the power of silence. Once through the processor named Sawako, subtle fragments in everyday life float in space vividly with a digital yet organic texture. She is interested in the soundscape and the media scape of digital era, and her activities are making bridge between public and private, virtual and actual world.

Sawako released her albums from 12k (USA), and/OAR(USA) and Anticipate (USA). She had collaborated with Taylor Deupree, asuna, HYPO, RF, Toshimaru Nakamura, Taku Sugimoto, Andrew Deutsch, Jacob Kirkegaard, Kenneth Kirschner, Radiosonde, among others. Her unique sonic world has been called “post romantic sound” by Boston’s Weekly Dig.

She has performed internationally as an audio and/or visual artist in MUTEK (Canada): Tonic, Diapason, Monkey Town, Issue Project Room, Starbucks Salon, BAP Festival (NYC); Corcoran Gallery (Washington DC); Glade Festival, Resonance FM, ICA (UK); Batofar (Paris); m12(Berlin); Offsite, Super Delux, Bullets, Apple Store (Japan). In 2006, she was awarded a Jerome Foundation grant to create a commissioned work for Roulette.

Her work has been featured in The Wire (UK), Blow Up (Italy), Improvised Music from Japan (Japan), NY Art (US), e/i magazine (US), DEBUG (Germany), Go MAG (Spain), GAFFA (Denmark) among others.

Sawako obtained a Master’s degree in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University where she studied Networked Expression, Physical Computing, Post Linear Narrative and Audio/Visual Studies. She received a B.A. from Environmental Information Department at Keio University, SFC, Japan.

Born in Nagoya, Japan, studying the classical piano over 10 years and Japanese Nohgaku Theatre for 6 years when she was a child.