Born in New York City, Matthew Ostrowski has been active since the early 1980s, working in improvised music, music theater, electroacoustic composition, and audio installations. An unreconstructed formalist with a continuing interest in density of microevents and rapid change, he has wasted much of the last ten years developing interfaces for real-time musical performance, attempting to emulate the multidimensionality and flexibility of acoustical instruments in the electronic domain.
He has performed with a boatload of international improvisors, and is currently most active as one half of KRK, with contrabassist George Cremaschi, whose CD ‘Acouasm’ has recently been released on Achuliean Handaxe Records; and as one third of the a/v trio Fair Use, specializing in sped-up interpretations of film classics. He has also worked as a composer/live processor/technical advisor to Elizabeth Streb, Shelley Hirsch, the Flying Karamazov Brothers, and many others.
Ostrowski’s work has been seen or performed on four continents, including the Wien Modern Festival, the Kraków Audio Art Festival, Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, PS 1 and The Kitchen, the Melbourne Festival, and Unyazi, the first festival of electronic music on the African continent. He received the NYFA Fellowship for Computer Arts in 2001, a Radio and Sound Art Fellowship from the Media Alliance in 2000, and was a nominee for the 2006 Alpert Award in the Arts.
Recent projects have included A Theory of Meaning, a radio piece for synthesized voices, commissioned by free103point9 radio(2006); atopia: levigation and apophenia, (2004-7) for downloaded data, recently exhibited at the Rencontres Internationales new media art festival in Madrid; and Spectral City (2007) a networked sound installation for urban spaces, most recently seen at the Dis-Locate festival in Yokohama.
Karlheinz Essl: computer, live-electronics, kalimba, gadgets Born 1960 in Vienna. Austrian composer, improviser and performer. He studied composition with Friedrich Cerha and musicology in Vienna (doctorate 1989 with a thesis on Anton Webern). As a double bassist, he played in chamber and jazz ensembles. Besides writing experimental music and composing electronic music, he performs on his own electronic instrument m@ze°2, develops software environments for computer-aided composition and creates generative sound and video environments – often in collaboration with artists from other fields. Essl served as composer-in-residence at the Darmstadt Summer Courses (1990-94) and completed a commission for IRCAM. In 1997, he was presented at the Salzburg Festival with portrait concerts and sound installations. Since 1994, Karlheinz Essl curates experimental music concerts and sound installations at the Essl museum in Klosterneuburg. Between 1995-2006 he was teaching „Algorithmic Composition” at the Anton Bruckner University in Linz. Since 2007 he is professor of composition for electro-acoustic and experimental music at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. m@ze°2 Karlheinz Essl performs on a laptop computer that he has transformed into a live electronic musical instrument. The result is exciting and musical. You just won’t hear these sounds anywhere else. He performs solo and in duets and trios, responding with sensitivity to fellow musicians, producing fascinating sound transformations, creating spontaneous surprises, and moving quickly from loops to cacophony to tiny clips of vocal sounds to all kinds of textures and ideas. He does all this with his m@ze°2(Modular Algorithmic Zound Environment) performance software. Joel Chadabe, CDeMusic (Januar 2002)