Cyborg Soloists:
The Body Electric

Zubin Kanga performs new works where classical piano meets new digital technologies

Pianist Zubin Kanga performs intimate, wild and flamboyant cyborg works in a programme featuring queer composers and themes. Each work combines the piano with a range of sensors, synthesizers, strobe lights, electronics, video and cutting-edge digital instruments.

Lola de la Mata explores responses to touch with biosensors from Movesense, as she dismantles preconceived notions of the piano recital in collaboration with queer performance art duo Antonio Branco x Riccardo T, embodying the watchful gaze and meddling hands of cherubs.

Luke Nickel uses Soundbrenner’s haptic metronomes alongside dreamlike roller-coaster visuals and the sounds of Ravel filtered through an AI, in a play of vertiginous tempi between the hands. CHAINES uses ROLI keyboards to create fluidly morphing electronics.

Alwynne Pritchard takes inspiration from Werner Herzog’s experimentations with hypnosis in 1976 film, Heart of Glass, to create a work in which the pianist seems to be hypnotised, performing around the piano (and in multiple personas on screen) in a performance inspired by drag, butoh dance and trance states.

Robert Reid Allan uses a TouchKeys keyboard to transform an interview with a queer mentor about generational changes in queer life and culture, and Zubin Kanga uses classic analogue synthesizers to create cascading walls of sound and spiralling rhythms that are then melted and morphed using MiMU sensor gloves.