EP23 Alexandra Spence

Raymond MacDonald is a saxophonist, composer and academic whose work explores the boundaries and ambiguities between what is conventionally seen as improvisation and composition. Much of his recent performing work has been in collaborative free improvisation contexts, however his roots in jazz and pop music are always evident in his playing and writing. MacDonald collaborates widely and has worked with visual artists, dancers, writers and filmmakers and has produced music for film, television, theatre and the concert hall.

Linda O'Keeffe is a sound artist based in New York. She holds a professorship in art at Stony Brook University, New York. A passionate advocate for the role of women in the sonic arts, she founded the Women in Sound Women on Sound (WISWOS) organisation. Additionally, she served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Interference Journal, a publication dedicated to audio cultures, from 2012 to 2022. In 2009, she co-founded the Irish Sound Science and Technology Association, leading as its President from 2015 to 2017.

Marcin Pietruszewski is a composer and researcher. He is engaged in sound synthesis and composition with computers, exploring specific formal developments in the tradition of electroacoustic music and contemporary sound art, as well as extra-musical domains of auditory design, computational linguistics and psychoacoustics. He works across performance, multimedia installation and radio productions probing the dynamics between formalism of synthetic sound and its material realisation.

France Jobin is a sound / installation / artist, composer and curator residing in Montreal, Canada. Her audio art can be qualified as “sound-sculpture”, revealing a minimalist approach to complex sound environments where analog and digital intersect. Her installations express a parallel path, incorporating both musical and visual elements inspired by the architecture of physical spaces. Her works can be “experienced” in a variety of unconventional spaces and new technology festivals across Canada, the United States, South America, South Africa, Europe, Australia, Japan and South Korea. Since 2009, her focus has been related to Quantum mechanics. Many of her projects are inspired by theories related to topics such as vacuum decay, string theory and more recently, what she feels to be the most perplexing phenomenon in the world of the quantum , entanglement resulting in a first presentation, Entanglement A/V, with visual artist Markus Heckmann, which delves into the realms of quantum physics premiered at Mutek Mtl 2021.

Ali Robertson, an award-winning improvising musician from Edinburgh, has been active in the experimental music scene for over twenty-five years, touring across three continents and becoming a regular on the international music festival circuit. His work exists on the periphery of what can be described as music, incorporating elements of improvisation, noise, composition, chance, comedy, spoken word, visual art, and storytelling. Best known for his work in the free improv performance duo Usurper, which he and cartoonist Malcy Duff performed as between 2003 and 2023, and for his work with the inclusive ensemble Sonic Bothy, as both a player and a workshop facilitator, Ali also performs solo and has collaborated with countless artists worldwide. Since 2000, he has operated the imprint Giant Tank, releasing dozens of CDs, cassettes, LPs, and publications, and hosting an ongoing series of concerts in Edinburgh under the TFEH banner, alongside his co-curator Firas Khnaisser.