LOOS artists 2021
Since it’s initiation, LOOS has worked with thousands of artists in the field of new music, improvisation, and artistic research worldwide.
Explore our artistic collaborators during the year of 2021:
Lucie Nezri (FR/NL)
Lucie Nezri is a composer and performer studying at the Institute of Sonology of the Royal Conservatoire in the Hague.
Nezri is drawn towards abstraction and simplicity. Her work bridges different contexts and disciplines pertaining to music, tuning theory, music cognition, computer science theory, and, at times, choreography. Her current research looks at the notion of indeterminacy in computer/algorithmic music. Through the use of stochastics and probability, Nezri investigates the influence of computing machines on the way one thinks and experiences the event of sound.
Kaðlín Sara Ólafsdóttir (IS)
Kaðlín Sara Ólafsdóttir is an Icelandic artist recently graduated from the Institute of Sonology in The Hague. Mostly she works with cassettes and cassette players, exploring the possibilities of low-quality sound and obsolete materials. Kaðlín has made several sound installations using hacked cassette players and old cassettes, exposing the fragile materiality of the cassette and the recorded stories that it holds. Recently, she has made compositions and live performances focusing on nostalgia and deterioration by bringing to light the imperfections of the cassette player and connecting it to the imperfections of memory.
Aftab Darvishi (IRN)
Aftab has studied Music Performance at the University of Tehran, Composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and Composing for film-and at the same time- Karnatic Music (South Indian music) at the Conservatory of Amsterdam.
Aftab has presented her music in various festivals in Europe, USA, and Asia.She is a former member of KhZ ensemble; an experimental electronic ensemble with the supervision of Yannis Kyriakides that has performed in various festivals such as Holland festival.
In October 2016, she was awarded the Prestigious” Tenso Young Composers Award 2016. In 2017, Aftab was commissioned by San Francisco’s Grammy Award-winning Kronos Quartet to write a piece for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire. She continued her collaboration with Kronos, with creating a new piece for Music for change- The Banned countries. Since 2015, She has been regularly invited as a guest lecturer to the University of Tehran.
In February 2019, Aftab Premiered her Opera “Turan Dokht” in Holland festival 2019.
Anna Chocholi (GR)
Anna is a video producer and media artist from Greece. Her interests are focused on emerging spaces, virtual and augmented media, contemporary video and emotion science. She has been involved in a variety of multimedia productions as video editor and multimedia engineer. She holds a BFA in fine arts from Aristotle University and currently she is a MSc student in media technology, Leiden University.
Petra Dolleman (NL) - live visuals and animation
Active as an autonomous artist since 1984. Mainly focusing on animation, video, drawing and graphical arts.
Co-operating with musicians, composers, ensembles:
a.o. Chiel Meyering, Maarten Altena, Delta Ensemble, Oene van Geel, ERAX, Peter van Bergen, GJ Prins Thomas Lehn, Loos, pdq^d.
During live-(impro)performances making use of film-projectors, beamer, live-drawing, installation.
Animation work has been shown and awarded internationally.
Occasionally teaching a.o. : G. Rietveld Ac, Film Ac, Vrije Ac, NIAF, Ac v Bouwkunst, Cal Arts and in workshops for children.
Future plans : sound & image (streaming)project at LOOS studio.
Develop new animations in combination research old & new media.
Elisabeth Lusche (USA) - trumpet
Elisabeth Lusche is a trumpet player specialising in new and improvised music. Originally from a small town in Alabama, Elisabeth is now based in The Hague, the Netherlands.
Elisabeth was a soloist in the Dutch National Opera’s critically-acclaimed “aus LICHT” production of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s opera cycle and has had numerous festival performances including the Holland Festival, Grachtenfestival (Theme Prize 2019 and OORKAAN Prize recipient), Rewire, Opera Forward Festival, and Klangspuren Festival (Pilgerwanderung 2018). Elisabeth is also a researcher- performer at Studio LOOS, a hotspot for interdisciplinary artistic research in The Hague and has served as a guest artist at Auburn University.
Marie Guilleray (FR) - curator Ephemere concertseries
Marie studied jazz and classical singing at the Conservatoire Nadia and Lili Boulanger in Paris (2003-2006), and at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague (2006-2010). In the course of these years, she developed a growing interest in contemporary, experimental and improvised music. This experience led her to extend her artistic practice from vocalist/performer to composer/sound artist. She graduated from a Master degree in Sonology at the Institute of Sonology in 2012. Since 2017, she is a PhD candidate at the Orpheus Institute and Leiden University where she researches the confrontations between the voice and the electronics. Since 2009, Marie has organized and curated concerts at Studio Loos. In 2010, she started the Ephémère music series which is dedicated to new music, improvised music, electronic music, and in short, what is important to be presented at this specific moment.
For more info: www.marieguilleray.com.
Christina Schönbach (DE)
Soprano Christina Sophie Schönbach was born in Hanover, but moved to Amsterdam at age ten. She studied Classics at the University of Oxford, followed by an MA in Archaeology in Leiden. When in the meantime, it really started to itch musically, she decided to follow the Bachelor Classical Solo Voice at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, which she completed in 2015.
Christina discovered her love for contemporary music as a singer at the Young Composers Meeting of orchestra De Ereprijs in 2013 and 2014 in Apeldoorn; through the collaboration with several young composers (Ruud Roelofsen, Cristiano Melli, Georgi Sztojanov); and the performance of De Staat en De Tijd by Louis Andriessen with the ASKO Schönberg Ensemble conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw.
She performed the role of Koe in the opera Koeien by Misha Mengelberg and Guus Janssen. In the Eendagsliederen program at the Grachtenfestival 2017, she sang songs by Hinse Mutter and Mathilde Wantenaar, among others. Christina has been immersing herself in the opera repertoire for several years and has played roles such as Ariadne (Strauss - Trentino Music Festival 2019), Almera (Muhly - Dark Sisters, Trentino Music Festival 2018), Agathe (Weber - Freischütz, Schloss Henfenfeld 2020). Christina lives in The Hague, but travels to Berlin regularly. She is looking forward to many great projects at Studio LOOS! Check out www.christinaschonbach.com for more.
Lucinda Watts (SA) & Roché van Tiddens (SA)
Roché van Tiddens and Lucinda Watts are music teachers who deliver the Crab Music workshops to children between 4-11 years at Studio LOOS and in collaboration with Rewire Festival Education. The aim of the workshops is to guide the students towards composing their own pieces of music. The students explore the many sound possibilities of the crab instruments, AKA hands on electronic sound generators, and, thereafter, are guided towards creating music. Listening activities form an important part of the workshops in order to heighten sound awareness. The electronic sound generators are a piece of equipment which may not necessarily be seen as an instrument for making music, however, by focusing on the characteristics of sound, they become just that. The intention is to approach music making from a different angle, where sound and its characteristics, analysed and broken up into pieces, becomes the source of material which is then put together to form a musical piece. You can read more about Crab Music, listen to the music composed by previous participants and see photos on their website: https://krabmuziek.wordpress.com
Frank Scheffer
The Dutch filmmaker Frank Sheffer studied graphics, design and art in Eindhoven and The Hague, and received his degree from the Dutch Cinema Academy in Amsterdam in 1982.From the outset, his films have combined various influences and disciplines. Scheffer’s desire to have significant encounters with his subjects before filming them shines through in his work, and results in perceptive, meaningful portraits. This approach is particularly noticeable in his work on the great American composer Elliott Carter, whom he filmed over a period of 25 years and became a close friend. His documentary portraits of key figures such as Carter, Pierre Boulez, Gustav Mahler and Igor Stravinsky provide a veritable panorama of 20th century music.Scheffer’s work is committed to showing that barriers, labels and pigeonholes are completely outdated concepts.
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay (IND)
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is a media artist, researcher, and writer. Incorporating diverse media, such as sound, text, and moving image, Chattopadhyay produces works for large-scale installation and live performance addressing contemporary issues of climate crisis, human intervention in the environment and ecology, urbanity, migration, race and decolonization. Chattopadhyay has received numerous fellowships, residencies and international awards. His works have been widely exhibited, performed or presented across the globe, and published by Gruenrekorder (Germany) and Touch (UK). His writings on various issues around sound and listening regularly appear in peer-reviewed journals, magazines, and other publications internationally, with two books forthcoming. Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in artistic research and sound studies from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University; he recently completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship.
Ranjith Hedge (IND)
Ranjith Hegde is a practitioner of contemporary improvised art. In this ensemble, he uses an extended range electric violin with a host of electronics such as realtime-convolution, sampler & granulator, and resonant drone machines. His musical influences are drawn from contrasting disciplines of Hindustani classical music, Indian tribal trance music, Free-jazz, as well as ideas from contemporary dance & theatre. As part of Basement21 (Chennai, India based interdisciplinary artist collective), he has been involved in building and developing the contemporary art movement in India by helping organize various modern art festivals, performances, lessons, and workshop series for the past 9 years.
Rouzbeh Esfandarmaz (IRN)
A music lover and sound addict who has every intention to spend his life seeking and refining new ways to make sound and music. Esfandarmaz is a hard-working musician with extensive experience as a teacher, tutor, composer, arranger, band-leader, multi- instrumentalist, music producer, audio engineer, and 3D Audio learner. He believes strongly in group efforts, which has led him to establish one of the successful bands in Iran (Pallett Band). Additionally, he works with an experimental spirit and an urge to make and produce music and sound, based on Iran’s rich folk, ritualistic, and regional musical heritage, and perform for audiences, live or through headphones and speakers, all around the world. This urge let him to form a new music band (Esfand); an electronic music duo focused on new ways of showcasing Iranian folk music to the world.
Thijs Geritz (NL)- curator Kernel Panic concert series
Thijs studied at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK) and works as a free-lance illustrator and animator. He is a self-taught musician, avid field recordist and radiomaker.
Besides his musical solo project Einzelganger, he has been part of several other projects, e.g. Mouches Volantes, Geritz / Kaffa and FREAZZP. For Concertzender Thijs regulary contributes to the radioshow Electronic Frequencies.
He created Kernel Panic in March 2011. The series became part of Studio Loos' program in September 2017. It is a series that brings together live acts with diverse and often juxtaposing styles in an effort to create an evening that's surprising and interesting to listen to. It features both established and novice acts.
Bjarni Gunnarsson (IS)
Bjarni Gunnarsson (1980) is an Icelandic Composer and Computer Scientist involved in computer music and algorithmic composition. Has released his music on labels such as Vertical Form, 3LEAVES, Granny or Tartaruga Records and performed his music in festivals such as Tectonics, Rewire, Today's Art, Sonar and Presences Electroniques. Collections of his recent solo works can be found on the releases "Paths" (2016) and "Lueur" (2018). Bjarni is a faculty member at the Institute of Sonology, Royal Conservatory, in The Hague. He is concerned with process-based ideas. Sounds focusing on internal activity and motion. Compositions that put into foreground behaviors, actions, fluid sound structures, fuzzy materials, or forms. His recent research focus includes the construction of persistent but adaptive synthetic environments, creative uses of digital interrupts, and machine-listening observers that react to computer-generated sound. www.bjarni-gunnarsson.net
Kyriakos Charalampides (GR)
Kyriakos is a sound designer and composer based in the Hague. His interest moves around environmentally emerged aesthetics and technology. He has been involved as a post-production engineer in several music and film productions. Currently he is working on the audiovisual performance SYMPTOSIS in collaboration with Anna Chocholi. He holds a BSc in sound engineering and music technology and a MMus from the Institute of Sonology in which he is currently a research associate.
Olaf Tarenskeen (NL) - jazz workshops
Olaf Tarenskeen worked as a classical contemporary guitarist and as improviser in several contemporary music ensembles (Schonberg/Asko; Spectra Ens.; Danel Quator a.o) and jazz projects. (Klimt 4tet; Henk Meutgeert; Harvie S.;Tineke Postma, Ernst Oosterveld, Michael Varekamp)
Within the contemporary jazz projects the classical guitar was blended to fit in a jazzband, exploring the phenomena of cross(ing)-over (among several CD’s, two articles on Jazz on Classical Guitar (2019) were published in the German EGTA magazine).
He teaches at his independent practice for all level students, popular music and jazz with focus on playing through the interstices of existing genres or in the coming together of elements from previously separate kinds of music, challenging these genre categories themselves and push our conceptual sensibilities to their limits. www.olaftarenskeen.nl