Jennifer Walshe, Panos Ghikas and Wobbly

The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (The Irish Times) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Recent projects include TIME TIME TIME, an opera written in collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton, and THE SITE OF AN INVESTIGATION, a 30-minute epic for Walshe’s voice and orchestra, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. THE SITE has been performed by Walshe and the NSO, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and also the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra. Walshe has worked extensively with AI. ULTRACHUNK, made in collaboration with Memo Akten in 2018, features an AI-generated version of Walshe. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, released on Tetbind in 2020, uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history. A Late Anthology was chosen as an album of the year in The Irish Times, The Wire and The Quietus. Walshe is currently professor of composition at the University of Oxford. Her work was profiled by Alex Ross in The New Yorker.

Born in Athens, Panos Ghikas is a London-based composer, improviser and producer. His output encompasses concert music, live and studio improvisation, interdisciplinary collaborations in digital media, film music and pop production. He is a member of the surrealist post-pop band The Chap and runs Migro, a label that releases work that falls into the intersection between composition and free improvisation. His work features in over 60 releases (Universal, EMI, Lo Recordings (UK), Ghostly International (US), Staatsakt (DE) and Diatribe (IE)) and has been performed and broadcast internationally.

His acoustic and hybrid compositions have received performances in the UK, Germany, Belgium, Greece and Mexico, by performers including the Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Exposé, the Kreutzer Quartet, Christopher Redgate, Peter Sheppard-Skaerved, Nick Roth, Luis Tabuenca, Pavlos Antoniadis and Rocío Bolaños.

Since 2012, Panos has developed the Unrealtime improvisation concept, a practice-based research project that has received support from UK and internationally based institutions. It focuses on the development of a live performance interface for navigation through audio-timelines with the purpose of re-sequencing audio gestures. Panos Ghikas is Senior Lecturer in Music at Canterbury Christ Church University and Course Director for the BA Creative Music Production and Technology.

Wobbly is the moniker of Jon Leidecker (born 1970) a San Francisco–based musician/composer of experimental electronic music. He has released works on Tigerbeat6, Illegal Art, Alku, Phthalo, and others. He has been producing music since 1987 and ongoing studio and live projects involve collaborations with People Like Us, Thomas Dimuzio, Kevin Blechdom, Tim Perkis, Matmos, The Weatherman of Negativland, and Dieter Moebius & Tim Story (composer). He is also a member of the Chopping Channel and Sagan.