TATIANA CASTRO MEJIA

Pianist, improviser and composer (Colombia). Since a very young age she always had an interest, a curiosity for the creative, to build and unbuild. Fundamentally she has used sound, but she has worked connecting it with another kind of languages: dance, writing, drama…

Today, more than 20 years after having decided to devote her life to music, she travels a path where improvisation plays a leading role and seeks to cross lines with dance and theater, with writing and poetry.

She studied at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá, Colombia) where she graduated obtaining the title of “Maestra en Música con Énfasis en Jazz” (Music studies with specialization in jazz_Bachelor Degree). Between 2005 and 2006 he studied with Argentine pianist Ernesto Jodos in Buenos Aires, thanks to a scholarship granted by the Escuela de Música Fernando Sor in Bogotá and the Escuela de Música Contemporánea (EMC) where she teaches actually. Her professional artistic life started in Bogota, but has had a strong development in Buenos Aires, where she has lived for 14 years.


Danishta Rivero is an improviser, performer, and sound artist based in Oakland, California. Heavily processing her voice with analog electronics, she explores the resulting artifacts and their relationship to the voice’s resonance and embodiment.
As a soloist, Rivero often performs as Caribay, conjuring the eponymous mountain spirit, whose laments cause avalanches. She is a member of electro-acoustic duo Voicehandler with percussionist Jacob Felix Heule. She is also half of Las Sucias, a feminist tropical noise duo with Alexandra Buschman-Román.


 

Tetuzi Akiyama plays the guitar with primitive and practical implications, following his own instincts via the very nature of the guitar, in a minimalistic and straightforward way. In an attempt to elecronize his own body, he delicately and sometimes boldly controls the intensity of every sound from micro to macrocosmic level. His solo albums explore the realms of fingerpicking, slide acoustic guitar atonalism, noisy experimental drone, and never-ending boogie. He has also made a body of work in collaboration with highly praised artists such as Jozef Van Wissem, Donald McPherson, Greg Malcolm, Bruce Russell, Günter Müller, Jason Kahn, Michel Henritzi, Phantom Limb, Gul3, Tim Barnes, Oren Ambarchi, Martin Ng, Anla Courtis and Alan Licht, just to name a few. Akiyama is a band member of Koboku Senjû, Satanic Abandoned Rock & Roll Society, and Hontatedori. He is a frequent guest of international music festivals in Eastern and Western Europe, North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and China in recent years.

Ayako Kataoka is a Japanese interdisciplinary artist, working in sound, installation, and performance. Her artistic and research interests include Psychoacoustics; Materials, Body, and Sculpture; and Improvisation. She has shared her work and crossed mediums at High Zero and Transmodern festivals in Baltimore, San Francisco International Arts Festival, Sound Forms Symposium in Copenhagen, The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bozen in Italy, The Stone in NY, International Dance Film Festival in Tokyo, and Improvisation Summit in Portland, among many others. Kataoka is a recipient of Frog Peak prize and holds an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College, where she studied under the tutelage of Pauline Oliveros and Maggi Payne at the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM).

Kiyomitsu Odai is a composer/improviser born and brought up in Tokyo, Japan. After receiving a B.A. in law from Waseda University (Tokyo), he moved to the U.S. and started his artistic career. As an improviser (piano and computer), he has performed at numerous venues including Hotti Biscotti, WNUR (Chicago), Muddy Waters (Santa Barbara), and Dům Kultury Vítkovice (Ostrava, Czech Republic). Journalist Josef Woodard mentions him as a “striking musically neo-expressionist keyboardist” in Santa Barbara News-Press. As a composer, he has adopted a multidisciplinary (mathematical, psychoacoustic, linguistic, algorithmic, etc.) approach to his own music, pursuing the “transcendental structures” that spiritually overcome the systems within themselves. He has participated in a number of music festivals and international conferences including Ostrava Days and ICMC, and worked with both professional and non-professional orchestras; Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra, for example, featured his Passacaglia di Fibonacci in 2011. The recording of another orchestral piece of his, Menetekel:「あー、いぬ。アーメン。」, as well as his own paper on it, was published in the 22nd volume of Leonardo Music Journal in 2012. He has studied with Don Malone, Hilda Paredes, Roscoe Mitchell, Curtis Roads, and Clarence Barlow. He holds a Ph.D. in music composition from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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The Red Room is a volunteer-run space in Baltimore dedicated to mind-expanding experimental culture, headquartered at Normals Books and Records.