Friday 16 March 2018, 7.30pm
Pleased to welcome American musician, composer and performance artist Miya Masaoka to Cafe OTO for the first time, performing a brace of special, one-off duo sets with Jennifer Walshe and David Toop.
Miya Masaoka works at the intersections of sound, composition, improvisation, spatialized perception and social interaction. Her work encompasses notated compositions, instrument building, creating computing wear-ables and sonifying the behavior of plants, brain activity, and insect movement. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Venice Biennale, Park Avenue Armory, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and MoMA PS1 (2018). Masaoka has taught composition at New York University and in the Music/Sound program at the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College since 2002, and is currently the director of the Sound Art MFA program at Columbia University. In 2017, her installation “Vaginated Ears” was shown as the Kunstmuseum Bonn, and in 2018 she will premiere a work for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. She has a new Duo CD with Anthony Braxton, and a Trio with Zeena Parkins and Myra Melford on Infrequent Seams
“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. Many of Walshe’s recent projects focus on the planet Mars, using it as a lens to think through the most pressing issues of our time. Notable projects from this series include MARS I, for Klangforum Wien and Some Notes on Martian Sonic Aesthetics 2034-51 for Ensemble Modern, culminating in MARS (2025) for Irish National Opera. Another recent project is the music-theatre work The Alonetimes, written with Philip Venables, which premiered at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in April 2026. Walshe has worked with AI for over a decade, and her book 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music was published by Unsound in 2024. A Spanish translation was published by Alpha Decay (Barcelona) in 2025. Recent albums include In the Merry Month of May (Blue Chopsticks, 2024), Walshe’s duo album with Tony Conrad, which was chosen as an album of the year by The Wire, The Vinyl Factory and KLOF Magazine. Walshe’s double album An Gléacht/Dordán (Diatribe, 2024) received the Académie Charles Cros Coup de Cœur for Experimental Music. Walshe is Professor of Composition at the University of Oxford. Her work has been profiled in many publications including The New Yorker.
David Toop has been developing a practice that crosses boundaries of sound, listening, music and materials since 1970. This encompasses improvised music performance, writing, electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, sound art installations and opera. It includes eight acclaimed books, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), Sinister Resonance (2010), Into the Maelstrom (2016), Flutter Echo (2019) and Inflamed Invisible: Writing On Art and Sound 1976-2018 (2019). Briefly a member of David Cunningham’s pop project The Flying Lizards in 1979, he has released fourteen solo albums, from New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments on Brian Eno’s Obscure label (1975) and Sound Body on David Sylvian’s Samadhisound label (2006) to Entities Inertias Faint Beings (2016) and Apparition Paintings (2021). His 1978 Amazonas recordings of Yanomami shamanism and ritual were released on Sub Rosa as Lost Shadows (2016). In recent years his collaborations include Rie Nakajima, Akio Suzuki, Tania Caroline Chen, John Butcher, Ken Ikeda, Elaine Mitchener, Henry Grimes, Sharon Gal, Camille Norment, Sidsel Endresen, Alasdair Roberts, Lucie Stepankova, Fred Frith, Thurston Moore, Ryuichi Sakamoto. Curator of sound art exhibitions including Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery (2000), his opera – Star-shaped Biscuit – was performed in 2012.
