Philip Brophy (AUS)

A founding member of →↑→ (aka Tsk-Tsk-Tsk) in the 1970s, and after a series of experimental short features in the 1980s, Philip Brophy (musician, composer, sound designer, filmmaker, writer) made his feature directorial debut with Body Melt in 1993. He has acted as composer and sound designer on most of his films, and numerous other shorts. He was also director of the Cinesonic International Conference on Film Scores & Sound Design and has edited 3 books from the conference.

Brophy continues to lecture and present on film sound and music internationally, specializing in horror, sex & exploitation, film sound & music and Japanese animation. He is widely published in all three areas, and his book 100 MODERN SOUNDTRACKS has been translated and published into Japanese. His most recent books are 100 ANIME and PRISCILLA.

Philip Brophy

Daniel Buess (SUI)

Daniel Buess is a drummer, percussionist and experimental musician born in Basel, Switzerland. He is involved in a number of groups and ensembles the experimental field, such as Ensemble Phoenix Basel, CORTEX and 16-17 (with Alex Buess), Buggatronic (with James Hullick) and more. Buess’ collaborations include artists such as Antoine Chessex, Zbigniew Karkowski, Phill Niblock, Julio Estrada, Chulki Hong, Stephan Wittwer, Iancu Dumitrescu, Z'EV and many others.

Regularly touring through Europe, Asia and Australia, Daniel Buess has performed at the most highly recognized festivals for experimental music, as well as at numerous underground spaces, open spaces and independent venues. His own independent projects and performances – which preferably take place at the more unusual spaces such as car workshops or abandoned train stations – often make extensive use of self-made percussion devices, built from a wide range of innovative materials and electronic components.

Daniel Buess

Yoko Higashino (JPN)

Yoko Higashino (art director, choreographer, and dancer) develops body-based performances that combine various dance elements to present an intense and unique worldview. As a solo artist she collaborates with a diverse range of challenging musicians, such as Keiji Haino, Masaya Nakahara and Toshio Kajiwara, and often appears in clubs, live houses, or galleries as “Kemumaki Yoko,” an unclassifiable avant-garde dancing body. She also holds dance classes and events at the BABY-Q Dance Lab.

Higashino has won numerous awards including the Next Generation Choreographer prize, the Toyota Choreography Award 2004, Yokohama Prize for Brilliant Future in the group dancing category, Yokohama Solo×Duo Competition 2005, and the 2006 best new choreographer prize from the On-Stage newspaper company.

BABY-Q

BING aka Toshio Kajiwara (JPN)

Toshio Kajiwara (musician) is a sound performance artist currently based in Tokyo, after 20 years in New York City. His obsessive interest in archiving obscure historical recordings first extended itself to a series of performances using phonograph players and magnetic tape machines in the early 1990s in New York. Later, he emerged as a touring and recording member of the Christian Marclay Trio.

He has collaborated extensively with Tim Barnes, Peter Kowald, Shelley Hirsch, Marina Rosenfeld, Barry Weisblat, Larry 7, Margalida Garcia, and Okkyung Lee, among others. For five years Kajiwara and DJ Olive curated the Phonomena improvisation series at Tonic and operated a record label of the same name. He has released recordings on various labels, including Asphodel, Quakebasket, Antiopic, and Analogue Society.

BING aka Toshio Kajiwara

Amplified Elephants (AUS)

This sound art ensemble arose in 2006 from the Footscray Community Arts Centre’s Artlife program for people with an intellectual disability. With James Hullick as artistic director, and supported by The Click Clack Project Inc., the Amplified Elephants have strived to provide audiences with larger than life sonic experiences. The ensemble has worked with most means of making sound: traditional instruments, vocals, synthesizers, found sounds, multi-speaker setups, feedback, field recordings and custom-built sound machines.

Ensemble members here in Japan include: Daniel Bond, Esther Tuddenham and Daniel Munnery with Nikki Zerella as their producer. Most recently the Elephants presented THE HOWLING SOUND (2012) at Melbourne’s premier outdoor performance space Federation Square.

Amplified Elephants

Ryusaku Ikezawa (JPN)

Ryusaku Ikezawa (drums, objects, electric wire system) continues to take his inventive playing into uncharted territories, combining dynamism and polyrhythm for a mercurial versatility that is at times awe-inspiring. He plays in a wide-ranging number of bands (Oncenth Trio, OKHP, Suga Dairo's Real Blue, Hayashi Eiichi's GatosMeeting, Yamada Azusa's Momo) and his improvised work takes him into challenging collaborations at every turn.

Following a series of releases with many of these groups over the years, he released a self-titled solo album in March 2012.

Ryusaku Ikezawa

Darrin Verhagen (AUS)

Darrin Verhagen primarily composes music and sound designs for contemporary dance, theatre, and installation. He has released over 20 albums of material, traversing a range of styles, and performs his audiovisual live shows locally and internationally. He was the founder and curator of Dorobo records, showcasing Australian sound art for 15 years. Darrin teaches within the Sound department at the School of Art, RMIT.

Darrin Verhagen’s research interests focus on the sonic codes of cinema (as informed by evolutionary biology and neuroaesthetics), as well as the exploration of score and sound design techniques outside of screen-based outcomes. Whilst his solo and musically ‘contemporary’ work explores the psychological effects of sonic extremity, his more traditional ‘musical’ material is reserved for contemporary dance and theatre where he often experiments in the grey areas between score and sound design.

Darrin Verhagen

Evil Penguin

Master of disguises, Mexican top-hats, ambient rockabilly to minimal Hawaiian Kumulipo chants, the Evil Penguin poses the primordial question of evanescence against a backdrop of New Wave folk. Celebratory, subliminal, moment-to-moment. A Tasmanian treasure with a penchant for open spaces.