Born in Peru, avant-turntablist Maria Chavez currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. With a collection of new and broken needles that she calls "pencils of sound" and a selection of records, she creates electro-acoustic sound pieces.
Chavez made her New York City debut in a duet with Thurston Moore, collaborated with Otomo Yoshihide as part of the 2007 Wien Modern Festival, and recently shared a stage with Pauline Oliveros and Lydia Lunch during Vienna's Phonofemme Festival 2009.
Having also performed at such internationally acclaimed venues as STEIM (Amsterdam) and Sonoteca (Lima, Peru), she was awarded a Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Grant by New York's Roulette Intermedium in 2008. In June and July, 2008, she was selected to be part of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as an artist in residence for a series of performances in and around Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses sculptures at DIA: Beacon.
Chavez recently completed the score for a short film by video artist David Gacs and performing artist Matthew Day entitled "Through my Geography," which can be viewed on her MySpace page.
This September, she will perform at San Francisco's Electronic Music Festival, a turntable festival in October in Berlin entitled T.I.T.O, in Gdansk and Krakow, Poland, Prague and more performamces to be announced.
Fellow sound artist and writer Tara Rodgers will include an interview with Chavez in Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound, to be published by Duke University Press in 2009/10.
Beyond the realm of sound, in 2006 Chavez co-founded Houndstooth:Fine Vintage for Men, a boutique in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that specializes in men's vintage clothing and accessories. The store's visionary, she spearheaded buying, merchandising, private styling, and services geared to the fashion, movie, and music industries. As Houndstooth recently closed to physical structural problems with it's location, Chavez has decided to focus on her sound career in lieu of opening a larger store.
 
http://www.myspace.com/mariachavez

Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and artist based in New York City. Her work has deployed both musical and visual media, including a noted series of large-scale performance works; multichannel sound installation; video; photography and hybrid forms drawing on these. While still a student, in 1994 she created the “Sheer Frost Orchestra”, a performance realized by 17 women on floor-bound electric guitars, deploying nail-polish bottles as sensitive and magical sound-producing implements. Later “orchestras”, including the performances “Emotional Orchestra” (Deitch Projects, New York, Tate Modern, London), and “WHITE LINES” (Wien Modern, British School at Rome, Taktlos Bern, Weld/Stockholm), have continued to evolve around the ideas first considered in these works, culminating, most recently, with “Teenage Lontano”, a work for 34-voice teenaged choir and “phonographic” (rotating) speaker installation. “Teenage Lontano” was premiered in the vast Drill Hall space of the Park Avenue Armory in New York as part of the Whitney Biennial 2008, about which critc Jerry Saltz wrote, “Watching this piece, I felt the opening of a portal between a failed utopian past and the possibility that the more real present is already something to love. I was transported.” It will next be performed in Amsterdam as part of the Holland Festival in June 2009. 


As an improviser, Rosenfeld has developed a distinctive practice playing turntables and her own custom dub plates (‘acetate records’), which are imprinted with original, fragmentary sound created in the studio to be remixed, manipulated, and otherwise transformed live, and performs frequently in Europe and North America, both solo and with many contemporary musicians, including Ikue Mori, Christian Marclay, Lee Ranaldo, george Lewis, Kaffe Matthews, Nels Cline, Zeena Parkins, Martin Tétreault, Otomo Yoshihide, Philip Jeck, Kim Gordon, Christof Kurzmann, Alan Licht, Dieb 13, Raz Mesinai, Anthony Coleman, and many others. She’s also brought her unique sensibility to sound installations for speaker arrays of various sizes and formats, and music composition-related works using video and photography, especially lenticular or 3D photography in constellations of turntables, photos and original LPs (“fragment opera”).


Rosenfeld’s work has appeared in a wide variety of contexts including the Whitney Museum (incuding the 2008 and the 2002 Whitney Biennials and the 2001 survey “Bitstreams”), the Tate Modern, the Stedelijk Museum (upcoming in June 2009), Artists Space, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; a public-art project for Creative Time; and festivals in North American and Europe including Wein Modern, Donaueschingen, the Holland Festival, Ars Electronica, Musikprotokoll, Pro Musica Nova, Maerz Musik, Mutek, Ars Electronica, Electronic Music Foundations's Ear to the Earth, and Los Angeles' Center for Experiments in Information, Art and Tecnhology, among others. 

Rosenfeld’s performed frequently with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; with the art-band “Text of Light”; with Sonic Youth during their “Good-bye Twentieth Century” tour; and was part of the London Musicians Collectives’ “Turntable Hell” project. She’s been included in numerous surveys of digital culture / sound-art / experimental music including “Bitstreams” (Whitney Museum), “Her Noise” (Electra), “Music / Video” (Bronx Museum & Strassbourg Musee d’Art Moderne et Contemporain), “Electronic Music Archive” (Kunsthalle St. Gallen), and “New Sounds New York” (The Kitchen). Commissioned works include "bone canopy/tine palace" for The Kitchen House Blend Ensemble; "Cephissus landscape", a 16-channel public installation for the reopening of New York’s Winter Garden in September 2002; “Delusional Situation” and “Teenage Lontano” for Whitney Biennials 02 and 09, respectively; “anti-Warhol movement” for New York's Diapason Gallery for Sound and Intermedia; and “Rings/Black Circles” for the New York New Music Ensemble.
 
http://www.marinarosenfeld.com

Martin Ng is a molecular biologist, turntablist and experimental DJ whose work has focussed upon redefining the sonic frontiers of the DJ by denaturing the turntable and “taking ‘extended technique’ into a realm where virtually any sound making potential that the instrument possesses is open to exploitation”(Will Mongomery, The Wire).  

Together with Mathias Gmachl (co-founder of Austrian digital band Farmers Manual), he formed gcttcatt - a nano-vinyl band which seeks to amplify and extend the recombinant potential of the DJ/turntablist  through the development of novel digital signal processing methods that allow for simultaneous atomisation and re-constitution of DJed sound + image. This interest in mutant DJ practices is further developed in beta erko, a far-out hip hop collaboration with Australian sonic iconoclasts Robin Fox, MC Vulk Makedonski & Anthony Pateras.

In recent years, Ng has also developed a distinctive, harmonically rich and tonally-based sonic vocabulary for the turntable. In separate collaborations with guitarists Oren Ambarchi and Tetuzi Akiyama, he has produced a body of work based upon the fluid architectural modulation of harmonics and resonances.  

Ng also has longstanding interests in experimental improvisation. He was part of the “Turntable Hell” project, a large-scale international collaboration of avant turntablists sponsored by the Arts Council of England. He has worked with a wide range of improvisors including Otomo Yoshihide, Ikue Mori, Martin Tetreault, Ilpo Vaisanen (Pan Sonic), Farmers Manual, Philip Jeck, Chris Abrahams (The Necks) and Jim Denley etc.

Selected Discography

Oren Ambarchi and Martin Ng – Fateless (DVD, Asphodel ASP 3009, San Francisco, USA)
beta erko – I’m OK, You’re OK (CD, Quecksilber  09, Germany)
Martin Ng and Tetuzi Akiyama ­- Oimacta (CD, Improvised Music from Japan, Japan, IMJ-519).
Oren Ambarchi and Martin Ng – Vigil (CD/CD-rom, Quecksilber 01, Germany). Featuring videos by Tina Frank.
Oren Ambarchi and Martin Ng - Reconnaissance (CD and LP, Staubgold, Germany (Staubgold 015)).
gcttcatt (Martin Ng and Mathias Gmachl) - ampErase (CD and CD-rom , Mego, Vienna, Austria (Mego 021)).
gcttcatt - Projektionen/live forms (audiovisual live acts) compilation (DVD, Lanolin, Vienna, Austria (Lanolin 003)).
Jim Denley and Martin Ng - Vergency (CD release by Grob, Cologne, Germany (Grob 322)).
 
http://www.abc.net.au/arts/adlib/stories/s875532.htm

Some reviews:
“ Incredible turntable work. Here is a manner of sonic dialogue which is truly new – this is true more in the aesthetic result that in the process. A bowl of welcome radicalism and overpowering proof that Ng innovates.” – Olivier Lamm, Review of “ampErase”, Chronic Art, Paris.

“The collaboration between Akiyama and Ng has produced a stunning piece of music…A crackling electricity is discernible between the musicians. The tension never drops.” – Will Montgomery, Review of “Oimacta”, The Wire, London.

“We're witnessing music taken to its furthest limits. The speeded up turntablism pounds like industrial jackhammers, becoming almost like hard techno if not for the many layers of noise, digital signals and feedback. If this represents the future, then I'm all for it.” - Satpal Kalsi, Review of “ampErase”, Friend of the Devil, California.

"Many artists with or without electronic backgrounds have tried similar things, but rarely have they created a piece that is an object of such plastic beauty, such raw post-modern aestheticism. Every musical gesture counts in this endeavour." - Francois Couture, Review of “Reconnaissance”, All-Music-Guide, Paris.