Les Soeurs Sonores, with Evelyn Ficarra & Heather Frasch, is a live electronic/ laptop duo whose work explores different modalities of deploying sound objects in real-time. They create intricate sonic landscapes using field recordings, amplified objects & instruments with live processing. Musical issues explored include: presence/non-presence, poetic/ sonic resonance, re-contextualization of sounds, rate of transformation, & shaping space. The performance context varies from 8 Channel Speaker Arrays, to Performative Installations, to Radio Broadcasts, to collaborations with video and dance.

Evelyn Ficarra is a composer and sound artist. Her work finds expression across a range of forms including music theatre, multi media, installation, dance, film and the concert hall. Throughout her career she has enjoyed collaborative work with choreographers, directors, filmmakers, and visual artists. Even in their ‘purest’ forms – say, a solo piano piece – her musical ideas are often co-mingled with, or germinated from, other materials (words, images, sounds) which inform the development and shape of the music and leave their traces in it. In that sense, her work is interdisciplinary at its core. In another sense, she is thoroughly single minded – she stubbornly hears all sounds as music, understands all time based structures (films, dance, theatre) as music, looks at all objects as potential sound sources (music.) Current preoccupations include explorations of sound objects in various contexts: vocal music theatre, installation and live improvisation.

Evelyn has recently been appointed Lecturer in Music Theatre at the University of Sussex, where she will also be Acting Director of the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre.


www.evelynficarra.net


Heather Frasch

Sound artist whose work explores the intersection of acoustic & electroacoustic composition, improvisation, interactive performance, new media theory and sound installations. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley where she studied composition with Franck Bedrossian and Edmund Campion, and interactive electronic music and interface design at CNMAT (Center for New Music and Audio Technologies) with David Wessel. She attended the Cursus for Young Composers at IRCAM (France) with Yann Maresz, Schloss Solitude Academy (Stuttgart) with Chaya Czernowin and Mark Andre, and the Wellesley Composer Conference with Mario Davidovsky. Further degrees include a Silver Medal from the Conservatoire Nationale de Region de Lyon and a Bachelor of Arts from Temple University, Philadelphia.

Her music has been performed at festivals and concerts worldwide such as: NIME (London), FRUM (Iceland), Atlas Academy (Amsterdam), ICMC (Huddersfield), NYCEMF (New York), SICMF (Korea), Moscow Autumn Festival, San Francisco Tape Music Festival, Acanthes Festival (Luxembourg) and the Third Practice Electronic Music Festival (Virginia), among others. Honors include the George Ladd Prix de Paris in Composition, EMS Artistic Residency in Sweden, Finalist for the 2012 International Sergei Slonimsky Composition Competition, and the Nicol DeLorernzo Prize in Composition, 2010 and 2008.

www.heatherfrasch.net