Working at EMS this week is Ebe Oke, a London-based composer and multimedia artist from South Georgia working with sound, installation and performance to realize experimental compositions exploring identity, technology and our relationship to the natural world.
Photo by Clare Britton
Oke studied composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen, and since relocation to England has concentrated on the scoring of dance, film and art installations.
Their debut double album SPECIES, which penetrates themes of identity, gender, healing and the non-human perspective, uses bird and insect sounds which are processed as instrumentation alongside non-linear percussion, programming, string quartet and Oke’s voice pluralised through treatments to embody the multiple avatars which appear on SPECIES.
Among Oke’s other works is DOKUMENT #2 a collaborative live record culled from a week spent in a studio in Copenhagen in 2016 with Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno. FIELD, commissioned by the artist AA Bronson, a founder of the artist collective General Idea. A sonic landscape in three parts which also features the sculpted vocals of Takako Minekawa, FIELD has been presented at Art Basel in Switzerland, Austria’s Salzburger Kunstverein and the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin. Aviary, exhibited at Tate St Ives in Cornwall, UK and Myung Won Museum in Seoul, South Korea is a generative audio visual installation combining bird sounds and artificial intelligence created in collaboration with Robert Thomas and Sammy Lee.
Oke has also worked with Wavepaths, a startup founded by neuroscientist Mendel Kaelen which provides generative music used in psychedelic psychotherapy.
Artist website: ebeoke.be
Instagram: instagram.com/ebeoke