Jeremy Woodruff 's music makes connections between trans-traditional approaches to liminal acoustics and electronic algorithms/feedback to critique society through subcultural appropriations and sonic subversion. Although beautifully melodic at it's core, his handling of the intra-melodic nuance of polyphonal voices, heightened hormone-treated harmonic progressions and staggered rhythmic time-ramping run roughshod over expected patterning and transcend collage in a meta-hermeneutic of ambience, noise, speech cadences and social tonality.
Jeremy Woodruff is a composer, musician, curator and currently part-time Professor at Bard College Berlin, and Lecturer and Artistic Director at Berlin School of Sound. He studied at BU, Brandeis, Royal Academy of Music, London and at the University of Pittsburgh. He was Professor of Composition, Music Theory and Sound Studies at the Istanbul Technical University, Center for Advanced Studies in Music (MIAM) and at KM Music Conservatory in Chennai, India. He has collaborated with various artists not only on sound art but also in video, dance, theater and radio works, including with Marianna Simnett, Bani Abidi, Egill Sæbjörnsson, Meg Stuart and others. His radio show “Berlin School of Sound” can be heard every month on Colaboradio, FRBB 88,4 FM in Berlin and 90,7 FM in Potsdam, Germany.
His concert works have been commissioned by Ensemble Extrakte, Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, Deutschen Kammerorchester Berlin and others (Berlin) Ensemble Decibel (London) and Hezarfen Ensemble (Istanbul). His sound art has been presented by Radio Berlin Brandenberg (RBB) Kunst im Bau, in various galleries including Errant Sound, KW Berlin, AD Gallery Bremen, Kasa Gallery Istanbul and Art Bangaluru in Bangalore, India. His writings have been published by Interference: A Journal of Audio Culture, Journal of Sonic Studies, KunstMusik, Sruti Magazine, Verlag für Moderne Kunst (Nürnberg), Bloomsbury Press, Les Presses du Réel and by Errant Bodies Press. His forthcoming co-edited volume Haunted Soundscapes: Transcultural Perspectives on Music, Sound and Power in Turkey will be published next year on Routledge Press. He is a founding member of the Errant Sound project space in Berlin, where he was a co-founder of the Dystopie Sound Art Festival and co-curator of the festival in Berlin 2018, Istanbul 2019, and Istanbul 2021 (https://www.dystopie-festival.net/). He will be co-curator of Dystopia Sound Art Festival India-Berlin in 2024/5.
More info at www.jeremywoodruff.net
www.berlinschoolofsound.com
www.dystopie-festival.net
Ebru Ojen was born in 1981 in Malatya, east of Turkey. The family moved to Van in 1984, when her school-teacher father was relocated by the state. After Ojen finished high school in Van, she moved to Izmir, where she completed her university education at Dokuz Eylul University’s Opera and Acting program, studying voice under Jeanette Thomspon. Her first creative work, libretto of Defective Pleasures, was staged in Izmir when she was still in college. During her career in film and television, Ojen has acted in numerous independent and commercial films, and major TV series. In 2014, Ojen published a striking debut novel, Aşı (Vaccine), about a state sponsored vaccine campaign in an imaginary Kurdish village that the locals perceive as a forced sterilization program. Written in what has become her signature language—raw, destablizing, heteroglossic— Aşı’s eerie realism gives way to a surrealist allegory about the crushing effects of the nationalist state on both bodies and the ethnic culture. The same year, Ojen was recognized among the ten most important emerging voices in Turkish literature. Her next novel, Let the Carnivores Kill Each Other appeared in 2017, followed by Lojman, in 2020 both of which are published by City Lights Publishers in English translation.
To write her novels, Ojen draws from personal memory, ethnographic research, field work and interviews. Among her chief interests is the geography of eastern Turkey, where modes of archaic violence remain active in the power-body relationship, and are valorized by modes of ‘symbolic violence’ that also carry distinctive geographic markers. Ojen’s writing reexamines the effects of systemic assimilation, exploitation, and dis/placement on the individual subject. But to emphasize the possibility of a life outside the reaches of state authority, Ojen also brings nature into the network of relationships by incorporating nature metaphors and images in her writing. These metaphors and images are direct expressions of Ojen’s own unmediated encounters/confrontations with nature while living in eastern Turkey.
Firat Demir (Istanbul, 1991, Kurdish) published his first poetry collection, Yeni Cüret Çağı, in 2012, followed by Öte Geçeler in 2015 to much critical acclaim. He edited the Turkish translations of Edmund White’s selected stories Ada Öyküleri (2017) and the biography, Rimbaud: Bir Asinin Çifte Yaşamı (2017). His translation of White’s Marcel Proust biography, Marcel Proust: A Life, has been recently published (2019), and is the first biographical study of Proust in Turkish. Demir is commissioned by Istanbul Biennial to edit and write an anthology for its 13th season, a companion book named Hala Barbar mıyız? (2013). Demir’s poetry and prose appeared in other mediums, such as video art and installation, in collaborations with contemporary artists, and exhibited at several biennials and group exhibitions. Demir is now working on his third poetry collection and a novel. Demir has been living in New York since 2014, where he completed his BA in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Demir was a recent fellow of the Santa Maddalena Foundation for Writers in Tuscany, Italy.