2023 MATA Festival
NIGHT 4 Artist Bios
Found Sound Nation
Found Sound Nation (FSN) is a creative studio that uses music-making to connect people across cultural and societal divides. We put forth creative responses to serve local and global communities by facilitating growth, exchange, healing, and learning through collaborative creation. Our mission is to facilitate joyful and authentic artistic processes that set the stage for adventurous collaboration, genuine connection, and center our individual and collective humanity. FSN has collaborated with music festivals worldwide, led audio production workshops around the world, and worked extensively with Carnegie Hall running music composition workshops for incarcerated youth in the Bronx and Brooklyn. For the last 10 years, FSN has partnered with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and Bang on a Can to produce OneBeat, our flagship program. OneBeat is the gathering place for the musical leaders of the 21st century, convening young professional musicians from around the globe, through a constellation of programs, to develop initiatives that use music as a tool for the betterment of our communities.
Mosaic: Memories is an experiential and performative mythology of the hidden cosmologies expressed in the stories, song traditions, home rituals, and relationships of women. It is drawn from two years of collected interviews, song archiving, recipe exchanges, portrait studios, and film footage of Kurdish women in Turkey and women in central Appalachia, as well as the voices of the artists themselves.
Created by Kyla-Rose Smith, Eva Salina, and Alexia Webster
Performed by Kyla-Rose Smith and Eva Salina
Narration by Mary Ellen Lough, Rubar Güngör
Featuring oral and visual footage from interviews with Janet Marie Pace, Dana Keplinger, Mae Boggs, Medîne and Edûle Kılıç, Fatma “Kurdistan” Tekbaş and archival recordings from Alî Tekbaş
Directed by Ashley K. Tata
Script by Mary Ellen Lough
Score by Kyla-rose Smith and Eva Salina
Scenic Design by Janet Pollock
Video Design by Alexia Webster
Projections by Xuan
Additional sound design by Kyla-Rose Smith and Chris Botta
With thanks to Fîdel Kılıç, Alî Tekbaş, Ayşenur Kolivar, Valerie Ison Horn, Nell Fields, Joy & Melissa, Gideon Crevoshay, those who welcomed and fed and shared with us in Hakkari, Mardin, Kentucky and West Virginia, our mothers and grandmothers, and our children.
We honor the memories of Edule Kılıç, Mae Boggs, and Carol Ison
Orbiting Topographies is a collaboration and active dialogue between visual musician Xuan and percussionist Jess Tsang, connecting their respective mediums through an invented visual and sonic improvisational language. Using indeterminacy as a mode of transportation, this exploratory work combines elements of experimental animation, object anthropology, material culture, and nature in search of symbiosis.
Created by Jess Tsang and Xuan
Jess Tsang - Bass drum, objects, and feedback
Xuan - Live projections and cyanotypes
Mosaic: Dreams is a collection of short pieces that take us into the dreams of a group of children who live under the shadow of a separation wall, near the Qalandia checkpoint in Ramallah, Palestine. Blending music, film, animation, and photo-journalism, these pieces explore how the unbound imaginative world of children washes up against and over the physical wall that surrounds them.
Created by Chris Marianetti, Alexia Webster and Asma Ghanem
Performed by Peni Candra Rini, Zafer Tawil, Gideon Crevoshay, Chris Marianetti, Elena Moon Park
Musical Motifs by Chris Marianetti, Zafer Tawil, Peni Candra Rini, Gideon Crevoshay, Elena Moon Park
Animations by Asma Ghanem, Chris Marianetti & Meghan Judge
Photography and Cinematography by Alexia Webster
Projections by Xuan
Found Sound Nation is Kyla-Rose Smith, Chris Marianetti, Elena Moon Park, Ezra Tenebaum, Jess Tsang, Alexia Webster, Alejandro Dyer
Special thanks to Elena Moon Park and Jess Tsang.
Additional thanks to Zosha Warpeha and Zhina Ardalan.