GROUNDTONE

6:00 pm – Lina Lapelytė, Study of Slope
8:00 pm – To be announced

4:30 pm – Miranda Cuckson, music for solo violin
6:00 pm – Lina Lapelytė, Study of Slope
8:00 pm – Exo-Tech

4:30 pm – Julia Kent, music for looped and processed cello
8:00 pm – Matthew Aucoin and ensemble

Lina Lapelytė (based in Vilnius, LT and London, UK) is an artist working across performance, sound, and installation. Her practice, rooted in musical composition, critically explores pop culture, gender norms, and collective memory. Using both trained and untrained performers, Lapelytė investigates vocal expression through popular music and opera, turning singing into a shared, affective experience that challenges dominant cultural narratives and systems of silencing.

Lapelytė gained international recognition through her collaboration with Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Vaiva Grainytė. Their opera Have a Good Day! has toured extensively, translated into nine languages, and received multiple awards. Their follow-up, Sun and Sea (Marina), won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 2019 Venice Biennale of Art.

Her solo works often center on inclusivity and unconventional voices. Study of Slope (also known as The Mutes), first presented at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, features a choir of self-identified non-musicians, challenging classical traditions that exclude off-key voices. The Speech, co-commissioned by La Biennale de Lyon and Kaunas Biennial for the Lithuanian Season in France (2024), explores the breakdown of verbal language and our disconnection from the natural world, amplifying voices of children and animals.

In recent years, Lapelytė has created large-scale, site-specific performances that engage with ecological and social themes, often using water as both medium and metaphor. Works like Currents/Instructions for the Woodcutters (2020) and What Happens With a Dead Fish? (2021) exemplify this shift.

Lapelytė’s work has been presented internationally at institutions and festivals such as Festival d’Automne/Bourse de Commerce, Paris (2024); Public Art Munich (2024); Wiener Festwochen (2023); FRAC Nantes (2022); SPACE London (2022); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2021); MOCA Los Angeles (2021); BAM New York (2021); Tai Kwun, Hong Kong (2021); Riga Biennial (2020); Cartier Foundation, Paris (2019); and the Venice Biennale (2016, 2019), among many others.

EXO-TECH is large ensemble collective formed in New York by vocalist and director SOPHIA BROUS and New Zealand pop innovator KIMBRA in 2016. The group features a revolving membership of some of New York and beyond’s most respected music luminaries, including David Byrne, Sean Lennon, Moses Sumney, Caroline Polachek, Bilal, Questlove, Yuka Honda, Dave Harrington, Zeena Parkins and many others.

Exploring the intersections of improvisation and pop song composition, EXO-TECH traverse musical worlds from Talking Heads to Can, to Arthur Lyman, Gang Gang Dance, Brigitte Fontaine and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, as much influenced by modern pop and rnb as by by free jazz, avant garde improvisation, tropicalia and film music.

Miranda Cuckson has delighted audiences with her playing of a wide range of music and styles, from older eras to the newest creations. A distinctive and greatly acclaimed soloist and collaborator, she performs at venues large and small, from casual spaces to concert halls. These have included the Berlin Philharmonie, Suntory Hall, Casa da Musica Porto, Teatro Colón, Cleveland Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Strathmore, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music series, 92nd St Y, National Sawdust, and the Ojai, Bard, Marlboro, Portland, Music Mountain, West Cork, Grafenegg, Wien Modern, and LeGuessWho festivals. Miranda made her Carnegie Hall debut playing Piston’s Concerto No. 1 with the American Symphony Orchestra. She recently premiered Georg Friedrich Haas’ Violin Concerto No. 2 with four orchestras in Japan and Europe, and Violin Concerto by Marcela Rodriguez with the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de México. Upcoming concerts include recitals at San Francisco Performances and on tour in Germany, and a performance of the Haas concerto in Vienna.

Reflecting her deeply felt perspective as a multiethnic American, Miranda works with an array of artists from many backgrounds. She has given innumerable premieres, had many substantial works written for her, and works with promising young artists and the most renowned composers of our era. She is a member of interdisciplinary collective AMOC* and founder/director of non-profit Nunc. She has guest curated at National Sawdust and done programming of chamber concerts at the Contempo series in Chicago and Miller Theater in New York, among others.

Miranda’s many lauded albums include Világ featuring the Bartok Solo Sonata along with new works; a live recording of the Ligeti Violin Concerto; the Korngold and Ponce concertos; several albums of music by major American composers; Bartók, Schnittke and Lutoslawski on ECM; Melting the Darkness, an album of microtonal and electronic music; and Nono’s La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura, which was named a Best Recording of the Year by The New York Times.

Miranda is an alumna of The Juilliard School, having studied there from Pre-College through her doctorate, and she was awarded the school’s Presser Award. She teaches at the Mannes School of Music at New School University.

Matthew Aucoin is a composer, conductor, writer and pianist who has been recognised one of the most promising young talents in the operatic and musical world. He is Artist in Residence at Los Angeles Opera, and has already worked as a composer and conductor with the Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Salzburg Landestheater and Music Academy of the West, among others.

After years spent performing and recording with other artists and groups, Canadian-born, New York City-based Julia Kent found her own voice with her solo debut, Delay, an exploration of the private emotional worlds that exist within the disjunctions and disorientations of travel, hailed for its “lovely, melancholy” compositions, full of “aching romanticism…rich melodicism, and detailed arrangements.” She toured to support it throughout Europe and North America, and subsequently released an EP, Last Day in July.

In Green and Grey, her following solo record, she continued to use looped and layered cello, electronics, and field recordings to explore the intersections between the human world and the natural world, the melding of the technological and the organic, the patterns and repetitions that exist in nature and are mirrored in human creations, and the complexity and fragility of our relationships with one another and with the world that surrounds us.

She moved to the Leaf Label to release Character  in 2013 and Asperities in 2015.

Her most recent record, Temporal, came out in January 2019. Made up mostly of music originally created to accompany dance and theatre, it is a meditation on the passing of time and the fragility of existence.

In addition to her solo albums, Julia Kent has composed a number of original film scores, as well as music for theatre and dance performances. She has toured throughout Europe and North America, including appearances at Primavera Sound in Barcelona, the Donau festival in Austria, Meltdown in London, the Unsound festival in New York City, Reeperbahn in Hamburg, CTM in Berlin, and Mutek in Montreal.