GROUNDTONE

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.

Josh Johnson is a saxophonist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and Grammy Award-winning producer. His second solo album, Unusual Object, a striking work of futuristic jazz and modern composition, released April 5 on Northern Spy Records. This spare work for processed saxophone and subtle samples shows Johnson further sharpening his unique compositional voice. Unusual Object, Johnson says, “is a development and documentation of a more personal world of sound. What’s it like for me to create the context for my sound, to frame it myself?”

His solo debut Freedom Exercise (Northern Spy) was featured in Rolling Stone’s Best Music of 2020 and Bandcamp’s Best Jazz Albums of 2020. Pitchfork called the record “excellent, daringly melodic” and PostGenre praised it as “a songwriting marvel”. Johnson is a regular collaborator with some of contemporary music’s most innovative artists, including Jeff Parker, Makaya McCraven, Nate Mercereau, Marquis Hill, and Kiefer. Parker’s widely-acclaimed 2022 record Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy features Johnson on saxophone and effects as part of the longstanding quartet. This is the most recent in a series of Parker’s records to highlight Johnson, with the latter also contributing saxophone and synths to 2016’s The New Breed and 2020’s Suite for Max
Brown.

Between 2018 and 2022 Johnson held the role of Musical Director for soul singer Leon Bridges, with whom he also played keyboards and saxophone. During his time with Bridges, Johnson performed throughout Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, with performances at the Hollywood Bowl, Glastonbury and the Sydney Opera House. Along with Nate Walcott (Bright Eyes), Johnson arranged 14 of Bridges’ songs for a performance with London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, also contributing a choral arrangement and directing the concert

Johnson produced and appears on Meshell Ndegeocello’s 2023 album The Omnichord Real Book which was awarded the 2024 Grammy for Best Alternative Jazz Album. He can also be heard on wide-ranging records by artist such as Harry Styles, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Moonchild, Broken Bells, Miley Cyrus, Louis Cole and Carlos Niño, among others. He currently resides in Los Angeles.

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.

PS21 Exo-Tech Lineup

Sophia Brous – musical director, voice
Kimbra – voice electronics
Nels Cline – guitar
Yuka Honda – synthesizers, electronics
Lina Lapelyte – violin
Booker Stardrum – drums
Spencer Zahn – bass
Patrick Higgins – guitar
Julia Kent – cello
Clara Warnaar – percussion
Kalia Vandever – trombone, electronics

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.

Born in South Korea and adopted at the age of 2, Lavinia Meijer is now based in the Netherlands. At only 9 years old, she started to play the harp. She studied at the conservatories of Utrecht (she was admitted to the conservatory at the age of 11) and Amsterdam, receiving her BA and MA with the highest distinction. Aged only 14, Lavinia Meijer was already performing with symphony orchestras. Her passion to broaden the possibilities of the harp is noteworthy. Not only does Mrs. Meijer search for rare classical solo & orchestral repertoire, she is also always on the alert for contemporary music possibilities, performing together with Òlafur Arnalds and others. She performs pieces by Radiohead in classical venues to great artistic and critical acclaim and enjoys commercial success for her albums. Ms Meijer tours extensively all over the world in classical and rock venues and at outdoor festivals. Ms Meijer has received numerous awards, including 2 gold discs and a certified platinum disc for the album Metamorphosis / The Hours with pieces by the acclaimed American composer, Philip Glass.

Ms. Meijer has performed on international stages such as Carnegie Hall, NYC; Royal Concertgebouw, Amsterdam; Paradiso, Amsterdam; Musikverein, Vienna; Carré, Amsterdam; Philharmonie, Berlin, Cité de la Musique, Paris; Bronfman Auditorium,Tel Aviv; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, and Seoul Arts Center. As a featured soloist she has performed harp concertos with renowned orchestras such as Concertgebouw Chamber Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Amsterdam Sinfonietta, and Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, working with such leading conductors as Andrew Grams, Thierry Fischer, Charles Floyd, Frans Brüggen, Hannu Lintu, and Marco Boni. Ms. Meijer played Bryce Dessner’s exciting piece Aheym as the special chosen guest artist of Kronos Quartet and Mr. Dessner pledged to write her a new composition.

Lavinia Meijer is the only classical artist to have hit the top 10 in the Dutch rock album charts with three consecutive albums. She starred in a TV commercial for the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum in 2015. Her albums Passaggio and Voyage were recorded in Berlin by the noted Tonmeister and 15x Grammy Award winner, Andreas Neubronner. Recently she released both Voyage, her seventh solo album with music by Debussy, Tiersen, Satie and Ravel, a live-recording with bandoneonist, Carel Kraayenhof: In Concert and The Glass Effect, to celebrate Philip Glass’s 80th birthday in 2017.

Clarice Jensen is a composer and cellist based in New York who graduated with a BM and MM from the Juilliard School. As a solo artist, Clarice has developed a distinctive compositional approach, improvising and layering her cello through shifting loops and a chain of electronic effects to open out and explore a series of rich, drone-based sound fields. Pulsing, visceral and full of color, her work is deeply immersive, marked by a wonderful sense of restraint and an almost hallucinatory clarity. Meditative yet with a sculptural sharpness and rigor that sets it apart from the swathe of New Age / DIY droners, she has forged a very elegant and precise vision.

Her music has been described by Self-Titled as “heavily processed, incredibly powerful neo-classical pieces that seem to come straight from another astral plane”; by Boomkat as “languorously void-touching ideas, scaling and sustaining a sublime tension”; whilst Bandcamp remarked upon “a kaleidoscope of pulsing movement rich in acoustic beating and charged with other psychoacoustic effects, constantly shifting in density and viscous timbre.”

Jensen’s striking debut album For This From That Will Be Filled was released in April 2018 on the Berlin-based label Miasmah and followed in September 2019 with the “Drone Studies” EP, a cassette release via Geographic North. Signing to FatCat’s 130701 imprint (Max Richter, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Hauschka, Dustin O’Halloran, etc.) in late summer 2019, her sophomore album The experience of repetition as death was released April 2020. Naming it among the top 50 albums of 2020, NPR remarked “This collection of requiems for a dying mother ranks among the great ambient albums of the 21st century.” Her latest album Esthesis was released in October 2022 and NPR ranked it among the Best Experimental Albums of the Year. Boomkat stated, “Jensen finds a fine line between in-the-moment, tactile precision and lingering hallucinatory afterimages that emerge from her improv/compositional system. The pieces betray an exquisite depth of feeling in Jensen’s diffractive rendering of shimmering layers and gently transitory movements,” with Magnetic Magazine reporting, “There is no doubt this album will impact people profoundly.”

Caimin Gilmore is a member of Irish new music group Crash Ensemble. He has recorded or shared the stage with:

Zach Condon, Squarepusher, Bernard Butler, Shahzad Ismaily, The Staves, Justin Vernon, Aaron and Bryce Dessner, Thomas Bartlett, Anais Mitchell, Phoebe Bridgers, Dirty Projectors, Kate Stables, Tom Fleming, Alabaster de Plume, Sam Amidon, Greg Saunier, Dionne Warwick, s t a r g a z e & Irish acts Gavin James, Dermot Kennedy, Colm Mac Iomaire, Lisa Hannigan, Damien Dempsey, Kodaline, Loah, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, Lisa O’Neill, Ye Vagabonds, John Francis Flynn, Jessy Buckley, Cormac Begley, John Sheahan, Tolü Makay, Niamh Regan, David Kitt, Anna Mieke, Rachel Lavelle, Saint Sister, Ships, Stephen James Smith, Participant, Lemoncello, Niamh Bury & Hard Rain Ensemble. He performs regularly with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Ulster Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland & celebrated Irish Dance Company Teac Damsa.