Annie Gosfield

Annie Gosfield is a composer, keyboard player and improviser who lives and works in New York. Her compositions include acoustic and electronic works, and range from solo pieces for detuned piano to chamber orchestra works that incorporate elements of improvisation and detuned strings. Active in the downtown New York music scene, she focuses on both notated music and improvisation, often combining the two. Gosfield’s compositions have been performed by ensembles such as The Bang on a Can All Stars, Rova, Agon Orchestra, The Spit Orchestra and The Crosstown Ensemble. She performs throughout Europe and the U.S., playing piano and sampling keyboards with her own ensemble and in solo concerts. Gosfield has worked with Roger Kleier, Marc Ribot, LaDonna Smith, John Zorn, Elliott Sharp and many others. In the early 1980s she played in the underground venues of Los Angeles with the free improvisation group The Apes of God.
Last November she released the CD Burnt Ivory and Loose Wires on Zorn’s Tzadik label: ”The sounds of a percussion factory, a destroyed piano and an abandoned guitar are twisted into sophisticated compositions incorporating tuned and detuned instruments, traditional and non-traditional techniques, composition and improvisation. Influenced by Harry Partch, Sun Ra, old nickelodeons and player pianos, Annie Gosfield presents us with a new view of microtonal music”. Fanfare, the Magazine for Serious Record Collectors, reviewed her music as “A furious explosion, a thundering wall of pulsating machine sound that is irresistible”; and The Village Voice added,”Her sampling techniques, offering a plethora of complex, metallic, and percussive noices, resulted in the most kaleidoscopic and sophisticated keyboard-sampler performance I’ve ever heard”.

Annie Gosfield: sampling keyboards; Roger Kleier: electric guitar.

Participation of Annie Gosfield has been made possible in part through support from: The Fund for US Artists at International Festivals and Exhibitions, a public/private partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Information Agency, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The Pew Charitable Trusts, with administrative support from Arts International.

In collaboration with: KUD France Prešeren.