“Kanga’s Piano Ex Machina is a rewarding experience, rich in possibility, infused with curiosity and playfulness, and not afraid to explore conceptual and expressive horizons well beyond the boundaries of a traditional piano recital.”
In 2020, following his appointment as Lecturer in Musical Performance and Digital Arts at Royal Holloway University, Kanga was awarded a £1.4 million UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship to fund his latest multi-year project Cyborg Soloists. As Director and Principal Investigator, Kanga, together with a host of collaborators, is unlocking new possibilities in music making through interactions with AI and machine learning; interactive visuals and VR; motion and biosensors; and new hybrid instruments.
Cyborg Soloists’ first public performance took place in November 2021 when Kanga gave the world première of his own composition, Steel on Bone for piano, MiMU multi-sensor gloves and electronics at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (hcmf//), where he previously performed in 2017 and 2018. In July 2021, he presented Philip Venables’s first major work for solo piano Answer Machine Tape, 1987 at Time of Music Festival (Finland). The work explores the AIDS crisis through a crucial week in the life of New York artist David Wojnarowicz, using an experimental KeyScanner to allow the piano to control electronics and to type text onto a screen like a typewriter. In the autumn, alongside the national premières of Answer Machine Tape, 1987 at November Music, hcmf// and Paris Autumn Festival, Kanga will unveil his and Neil Luck’s largest-scale project to date: Whatever Weighs You Down using MiMU’s multi-sensor gloves to interact with deaf performance artist Chisato Minamimura at Gaudeamus Festival in Utrecht and London’s Café Oto.
With over 130 world premières under his belt, Kanga’s performances have been heard across the UK, Europe and Australia including at hcmf//, London Contemporary Music Festival, BBC Proms, Cheltenham Festival, Festival Présences (France), Klang Festival (Denmark), Darmstadt (Germany), Resonator Festival (Sweden), CUBE, Graz (Austria), Borealis Festival (Norway), and Melbourne and Sydney Festivals. Commissioning and co-creating new works is at the heart of his music making and Alexander Schubert, Michael Finnissy, Steve Reich, Nicole Lizée, Simon Steen-Anderson, Liza Lim, Laura Bowler, George Benjamin, Shiva Feshareki, Brett Dean, Tansy Davies, Oliver Leith, Laurence Osborne and Brett Furer are but some of the few composers he has worked with since the start of his career.
Zubin Kanga studied Music, Philosophy & Computer Science at the University of Sydney before moving to London where, under the supervision of Rolf Hind and Neil Heyde, he completed a Master’s degree and PhD at the Royal Academy of Music. Following his tenure as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nice and IRCAM, Paris, he became Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Royal Holloway before his appointments as Lecturer and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow.
