Wu Wei will be collaborating on the Native Alien project with Sandeep Bhagwati.

Please come to the research presentation on Dec 19th from 5-7pm (17-19h) in the matrabox (EV 4.502). At this presentation, Wu Wei will also perform Sandeep Bhagwati’s interactive score “Transience” together with Cléo Palacio-Quintin (flute), Elin Soderstrom (viola da gamba) and Michal Seta (guitar). Please RSVP at the address below.

NATIVE ALIEN is a long term research-creation project – the search for a software that can play in a musically inspiring way with a human music performer-improviser. We are developing this project in close dialogue with a research group on machine improvisation at the IRCAM Centre Pompidou in Paris (Gerard Assayag / Benjamin Levy). Over the past two years, the Native Alien team (Sandeep Bhagwati / Navid Navab) have developed advanced compositional, comprovisational and sonic software architectures that now are being tried, modified and improved upon in close practical collaboration with outstanding solo performers from many different music making traditions around the world. The end product, we hope, will be an immersive environment for live-composition, as well as a musically empathic software that can play in any style, with any adventurous musician.

Wu Wei is considered to be the world’s leading avant-garde sheng soloist – the sheng is a 4000-year old Chinese instrument, a mouth-organ. Taking Chinese art music as his point of departure, he approaches many other traditions with extraordinary musical creativity and vitality: for many years already, he has been a star in contemporary western art music, in improvised music, in jazz, in minimalist music, and other styles. While he performs on a conventional modern sheng with 37 pipes, he has decisively expanded the technical and sonic possibilities of his instrument. He has won many prestigious national and international competitions, awards and prizes both for traditional Chinese music and for his trans- and cross-traditional projects. He has worked with Nobel Laureate Günter Grass, and has performed than 140 world premières of contemporary compositions – among them 10 concertos for Sheng and orchestra – written for him by composers such as John Cage, Unsuk Chin, Toshio Hosokawa, Tan Dun, Guo Wenjing, Qu Xiaosong, and Sandeep Bhagwati. He has collaborated with dance companies all over the world, played with Atlas Ensemble, Ensemble Modern, Nieuw Ensemble, and many more, has appeared as a soloist with leading orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Tokyo Symphony Orchestra etc., often at seminal festivals: Berliner Festspiele, Munich Biennale, the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Warsaw Autumn, Suntory Summer Festival, Gaudeamus Music Week, Holland Festival, Shanghai Electronic Music Festival, Musiques Marseille, San Francisco Art Festival etc. As a composer he has received numerous commissions, and has wowed audiences at jazz festivals worldwide, playing with the likes of Peter Kowald, Gunter Baby Sommer, Michael Riessler, Howard Levy, Ross Daly, Ferenc Snetberger, Tony Buck, Carlo Rizzo, Ramesh Shotham, Lequan Ninh, Pavel Fajt, Franz Hautzinger, Carl Ludwig Huebsch, Carl Stone, etc. His music has been released on numerous CDs.