"Charlemagne Palestine (born Chaim Moshe Tzadik Palestine) is a performance artist from New York.

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1947, Palestine began by singing sacred Jewish music and studying accordion and piano. At the age of 12 he started playing backup conga and bongo drums for Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Kenneth Anger, and Tiny Tim. From 1962-69 Palestine was daily carillonneur for the Saint Thomas Episcopal Church in Manhattan, eventually creating a piece that consisted of 1,500 15 minute performances.

From 1968-72, Palestine studied vocal interpretation with Pandit Pran Nath, experimented on kinetic light sculptures with Len Lye, composed music for Tony and Beverly Conrad's film "Coming Attractions," taught at Cal Arts with Morton Subotnick, created the sound and movement piece Illuminations with Simone Forti, and developed his own alternative synthesizer, The Spectral Continuum Drone Machine. Throughout the seventies Palestine created records, videos, sculptural objects, abstract expressionist visual scores and performed regularly in the company of his stuffed animals. From 1980 to 1995 Palestine performed only rarely, exhibiting instead at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and in documenta 8. During that time he also founded the Ethnology Cinema Project in New York, which is dedicated to preserving films that document disappearing traditional cultures.

After moving to Europe in 1995, in addition to creating exhibitions, Palestine performs regularly, re-releasing older material and developing new videos and sonic projects."

"Carsten Nicolai, born 1965 in Karl-Marx-Stadt, is a German artist and musician based in Berlin. He is part of an artist generation who works intensively in the transitional area between music, art and science. In his work he seeks to overcome the separation of the sensory perceptions of man by making scientific phenomenons like sound and light frequencies perceivable for both eyes and ears. Influenced by scientific reference systems, Nicolai often engages mathematic patterns such as grids and codes, as well as error, random and self-organizing structures. His installations have a minimalistic aesthetic that by its elegance and consistency is highly intriguing. After his participation in important international exhibitions like documenta X and the 49th and 50th Venice Biennale, Nicolai's works were shown worldwide in extensive solo and group exhibitions.

His artistic œuvre echoes in his work as a musician. For his musical outputs he uses the pseudonym Alva Noto. With a strong adherence to reductionism he leads his sound experiments into the field of electronic music creating his own code of signs, acoustics and visual symbols. Together with Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider he is co-founder of the label 'raster-noton. archiv für ton und nichtton'. Diverse musical projects include remarkable collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ryoji Ikeda (cyclo.), Blixa Bargeld or Mika Vainio. Nicolai toured extensively as Alva Noto through Europe, Asia, South America and the US. Among others, he performed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou in Paris and Tate Modern in London. Most recently Nicolai scored the music for Alejandro González Iñárritu's newest film, 'The Revenant' which has been nominated for a Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Critics Choice Award."

"Christian Ernest Marclay (born January 11, 1955) is a visual artist and composer. He holds both American and Swiss nationality.

Marclay's work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film. A pioneer of using gramophone records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collages, Marclay is, in the words of critic Thom Jurek, perhaps the "unwitting inventor of turntablism." His own use of turntables and records, beginning in the late 1970s, was developed independently of but roughly parallel to hip hop's use of the instrument.

Christian Marclay was born on January 11, 1955 in San Rafael, Marin County, California, to a Swiss father and an American mother and raised in Geneva, Switzerland. He studied at the Ecole SupŽrieure d'Art Visuel in Geneva (1975Ð1977), the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston (1977Ð1980, Bachelor of Fine Arts) in the Studio for Interrelated Media Program, and the Cooper Union in New York (1978). As a student he was notably interested in Joseph Beuys and the Fluxus movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Long based in Manhattan, Marclay has in recent years divided his time between New York and London.

Citing the influence of John Cage, Yoko Ono and Vito Acconci, Marclay has long explored the rituals around making and collecting music. Drawn to the energy of punk rock, he began creating songs, singing to music on pre-recorded backing tapes. Unable to recruit a drummer for his 1979 performances with guitarist Kurt Henry, Marclay used the regular rhythms of a skipping LP record as a percussion instrument. These duos with Henry might be the first time a musician used records and turntables as interactive, improvising musical instruments.

Marclay sometimes manipulates or damages records to produce continuous loops and skips, and has said he generally prefers inexpensive used records purchased at thrift shops, as opposed to other turntablists who often seek out specific recordings. In 1998 he claimed never to have paid more than US$1 for a record. Marclay has occasionally cut and re-joined different LP records; when played on a turntable, these re-assembled records will combine snippets of different music in quick succession along with clicks or pops from the seams Ð typical of noise music Ð and when the original LPs were made of differently-colored vinyl, the reassembled LPs can themselves be considered as works of art.

Some of Marclay's musical pieces are carefully recorded and edited plunderphonics-style; he is also active in free improvisation. He was filmed performing a duo with Erikm for the documentary Scratch. His scene didn't make the final cut, but is included among the DVD extras.

Marclay released Record Without a Cover on Recycled Records in 1985, "...designed to be sold without a jacket, not even a sleeve!" Accumulating dust and fingerprints would enhance the sound. A review in Spin at the time cited Marclay's "coolest theatrical gesture" in his live performances of phonoguitar: the artist strapped a record player onto himself and played, for example, a Jimi Hendrix album. In Five Cubes (1989), he melted vinyl records into cubes. In the 1980s and early '90s, he invented album covers. The Sound of Silence (1988) is a black-and-white photograph of the Simon & Garfunkel single of the same title. In a series of cyanotypes (2007Ð09), white negatives against a blue background, he unspooled cassette tapes.

Thom Jurek writes that "While many intellectuals have made wild pronouncements about Marclay and his art Ð and it is art, make no mistake Ð writing all sorts of blather about how he strips the adult century bare by his cutting up of vinyl records and pasting them together with parts from other vinyl records, they never seem to mention that these sound collages of his are charming, very human, and quite often intentionally hilarious."

Marclay has performed and recorded both solo and in collaboration with many musicians, including John Zorn, William Hooker, Elliott Sharp, Otomo Yoshihide, Butch Morris, Shelley Hirsch, Flo Kaufmann and Crevice; he has also performed with the group Sonic Youth, and in other projects with Sonic Youth's members."

"Christina Kubisch was born in Bremen in 1948. She studied painting, music and electronics in Hamburg, Graz, Zürich and Milano, where she graduated. Performances, concerts and works with video in the seventies, subsequently sound installations, sound sculptures and work with ultraviolet light. Her compositions are mostly electroacoustic, but she has written for ensembles as well. Since 2003 she works again as a perfomer and collaborates with various musicians and dancers.

Numerous grants and awards, such as the Award of the German Industrial Association (BDI) 1998, composition grant of the city of Berlin 2000, Carl Djerassi Honorary Fellowship, USA 2000, artist-in-residence IASPIS, Stockholm 2002, Honorary prize of the German Sound Art Prize 2008, City sound artist Bonn, 2013.

Since 1974 solo exhibitions in Europe, USA, Australia, Japan and South America. Numerous participations in international festivals and group exhibitions such as: Pro Musica Nova, Bremen 1976 and 1980, Für Augen und Ohren, Berlin 1980, Biennale of Venice 1980 and 1982, documenta 8, Kassel 1987, Ars Electronica, Linz 1987 and 2010, Steirischer Herbst, Graz 1987, Biennale of Sydney 1990, Biennale of Nagoya 1991, Donaueschinger Musiktage 1993 and 1997, Sonambiente, Berlin 1996 and 2006, Klangkunstforum Parkkolonnaden, Berlin 1999, Sonic Boom, London 2000, Visual Sound, Pittsburgh 2001, Singuhr Hörgalerie, Berlin 2002, Activating the Medium, San Francisco 2003, sounding spaces, Tokyo 2003, Resonances - The Electromagnetic Bodies Project, ZKM, Karlsruhe 2005, Her Noise, London 2005, B!AS International Sound Art Exhibition, Taipei 2005, Stockholm New Music 2006, Invisible Geographies: Sound Art from Germany, New York 2006, Sharjah Biennial 2007, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2007, Soni(c)loud, Mexico City 2008, RUHR2010, European Capital of Culture project, Ruhr area 2010, Salon Urbain de Douala, Cameroon

2010, gateways, Art and Networked Culture, Tallinn 2011, White Walls Have Ears, Hong Kong 2012, Sound Art. Klang als Medium der Kunst, ZKM, Karlsruhe 2012, bonnhoeren, Beethovenstiftung Bonn, 2013, festival NOW, Essen 2014, blurred edges festival, Hamburg, 2015.

Her music has been released with various labels such as Cramps Records, Edition RZ, ampersand, semishigure, Die Schachtel, Olof Bright, AA Records.

Christina Kubisch has been a visiting professor in Maastricht, Paris and Berlin. She has been a professor for sound art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Saarbrücken, Germany, from 1994 to 2013. She is a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin since 1997."