"Kurt Liedwart, born in 1977 in Moscow, USSR, is an artist, improviser, music producer, label owner and founder of the Moscow-based experimental and electroacoustic improvised music label Mikroton Recordings. He has developed his own art and sound that cross genres, mixing music practices such as electroacoustic and improvised music, noise and glitch, and art movements such as actionism and Fluxus. He plays a wide-ranging array of instruments such as analog synthesizers, electronics, light-controlled electronics, electromagnetic devices, laptop, sinewaves, field recordings, percussion processed electronically in real time.

Plays and records solo and in various formations with Martin Taxt, Arturas Bumšteinas, Ernesto Rodrigues, Guilherme Rodrigues, Nuno Torres, Abdul Moimême, Julien Ottavi, Heddy Boubaker, Alexandre Losada, Jason Kahn, Burkhard Beins, Alexander Markvart, Sergey Kostyrko, Birgit Ulher, Gregory Büttner, Piotr Tkacz, Gerard Lebik, Annette Krebs, Klaus Filip, Noid, Norbert Möslang, Keith Rowe, Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Miguel A. Garcia, Xavier Lopez, Dmitry Krotevich, Nicola Ratti, Alberto Boccardi, Hannes Lingens, Pierre Borel, Radu Malfatti, Alexei Borisov, Ignaz Schick, Stefano Pilia, Thomas Buckner, Ilia Belorukov, Andrey Lomakin, Edita Fyl, Oleg Makarov, Phil Raymond, Bruno Duplant, Pedro Chambel, Andrey Popovsky, Konstantin Sukhan, Alexey Sysoev, Brinstaar, Denis Sorokin, Paul Roth, Ian Douglas-Moore and others.

Various recordings released on his own Mikroton Recordings as well as on Intonema, Hideous Replica, Copy For Your Records and so on.

Played at various festivals: Abracadabra (Moscow), Noise & Fury 2008 (Moscow), XXII Festival Of Modern Art (Bryansk), Love Live Electronic Festival (Moscow), Ru.Noise 2009 (Kiev), Ad Libitum 4 Festival (Warsaw), Ruby Attack Festival (Moscow), Prepared Environments on Prepared Wednesdays 2010: Informal Tribute to John Cage (Moscow), Prepared Environments on Prepared Wednesdays 2011 (Moscow), Poetronica 2010 (Moscow), Poetronica 2011 (Moscow), Teni Zvuka 2011 (Saint-Petersburg), Noise & Fury 2011 (Moscow), Alt+E Fest 2011 (Moscow), Prepared Environments 2012 (Moscow), Teni Zvuka 2013 / Mikroton Live 2 (2013 | Moscow, Saint-Petersburg), Prepared Environments 2013 (Moscow), Noise & Fury 2013 (Moscow, Yaroslavl, Saint-Petersburg), Teni Zvuka 2014 / Mikroton Live 3 (2014, Moscow, Saint-Petersburg), Der blöde dritte Mittwoch (2014, Vienna), Music Of Now (2015, Saint-Petersburg), Escucha! (2016, Madrid).

As a music critic he wrote for Billboard Russian Edition, Electronic Music Magazine, Contemporary Music Magazine, Tonschrift., Colta."

"Julien Ottavi: Composer, Artist, curator and PhD student on new music and network

A mediactivist, artist-researcher, composer / musician, poet and tongues destroyer, experimental film maker and anarchitect, founder and member of Apo33, Julien Ottavi is involved in research and creative work, combining sound art, real-time video, new technologies and body performances. Since 1997, he develops a composition work using voice and its transformation through computer. Active developer of audio/visual programs with Puredata, he has also developed since many years DIY electronics (radio transmitters, oscillators, mixers, amplifiers, video transmitters...etc) in the perspective of knowledge sharing on technological development. Main developer for the Gnu/Linux operating system APODIO for digital art and A/V & streaming diffusion. His practices is not limited to the art spheres but crosses different fields from technological development to philosophy / theoretical research, biomimetic analysis & experimentation. Since many years he reflects on the relations between experimental practices and collective practices within the creation of autonomous collective groups, putting in question the authorship strategy of the "art ideology".

Julien Ottavi is part of a generation of audio artists to emerge in the 90's that indicated some of the directions that music and soundart is taking. While at art school, he organized a series of concerts, bringing international artists from the experimental scene to Nantes, drawing touring musicians to movements happening outside of Paris. This became not just a destination but a nexus for collaborations. This resulted for example in the group Formanex to perform graphical scores of electro-acoustic music, and in Apo33, an artists collective to facilitate, nurture, and disseminate creative audio practice. In this way, Julien represents the energy and initiative of a present day artist - activist through practice, organizing as performance, publishing as networking, open source and open aesthetic. This fluidity of working across boundaries of style and role are seen in his music, physical with computer, performative and reflective. (introduction by Atau Tanaka)"

"tabletop guitarist and painter. Rowe is a founding member of both the influential AMM in the mid-1960s (though in 2004 he quit that group for the second time) and M.I.M.E.O. Having trained as a visual artist, Rowe's paintings have been featured on most of his own albums. After years of obscurity, Rowe has achieved a level of relative notoriety, and since the late 1990s has kept up a busy recording and touring schedule. He is seen as a godfather of EAI (electroacoustic improvisation), with many of his recent recordings having been released by Erstwhile Records.

Rowe began his career playing jazz in the early 1960s-notably with Mike Westbrook and Lou Gare. His early influences were guitarists like Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian and Barney Kessel. Eventually, however, Rowe grew tired of what he considered the form's limitations. Rowe began experimenting, slowly and gradually. An important step was a New Year's resolution to stop tuning his guitar-much to Westbrook's displeasure. Rowe gradually expanded into free jazz and free improvisation, eventually abandoning conventional guitar technique.

This change in his approach to guitar, Rowe reports, was partly inspired by a teacher in one of his painting courses who told him, "Rowe, you cannot paint a Caravaggio. Only Caravaggio can paint Caravaggio." Rowe reports that after considering this idea from a musical perspective, "trying to play guitar like Jim Hall seemed quite wrong." For several years Rowe contemplated how to reinvent his approach to the guitar, again finding inspiration in visual art, namely, American painter Jackson Pollock, who abandoned traditional painting methods to forge his own style. "How could I abandon the technique? Lay the guitar flat!"

Rowe developed various prepared guitar techniques: placing the guitar flat on a table and manipulating the strings, body and pick-ups in unorthodox ways to produce sounds described as dark, brooding, compelling, expansive and alien. He has been known to employ objects such as a library card, rubber eraser, springs, hand-held electric fans, alligator clips, and common office supplies in playing the guitar. A January 1997 feature in Guitar Player magazine described a Rowe performance as "resemble a surgeon operating on a patient." Rowe sometimes incorporates live radio broadcasts into his performances, including shortwave radio and number stations (the guitar's pick-ups will also pick up radio signals, and broadcast them through the amplifier).

AMM percussionist Eddie Prévost reports that Rowe has "an uncanny touch on the wireless switch", able to find radio broadcasts which seem to blend ideally with, or offer startling commentary on, the music. (Prévost, 18). On AMMMusic, towards the end of the cacophonous "Ailantus Glandolusa", a speaker announces via radio that "We cannot preserve the normal music." Prevost writes that during an AMM performance in Istanbul, Rowe located and integrated a radio broadcast of "the pious intonation of a male Turkish voice. AMM of course, had absolutely no idea what the material was. Later, it was complimented upon the judicious way that verses from The Koran had been introduced into the performance, and the respectful way they had been treated!" In reviewing World Turned Upside Down, critic Dan Hill writes, "Rowe has tuned his shortwave radio to some dramatically exotic gameshow and human voices spatter the mix, though at such low volume, they're unintelligible and abstracted. Rowe never overplays this device, a clear temptation with such a seductive technology - the awesome possibility of sonically reaching out across a world of voices requires experienced hands to avoid simple but ultimately short-term pleasure. This he does masterfully, mixing in random operatics and chance encounters with talkshow hosts to anchor the sound in humanity, amidst the abstraction." "

Some accounts report that Rowe's guitar technique was an influence on Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett: "Taking his cues from experimental guitarist Keith Rowe of AMM, Barrett strived to push his music farther and farther out into the zone of complete abstraction."

Rowe has worked together with numerous composers and musicians, including Cornelius Cardew, Christian Wolff, Howard Skempton, Jeffrey Morgan, John Tilbury, Evan Parker, Taku Sugimoto, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Oren Ambarchi, Christian Fennesz, Burkhard Beins, Kurt Liedwart, Toshimaru Nakamura, David Sylvian and Peter Rehberg.