• MADEIRADiG Festival 2024 — 28th November — 3rd December

    • David Behrman
    David Behrman is a pioneering computer music composer and live performer. His award winning work focuses on the interactivity between performer and computer. In the 1960s he co-founded the Sonic Arts Union and was a producer at Columbia Masterworks. He has taught at universities throughout the U.S., as well as at the Technical University at Berlin. His sound installations have been featured in galleries around the world. Read | Listen

    Okkyung Lee
    Okkyung Lee is a South Korean cellist whose distinctive approach moves freely between genres: from noise, to jazz, to the popular music of her homeland. She is known for her improvisational work using visceral extended techniques and more recently, for composing immersive, site-specific works. She has appeared on over 30 albums, including releases on Shelter Press and GRM Portraits/Editions Mego, and performed at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York). Read | Listen

    Kaffe Matthews
    Kaffe Matthews is a pioneering English electroacoustic sampler and composer. In 2006 she was awarded Distinction in Digital Musics at Prix Ars Electronica for her ‘sonic bed’, and founded a research company that develops ‘sonic bikes’ – instruments that play sound and music that changes as the cyclist changes speed and location. Read | Listen

    Ben Bertrand
    Ben Bertrand is a Belgian bass clarinetist and composer. With his instrument and countless effects and loop pedals, he constructs modal, hypnotic grooves, over which he plays microtonally-inflected clarinet phrases. His last album, ‘Manes’, was released in March 2020 in collaboration with Belgian label Stroom. Read | Listen

    Marja Ahti
    Marja Ahti is a Swedish-Finnish sound artist and composer based in Turku, Finland. She mixes field recordings with synthesis and effects to find a special form of communication between the sounds. She is a part of the duo Ahti & Ahti with her partner Niko-Matti Ahti, and is a member of the collective Himera. Read | Listen

    Abul Mogard
    Abul Mogard is a mysterious electronic musician hailing from Belgrade, Serbia. His sought after live shows are filled with darkly ambient/drone compositions that stir through smoke and screens of mesmerising light. His latest album “In Immobile Air” was released last spring by Ecstatic. Read | Listen

    Silvestre Pestana (1949, Funchal) he is one of the most radical and least known figures in contemporary Portuguese art. Poet, visual artist and performer, Pestana has created, since the late 1960s, a unique work in a variety of disciplines. His work imposes itself on the radical nature of its interventions, which are supported by an intentional hybridism resulting from the game and permutation between linguistic and non-linguistic signs to confront the relationship between society, art and technology. READ | WATCH

    Henrique Leal, born in 1992 in Madeira Island, graduated in Visual Arts and Multimedia in 2017 at the University of Madeira. He explores various expressive materials always linked to sound art and, recording its immersive thinking on issues of human existence on canvas and other supports, combining new technologies with pictorial practice in order to explore the creative dimension of Artificial Intelligence. WATCH

    Sara Rodrigues (1990, Porto) is an interdisciplinary creator in the field of audiovisual art and performance. She completed a BA in Music and a Masters in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, where recently completed the Junior Fellow position. READ | LISTEN

    Giant Swan
    Giant Swan is a Brighton-based electronic music duo made up of Robin Stewart & Harry Wright. They emerged from the UK underground by blasting super-charged dancefloor bangers for all night ravers all the way to the world’s top festivals. Their latest EP Don’t Be Afraid of Tenderness was released last Spring by Keck UK. Read | Listen

    Gwenifer Raymond
    Gwenifer Raymond is a Brighton-based Welsh guitarist known for her clawhammer strumming technique. Her sound, “Welsh primitive” as she calls it, is heavily influenced by American blues music from Mississippi. She found inspiration in the natural landscape and the ancient history of northern Cardiff for her 2020 album Strange Light Over Garth Mountain, near to where she grew up. She is also a games designer, a drummer and has a PhD in astrophysics. Read | Listen

    KMRU
    Joseph Kamaru, aka KMRU, is a sound artist and experimental ambient musician, raised in Nairobi, Kenya, and currently based in Berlin where he is a student at Universität der Künste Berlin for sound Studies and Sonic Arts Master’s Program. His works deal with discourses of field recording, improvisation, noise, ambient, machine learning, radio art and expansive hypnotic drones. He has earned international acclaim from his in far-flung locales as well as his ambient recordings, including the 2020 album Peel released on Editions Mego. Read | Listen

    Lea Bertucci
    Bertucci is a composer, performer and sound designer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her performance practice with woodwind instruments, her work incorporates multi-channel speaker arrays, electroacoustic feedback, extended instrumental technique and tape collage. In recent years, her projects have expanded toward site-responsive and site-specific sonic investigations of architecture. Deeply experimental, her work is unafraid to subvert musical expectation. Read | Listen

    João de Nóbrega Pupo
    João de Nóbrega Pupo is a Portuguese sound artist, based in Barcelona. He has a degree in Art and Multimedia from the University of Madeira and studied Sound Art at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona. Pupo’s debut, ‘Sonified Notations’ was created under the tutelage of Colectivo Casa Amarela. His music has been described as a healthy confrontation between abstract electronics and concrete percussion. Read | Listen

    SINOP is an improvisation trio formed by Francisco Andrade, Francisco Aguilar (saxophones) and Berlin based Higino Andrade (double bass). These are three members of the most recent wave of Madeiran musicians trained in Madeira who have been developing activities in the areas of electroacoustic experimentation in different genres from contemporary classical to jazz. Eclectic and experienced, they are part of several musical projects both in Madeira and abroad. LISTEN

    Rodrigo Camacho, (1990, Funchal), is an interdisciplinary creator and curator. He won a British Composer Award (2013) and a Sound & Music Chagrin Award (2018). In 2014, he founded with Sara Rodrigues and is currently co-director of the New Maker Ensemble. READ | LISTEN