Zubin Kanga: Ghost in the Machine + After Dark

Pianist, composer and technologist Zubin Kanga performs groundbreaking new music from his Cyborg Soloists project, combining the piano with hybrid instruments, digital avatars, synthesizers, body sensors and experimental AI.

Nwando Ebizie’s I Will Fix Myself (Just Circles) explores the influence of Chopin’s technique on Zubin’s relationship to the piano, combining interview materials and AI voices with the piano, a synthesizer and complex Afrofuturist electronic textures.

In Alex Paxton’s Cuddley Wuddley, everyday experiences become whimsical studies expanding the piano with a keyboard playing sampled choirs, drums, birds and cooking utensils.

And Ben Nobuto’s The Art of Sinking takes the loneliness and anxiety of a pianist preparing for a performance and explodes their inner monologue onto the stage in a virtuosic duet between the pianist and a digital avatar.

Performed on piano, ROLI Seaboard, video, and electronics it draws together the pianistic bravura of Liszt and Ravel with the glitchy rhythms of video game music.

All the music was commissioned or created as part of Cyborg Soloists, supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and Royal Holloway, University of London.

‘Cyborg Pianist’ Zubin Kanga is at the forefront of creating, co-creating and performing groundbreaking interdisciplinary works that explore and redefine how musicians can interact with new technologies.