About the Artists

Visible Cloaks are Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile, two musicians working in the spaces between composition and sound design, arrangement and environment, place and non-place. They have spent over a decade developing an approach to amorphous, omni-directional digital composition intended to be appreciated in both active and passive listening spaces, focusing on abstraction over ambience. This work has taken many forms: site-specific multi-channel pieces, live A/V performances, compositions for aleatoric chamber ensembles (Doran’s Componium Ensemble), workshops, albums, EPs, film scores, VGM composing (Season: A letter to the Future), corporate sound design, collaborations with musicians like Miyako Koda, Motion Graphics, Seungmin Cha, Félicia Atkinson, Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano, and music for installations by artists like Brenna Murphy, Mike Tyka and Nile Koetting. Both live and in the studio, their work focuses on the artifice of digital representation, utopian flashes seen in cultural exchange, the cartography of virtual worlds and the glistening sheen of the hyperreal.

Madalyn Merkey is a composer and performer of live computer music based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her recent work draws on the principles of acoustic instruments and material spaces, designing real-time sound synthesis programs for site-specific performance. She is currently on staff at CCRMA and was previously the host of Piano on KPFA. In 2015, Merkey translated the pioneering electronic music text Due scuole di musica elettronica in Italia (1968) by composer Enore Zaffiri (b. Turin, 1928) from Italian to English. She first realized the audio components of Zaffiri’s work at Mills College in 2014 as part of her MFA thesis in Electronic Music, and later conducted additional research at the Conservatorio di Musica Luigi Cherubini in Florence, Italy.