Randy Gibson
artistic director and composer

Randy Gibson is a composer, performer, and nascent film-maker living and working in Brooklyn. He began his musical training at the age of six, studying drums, and later marimba with Pete Ehrmann in Boulder, Colorado. In the summer of 1998, he traveled to Japan, where he had the good fortune to study marimba with Keiko Abe. Earlier that same year he wrote his first composition, Descention, a short solo for percussion using extended techniques to augment a research paper about John Cage.

In early 2003, Gibson began studies in New York with seminal minimalist composer La Monte Young which has brought the heart of his music into focus, and reinforced his commitment to quality in his craft. His pieces often combine live and electronic music, as well as aspects of the world music he has studied, most recently and prominently Raga singing in the Kirana tradition with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, but also Balinese and Japanese music. Gibson has begun to explore just intonation and the Raga tradition with Separate Haven (for violin and electronics) and Aqua Madora (for piano and sine-wave drones.). These two recent works highlight his interest in small sounds and subtle shifting patterns in a unique sonic environment.

His first large piece, Chaos and Simplicity, was written during his trip to Japan, and received its premiere in the spring of 1999. Since that time he has received commissions from choreographers and film-makers, including Kim Olson/Sweetedge, Lauren Beale, the Interstate Dance Collective, Notes In Motion, and Ana Baer-Carrillo. His piece Alicia with Baer-Carrillo was awarded second place for the Creative Works Award through the University of Colorado, the first time the award was given to a dance performance. His pieces have been performed in North America and Europe,and have been included in several festivals including the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art in Minnessota, The Internationale Tanzmesse NRW in Dusseldorf, The Boulder International Fringe Festival, HOT DAM: the opening festival of the Denver Art Museum, the Sans Souci International Festival of Dance Cinema, the Minnesota Fringe Festival, the Erick Hawkins Legacy Forum in New York, and the 44. Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt.

Gibson is a member of the American Music Center, ASCAP, SEAMUS, the International Society of Improvised Music, and Dance Theatre Workshop. He is co-founder and director of Avant Media Performance, Inc. a non-profit organization dedicated to collaborative performance works.