Composer/performer Kari Watson gives the UK premiere of Fuse, a work for analog modular synthesizers and programmed drum machines.

EXMO is proud to welcome Kari Watson to St John's College!

Kari will perform the UK premiere of their solo work Fuse. Fuse combines modular synthesizers, a quadraphonic speaker array, and unhoused speaker cones distributed throughout the room to create a live spatial audio sound sculpture. Custom wearables including an XLR snake tie Watson’s body into the setup. Modular instruments sit atop custom ceramic tables made with visual artist and ceramicist Paige Schlosser, designed so cables can be woven in and around the surfaces. Watson takes theorist Donna Haraway’s cyborg as an origin point for the project: a figure of synthesis and hybridity, where humans and machines are enmeshed and the boundaries between body and environment are continually unsettled. Fuse makes that unsettled boundary audible, asking where the performer ends and the surrounding system begins.

To open the night, Kari and Zack Di Lello will perform a short set of freely improvised music that explores the possibilities of merging voice and electronics.

Kari (they/them) is a composer, performer, and intermedia artist whose work explores the intersections of contemporary concert music, electroacoustic composition, live performance, and interactive installation. Their composition practice is cross-disciplinary and deeply collaborative, often involving workshop-driven processes that prioritize collective exploration and exchange. As a performer playing analog synthesizers, they engage a customizable spatialization software built in MaxMSP with spatial speaker arrays to further explore issues of tactility and drama in immersive sonic environments.

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Doors open at 7pm, show starts at 7:30pm. This event takes place in the Garden Quad Auditorium at St John's College, Oxford. Enter at the Porter's Lodge and follow the signs through the college.

Experimental Music Oxford is a series supported by St John's College at the University of Oxford. All events are free and open to the public.

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Description supplied by the event organiser.