L’ACQUA NON RICORDA

Premieres June 12, 7pm PST via YouTube
FREE Stream Access – (Donate if you can)

In this final Season 8 broadcast, WasteLAnd brings you a special set featuring Italian composer Silvia Cignoli alongside works by wasteLAnd Academy alum, Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi. There will be lots of real and reimagined guitar pedals and audio effects - you will not want to miss in these full and intense sound worlds. 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi (b. 1997 Tehran, Iran) is a Vancouver-based composer-performer. She writes for hybrid instrumental and electronic ensembles and performs electroacoustic music. Kimia explores the unfamiliar familiar while constantly being driven by the mechanism of the human psyche and exploring ways to manipulate it.

Her work has been featured in festivals such as The New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (Virtual), Yarn/Wire Institute (Virtual), Ensemble Evolution (Virtual), New Music on the Point (Vermont, USA), wasteLAnd Summer Academy 2019 (Los Angeles, USA), EQ: Evolution of the String Quartet (Banff, Canada), Modulus Festival (Vancouver, Canada), SALT New Music Festival (Victoria, Canada).

Being a cross-disciplinary artist, she has actively collaborated on projects evolving around dance, film, and theatre. Her recent collaborations include live electronic music for a dance performance by Ballet BC's artists in residence, Peter Smida; Original score for Anthony Lee's short film; And, live-performed music for Tomoyo Yamada's dance film.

Kimia has been presented by organizations such as Iranian Female Composer Association, Music on Main, Western Front, Vancouver New Music, and Media Arts Committee. She has had publicity in papers such as The New York Times, Georgia Straight, MusicWorks Magazine, Vancouver Sun, and Sequenza 21.

Koochakzadeh-Yazdi has recently graduated from Simon Fraser University’s interdisciplinary School for the Contemporary Arts with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Music Composition and having studied with Sabrina Schroeder, Owen Underhill and Mauricio Pauly.

Silvia Cignoli is a classical and electric guitarist, experimental musician and sound artist who ranges from classical to contemporary music, from radical improvisation to avant-rock to her own musical creation that is a crossover between her academic background and the underground electronic scene. In her work, vaporous- magmatic sounds build soft atmospheres which tend to explosion with a continuous game between absence and presence. 

In 2020 she released her first solo album “The Wharmerall” (Pitch the Noise Records) where she composed and played electric guitar, signal processors, electronics and keyboards. The album was welcomed in a very enthusiastic way from both fans and critics. 

She won several international competitions and participated in the premiere of dozens of pieces, including F. Zappa's The Yellow Shark in Italy. She played as a soloist as well as author, both in ensemble and in orchestra across various countries such as Italy, Switzerland, Oman, Cyprus, Germany, Russia. 

She has specialized in contemporary music interpretation (ranking among the first places in several contemporary music competitions) and has been collaborating with various ensembles (Divertimento, Repertorio 0, Eutopia, Sinestesia, Fiarì, New Made.). 

She is co-author of site-specific and inter-media projects. As a score composer she has realized the music for Salvatore Insana’s found footage film “Io ho fissato il fuoco per sempre” (produced by AAMOD, Rome). 

With the experimental and noise duo IN/ELEKTRA she released the album “Shimmering behaviour” (Industrial Coast Records, UK). She held seminars and masterclasses in important Italian Conservatories.

You can find more of her work at her Bandcamp page.