Andrea & Zeena Parkins

Cousins Andrea Parkins (accordion, electronics) and Zeena Parkins (harp, electronics) meet up on the west coast for an evening of improvised solos and duets. Presented by Nonsequitur.

Andrea Parkins is a composer, sound/installation artist and electroacoustic musician who engages with interactive electronics as a compositional/performative process, and explores strategies related to Fluxus’ ordered, yet ephemeral activities. An integral participant of the New York sound art and experimental music scene and worldwide, she is especially known for her pioneering gestural/textural approach to her electronically-processed accordion and customized live sound processing. Her laptop electronics and amplified accordion create sonic fields of lush harmonics, noisy concretized disruption, and sculpted/soaring electronic feedback.

Multi-instrumentalist/composer/improviser Zeena Parkins is a pioneer of contemporary harp practice and performance, reimagining the instrument as a “sound machine of limitless capacity.” She plays a one-of-a-kind electric harp and has extended the language of the acoustic harp with the inventive use of unusual techniques, preparations, and electronic processing. Blending and morphing of both real and imagined instruments with mangled, sliced, or possibly disengaged sounds, she remains in process with sound as material and music, engaged in translations of sonic states in the concert hall, the black box theater, the dance studio, the recording studio, the classroom, the cinema, the skyscraper, the ocean and the gallery.