Zubin Kanga - CTRL / ABSORBER (2024) Hi-Res

Zubin Kanga is a London-based contemporary composer, pianist, and musicologist known for exploring new technologies within music. He is also an enthusiastic advocate for other contemporary composers and has premiered over 150 works.

Kanga was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1982, and he was a student at the Sydney Grammar School. After he graduated in 2000, he enrolled at the University of Sydney and studied computer science, music, and philosophy. He joined the contemporary chamber group Ensemble Offspring in 2005, and he remains active with the ensemble. Two years later, Kanga moved to London and became a student of Rolf Hind at the Royal Academy of Music, where he earned his MM in 2009 and PhD in 2014. It was during this period that he was named "Best Newcomer" in the 2010 Limelight Awards by Limelight magazine, which led to international recognition.

Following his graduation in 2014, Kanga received research fellowships from the Royal Academy of Music and the University of Nice Sophia, and he released the album Not Music Yet. In 2015, he appeared as both a piano soloist and accompanist on David Gorton: Orfordness, Chiaroscuro: Modern works for soprano and piano, and Piano Inside Out, which was nominated for an Australian Independent Record Award. He released Patrick Nunn: Morphosis in 2016, which featured works commissioned by Kanga that incorporated experimental components such as live electronics and 3D motion sensors. In the following year, he premiered Dead Leaves on ABC Classic radio, he received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, and he collaborated with the Marsyas Trio on the album In the Theatre of Air.

Kanga performed his Wikipiano recital program at the 2018 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and in 2019 he undertook a critically acclaimed tour of Australia. He began an appointment as a lecturer at Royal Holloway University in 2020, and he received a £1.4 million UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for his Cyborg Soloists project, which explores the possibilities of AI, machine learning, and interactive virtual reality technologies in music. The 2023 release Zubin Kanga: Cyborg Pianist was the culmination of this research, and features Kanga's Hypnagogia (after Bach) and the works of Laura Bowler, Shiva Feshareki, and others. ~ RJ Lambert