Rylan Gleave – Gulf (Spanish Premiere)

Claudia Molitor – You touched the twinkle on the helix of my ear (Spanish Premiere)

Miguel Ángel Berbis – Perfecta Imperfecció* (World Premiere)

Ben Nobuto – The Art of Sinking (Spanish Premiere)

*Funded by the IVC

Pianist, composer and technologist Zubin Kanga performs new solo works created out of his Cyborg Soloists project that combine the piano with malleable keyboards, interactive visuals, motion sensors, AI-assisted motion tracking and other cutting-edge technologies.

Claudia Molitor’s work is a dialogue between the piano and her hands on screen, notating, editing, collaging and drawing the work. In Rylan Gleave’s Gulf, the performer treads a knife-edge between natural and artificial soundscapes, using AI-assisted video motion capture (developed in collaboration with MiMU gloves creator Tom Mitchell) to allow the pianist to shape the sounds of the piano through gestures in the air.

Miguel Angel Berbis combines waves of piano notes in a precise choreography with video and electronics.

Ben Nobuto’s The Art of Sinking takes the loneliness and anxiety of a pianist preparing for a performance and explodes their inner monologue onto the stage in a virtuosic combination of ROLI Seaboard (a malleable keyboard which allows sounds to be moulded through movement within and across keys), video and piano, drawing together the pianistic bravura of Liszt and Ravel with the glitchy rhythms of video game music.

This performance is presented by Zubin Kanga as part of Cyborg Soloists, supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and Royal Holloway, University of London.

Programme Notes

Rylan Gleave – Gulf (2024)

Gulf lives on a knife edge, treading carefully through both natural and artificial soundscapes, and seeks to find a relationship between queer and sacred identities. The performer traverses this path alone, the tempermental duet between piano and electronics only ever able to respond to itself.

By controlling the effects that alter the sound of the piano, and to a degree, how long the listener dwells in heavy in and lighter spaces, the performer balances on either side of the gap. The performer is also asked to de- and re-attach themselves to both their instrument and their upper body movements, timing moments of change carefully to avoid tumbling over the edge.

Gulf was commissioned by Zubin Kanga as part of Cyborg Soloists, with the support of a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and Royal Holloway, University of London.

Claudia Molitor – You touched the twinkle on the helix of my ear (2018)

Compositional time, filmic time, editing time, rehearsal time, practicing time all enter into the performance of You touched the twinkle on the helix of my ear. Their echoes describe the interrelationships that exist between the haptic realities of composition and performance both focussed on manifesting an instance, the same instance, of sound.

Conceived as a contemplative dialogue between the present pianist and the absent composer—each ‘haunting’ each other’s creative space—the piece audio-visually explores the interplay between performing, notating and sounding.

You touched the twinkle on the helix of my ear was commissioned by Zubin Kanga, with the support of the RVW Trust.

Programme Note by Claudia Molitor

Miguel Ángel Berbis – Perfecta Imperfecció (2025)

Perfect Imperfection invites the audience on a sonic and visual journey through the contrast — and eventual fusion — between the digital and the human. The piano, a symbol of expressive gesture, encounters an electronic counterpart that begins as rigid, mathematical, almost brutalist, and gradually becomes infused with error, breath, and ambiguity.

The work unfolds from a state of mechanical perfection — conveyed through precise pulses, filtered spectra, and synchronized flashes — toward a space where rubato, unstable timbres, and rhythmic imperfection emerge as poetic expression. In this multisensory dramaturgy, light and video do not merely accompany the music: they converse with it, create tension, and breathe alongside it, projecting an inner landscape where the machine ceases to execute and begins to listen.

Perfect Imperfection does not aim to oppose the human and the artificial, but rather to reveal how beauty can arise from the fragility of error — as if the machine, exposed to music, were to discover in the trembling of the pulse an unexpected sense of wonder.

Ben Nobuto – The Art of Sinking (2025)

You are playing to an imaginary crowd in a huge, imaginary stadium. It’s your big day: everyone is excited, but you feel sleepy and not really up to it. You keep hearing a little voice in your head telling you to do things. Everything feels slightly glossy like a dream. You have the feeling that you’ve forgotten to do something urgent. You keep playing. The crowd loves you.

The Art of Sinking was commissioned by Zubin Kanga as part of Cyborg Soloists, with the support of a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and Royal Holloway, University of London.