Sarah Peebles
composer/performer

"Sarah Peebles has one of the most careful and subtle ears of any composer of musique concréte working today." -- Terra Nova Journal (MIT Press)

Composer/performer Sarah Peebles integrates sounds she has gathered from natural habitats and cityscapes in North America and Japan into her improvisations and sound works - often exploring alternate performance settings, such as museums, bamboo groves, temples and parks. Her work with electroacoustics focuses heavily on sampled sounds, which are called forth and manipulated on the fly, using a Macintosh computer running Max, Sample Cell and other programs. She gathers and alters her own sounds, which run the gamut from dust pans, home-made reeds and bullroarers, to hummingbirds, ignited vapors, cicadas and water. Peebles also draws upon the sustained tones of the shoh - a free-reed mouth-organ noted for its unique timbre and tendency to 'throw' sound in unexpected ways.

Uniting her music with diverse arts, she has collaborated with spoken word, dance, video and installation artists, artificial intelligence researchers and other musicians. Additionally, she is a member of Cinnamon Sphere trio (calligraphy performance by Chung Gong Ha, with improvised soundscapes by Peebles and guitarist Nilan Perera), active in performing as well as producing video and audio works.

Peebles' work in new music has included performances in Canada, U.S.A., Australia, Japan, and the U.K. at such venues as The Kitchen, Roulette Intermedium (NYC), Studio Kinshicho (Tokyo), SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater Evening, Adelaide Festival of Arts-The Listening Room (ABC), and production/performance for Sonic Circuits festivals in Toronto and Minneapolis. She is published on a variety of labels, including innova, Barooni (with David Toop), MusicWorks, Hornblower, The Aerial and others. Peebles has also studied and performed traditional and contemporary music in Japan independently and as a Japan Foundation Uchida Fellow.

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