Randy Gibson is a composer, performer, and nascent visual artist living and working in Brooklyn.
He began his musical training at the age of six, studying drums, and later marimba with Pete Ehrmann in Boulder, Colorado. In the summer of 1998, he traveled to Japan, where he studied marimba with Keiko Abe. Earlier that same year he wrote his first composition, Descention, a short solo for percussion using extended techniques to augment a research paper about John Cage.
In early 2003, Gibson began composition studies in New York City with seminal minimalist pioneer La Monte Young. Continually humbling and revelatory, his studies with Young have brought greater clarity to his work, and reinforced his aesthetic convictions. Gibson combines live and electronic music, as well as aspects of the world music he has studied, most recently and prominently Raga singing in the Kirana tradition with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, but also Balinese and Japanese music. Gibson has begun to explore just intonation and the Raga tradition with Separate Haven (for violin and electronics), Aqua Madora (for piano and sine-wave drones.), and the continually evolving, Doleo Æternus (for multiple instruments with computer). These works highlight his interest in small sounds and subtle shifting patterns in dense and ritualistic sonic environments.
His first large piece, Chaos and Simplicity, was written during his trip to Japan, and received its premiere in the spring of 1999. Since that time he has received commissions from choreographers and film-makers, including Kim Olson/Sweetedge, Lauren Beale, the Interstate Dance Collective, Notes In Motion, and Ana Baer-Carrillo. His piece Alicia with Baer-Carrillo was awarded second place for the Creative Works Award through the University of Colorado, the first time the award was given to a dance performance. His pieces have been performed in North America and Europe,and have been included in several festivals including the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art in Minnesota, The Internationale Tanzmesse NRW in Dusseldorf, The Boulder International Fringe Festival, HOT DAM: the opening festival of the Denver Art Museum, the Sans Souci International Festival of Dance Cinema, the Minnesota Fringe Festival, the International Society of Improvised Music 3rd annual conference, the Erick Hawkins Legacy Forum in New York, and the 44 Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt.
Gibson’s compositions are published by Golightly Music (ASCAP). In 2003, Gibson, together with Ana Baer-Carrillo, co-founded Avant Media Performance, Inc. a non-profit organization dedicated to collaborative performance works.
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