Jenn Kirby

(b. 1987)
side profile of person with dark hair
Photo
Daryl Feehely

 

Jenn Kirby is a composer, performer, and music technologist. She works with instrumental composition, electroacoustic music, experimental electronic music, and regularly collaborates with musicians and movement artists. Jenn makes hybrid musical instruments, using software, sensors and re-purposed controllers, as interfaces to body movement for live electronic music. Her performance work often engages with physicality, texture, and embodiment through postdigital practices. Jenn’s research interests are in the perception and manipulation of time in music, and movement-led performance system and hybrid instrument design. Jenn is a lecturer in electronic music and technology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Jenn’s music has been performed throughout Europe, North America and in parts of East Asia. She has been commissioned by Evlana / New Music Dublin, Kirkos Ensemble, Glasshouse Ensemble, Ensemble Entropy, among others. She has undertaken residencies with Cove Park, soundSCAPE Festival and National Theatre Wales. Jenn has released 4 solo albums (2 with pan y rosas discos) and 3 EPs. Her work has been described as “digital surrealism”, “intoxicatingly strange” and having a “sense of adventure and experimentalism”. At the centre of Jenn’s work is a curiosity for sound, body, and connection, often forming through the fracturing of sound, movement, and the exposure of process.