Zubin Kanga: Ghost in the Machine + After Dark
Southbank CentreBelvedere Road, South Bank, London
Sat 17 Oct · 20:00 · £32
About this event
The trailblazing pianist, composer and technologist performs a world premiere by AI pioneer George Lewis and works by Nwando Ebizie, Alex Paxton and Ben Nobuto. Pianist, composer and technologist Zubin Kanga performs groundbreaking new music from his Cyborg Soloists project that fuses classical virtuosity with cutting-edge technologies, combining the piano with hybrid instruments, digital avatars, synthesisers, body sensors and experimental AI. The centrepiece is a monumental new work by visionary composer George Lewis, who has been combining interactive AI systems and live musicians for over 45 years. Blombos Playground is a new milestone in his decades of human-computer innovation, combining Kanga’s live keyboardist with two AI improvising systems, Voyager and Somax. Voyager is Lewis’ iconic interactive software system which he has been continuously developing over four decades. It responds to the live performer like a natural improvisor with its own unique personality. Somax, a machine-learning-based system developed at IRCAM in Paris, has been trained on Kanga’s improvisations to become a kind of improvising AI doppelgänger. In Blombos Playground, the two systems are combined as SoVo, a new hybrid AI improvising system, performing and improvising with Kanga on three virtual keyboard instruments swirling across multiple speakers, in a breathtaking dialogue between real and virtual creativity. Nwando Ebizie’s I Will Fix Myself (Just Circles) explores the influence of Chopin’s technique on Zubin’s relationship to the piano, combining interview materials and AI voices with the piano, a synthesiser and complex Afrofuturist electronic textures. In Alex Paxton’s Cuddley Wuddley, everyday experiences become whimsical studies expanding the piano with a keyboard playing sampled choirs, drums, birds and cooking utensils. And 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 duet between the pianist and a digital avatar. Performed on piano, ROLI Seaboard, video and electronics, it draws together the pianistic bravura of Liszt and Ravel with the glitchy rhythms of video game music. All the music was commissioned or created as part of Cyborg Soloists, supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and Royal Holloway, University of London. SoVo was created in 2025 by Marco Fiorini and Gérard Assayag at IRCAM, and George Lewis and Damon Holzborn at Columbia University. ‘Cyborg pianist’ Zubin Kanga is at the forefront of creating, co-creating and performing groundbreaking interdisciplinary works that explore and redefine how musicians can interact with new technologies.
