Randy Gibson
artistic director and composer

Randy Gibson is a composer and performer living and working in New York City. He works with structure, evolutionary compositional models, and improvisation to create enveloping and ritualistic works in just intonation.

Gibson began his musical training at the age of six studying percussion. In the summer of 1998, he traveled to Japan to study marimba with the great Keiko Abe. In early 2003, Gibson began composition studies in New York 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 importantly Raga singing in the Kirana tradition with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, but also Balinese and Japanese music.

By presenting his work with visual elements and the markers of ritual (incense, lighting) Gibson is able to offer the audience a way into the right frame of mind to embrace stillness and become absorbed in the sound.

Gibson’s work has been commissioned by choreographers such as Lauren Beale and Kim Olson / sweetedge, video artist Ana Baer-Carrillo, The Tapeworm cassette label, experimental bassoonist Annie Lyle, and new music ensembles Ekmeles and The Guidonian Hand. The London World Premiere of his work “The Third Analog Pillar...” was made possible by a grant from the American Music Center.

In addition to performances during the annual Avant Music Festival in New York City, Gibson has presented performances and installations at festivals around the world including the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art in Minnesota, The Internationale Tanzmesse NRW in Düsseldorf, The Boulder and Minnesota International Fringe Festivals, HOT DAM: the opening festival of the Denver Art Museum, the Sans Souci International Festival of Dance Cinema, the ISIM 3rd annual conference, the Erick Hawkins Legacy Forum in New York, the 2010 Korea Experimental Arts Festival in Seoul, and the 44. Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt.

Gibson is the artistic director of Avant Media, a non-profit organization dedicated to collaborative artistic endeavors.