VISTAS by Kari Watson & Katinka Kleijn

VISTAS - Kari Watson & Katinka Kleijn

Kari Watson and Katinka Kleijn bring together a wide range of sounds, merging acoustic, analog, and digital sound sources and often exploring extended aspects of improvisation such as physicality, attunement, and embodiment. Combining cello, modular eurorack synthesizer, Max MSP, and handheld electronics, the two create tactile performance environments for their audiences. Together, Watson & Kleijn have a deep commitment to live performance as a venue for possibility, vulnerability, and variability. The two embrace improvisation as grounds for continual exploration of connection, empathy and risk. 

VISTAS

An experiment in scale and vantage point, VISTAS consists of a single thirty-five-minute track that explores two seemingly contrasting sound sources: the acoustic cello and the eurorack analog modular synthesizer. Electrical circuits and metal strings warp and weft, rewiring and restringing a panoramic sonic tapestry.

Watson and Kleijn transform and transpose their instruments, morphing from fusions to fissures, from discrete sonic characters to summations of astonishing blend. VISTAS gradually reveals different sides of these two instruments, illuminating their seams and edges, playing amidst and between a sonic language that blurs pitch, texture, and noise, refracting and rebuilding a tactile tectonic track.

Hailed by The New York Times as “a player of formidable expressive gifts,” cellist Katinka Kleijn has established herself as a multidisciplinary artist with a genre-defying career. Her work spans improvisation, composition, and performance art, moving across traditionally siloed practices. She frequently explores the cello as a body corollary to her own, placing the instrument in thought-provoking new contexts—both sonically and conceptually. Kleijn is a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Recently featured by Musical America as their New Artist of the Month (February, 2025), Kari Watson (they/them) is a Chicago based composer, performer, and sound artist working between the mediums of contemporary concert music, electroacoustic music, live performance, and interactive installation work. Watson’s concert music and performance practice alike explore issues of tactility, physicality, attunement, and drama in immersive sonic environments, often incorporating electronics as mediators to and/or extensions of the human body. Watson is currently completing a PhD in Composition and Electronic Music at the University of Chicago.

https://www.kariwatson.com
https://www.katinkakleijn.com

Kari Watson and Katinka Kleijn bring together a wide range of sounds, merging acoustic, analog, and digital sound sources and often exploring extended aspects of improvisation such as physicality, attunement, and embodiment. Combining cello, modular eurorack synthesizer, Max MSP, and handheld electronics, the two create tactile performance environments for their audiences.