Nicholas Chase - Students

Alpert Award Nominee Nicholas Chase's work has been hailed by Strad Magazine as 'brilliant,' the Los Angeles Times as 'flamboyant, avant-garde' and 'brawling yet taut...the Rite of Spring meets Metallica,' by the Albuquerque Journal as 'crackling, witty,' by the Whittier Press as 'seamless, powerful... spectacular' and, dubbing him 'Eye/Ear Explorer,' the LA Weekly writes of his short opera 22 (Taker ofthe Total Chance), 'the human brain at its most imaginative.'



Chase earned his MFA in Composition/New Media and Integrated Media studying with Morton Subotnick, Bunita Marcus, Stephen L. Mosko, and additionally with Ziad Bunni of the Aleppo Conservatory of Arabic Classical Music, James Tenney, Christian Wolf and Zhou Long.

Chase's chamber works have been performed by the California E.A.R. Unit, New Zealand's 175 East, South West Chamber Music and the Philadelphia Classical Symphony from whom he received a joint award from the Symphony and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for the Andy Warhol-inspired work tw!TcH. His electronic audio/visual interactive work has been featured as part of the San Francisco/Bay Area-based Illuminated Corridor, the Center for Electronic Art, Information and Technology (CEAIT) Festival in Los Angeles, and a concert of his electro-acoustic compositions was featured in 2003 as part of Stanford University's "Music from the Edge"contemporary music festival at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).

Chase has been commissioned by the California E.A.R. Unit, the Long Beach Opera, Viola Plus, Ltd. as well as Swiss bassist Cristin Wildbolz, first violin of New York's Ensemble Sospeso, Mark Menzies, and internationally renown flutist Dorothy Stone to name a few.

As a performer, Chase is former frontman to the pop act Soul Parish, who topped the European Indie/Gothic club charts with their dance single Lilith. Chase has since appeared performing electronics and DJ turntables with his own touring ensemble, with the California E.A.R. Unit, and with renown harpist/improviser/scholar, Susan Allen, and British bassist, Rus Pearson, collectivelyknown as NIRUSU III, who opened the 2006 Edgetone Music Summit in San Francisco to outstandingly positive acclaim, and with Russian pianist/improviser Roman Stolyar at REDCAT in Los Angeles. Most recently Chase has lent his voice talent to a series of programs featured on the German radio station BauhausFM out of Weimar, Germany.

Chase is founder of the Egg Ensemble whose serial film/performance project Eleven Ideas (eleven.mas-lab.org) has been performed and screened at venues in Hollywood, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Helsinki. Chase is also Founding Director of the Musical Arts/SoundLaboratory (www.mas-lab.org) and Chase Ateliers, an organization committed to inter-disciplinary and experimental collaborations.

Recent works include the world premieres of Considering Light by the Sonic Liberation Players in Los Angeles, the Ngoma Lungundu (Voice That Thunders) and Songs of the Thirsty Sword - Part I for piano, interactive electronics and video headlining two festival openings (New Music Plus+ - Czech Republic, Music By The Eyeful - San Francisco), and the world-premiere presentation of Transmissions, an interactive audio/video street composition as part of a collaborative, public installation at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Additionally Blue Sky Over Buchenwald, soundtrack to Wie kann es so schön in Buchenwald sein?, the Alternativer Medienpreis-nominated documentary on the Buchenwald Concentration camp of World War II and Ngoma Lungundu have just been released on iTunes along with the US release of Seventh Sense for bass andinteractive electronics (originally released on STV/Unit Records in Switzerland).

Upcoming events include the concert premiere of a revised version of Songs of the Thirsty Sword, as well as a recital of new solo+interactive electronics and video works that will tour the US and Europe in 2010.

Chase returns from the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany where he taught visual media and worked with students from Tonji University, Shanghai, collaborating with the BauhausFM Experimental Radio to work toward the PhD in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

More information at www.nicholaschase.net.