"Nicola L. Hein (Born 1988 in Düsseldorf) is a guitarist, composer and soundartist. As a guitarist he is mainly concerned about the search for new sounds on his instrument. He plays electric and acoustic guitar with or without preperations and tries to find new ways of playing the guitar within the context of Free Improvised Music and Jazz. He plays the guitar with his hands and plectrum but also with a lot of different objects: screws, rulers, iron wool, violin bow, abrasive paper, magnets and many other objects which are part of his musical vocabulary. The result is his very own world of sounds, which is using the rich potential of the guitar as a creator of sounds. The manual creation is a very important character of this sound world, which never gets distorted by the use of electronic effects. As a composer he finds different ways of integrating philosophical ideas into music and to play music as a form of philosophy. In order to actualize itself the compositional work is always aimed at the improvising musician as a dialectic partner of the composition. From the interplay of these partners an ästhetic emerges that is based on the spontanity of the performance and the setting of aesthetic action spaces alike. As a soundartist he is developing different ways to project the musical ontology of Improvised Music onto different aesthetic rooms. This is done by creating instruments, installations and other ways of using the guitar, which use the musical ontology of Improvised Music as the center of the sonic practise but generate a lot of different sense structures that differ from the usual practise of Improvised Music (for example by creating a scenic sense layer etc.). He also creates sound installations which involve the recipient as a part of the work. The works encourage the recipient to make a special aesthetic experience with different sounds. The aesthetic of these sounds is inspired by the aesthetics of Free Improvised Music.

He studied Jazzguitar, Soundart/Composition, Philosophy and German philology at the Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität Bonn and the Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Projects with the support of: Initiative Musik, Staatsministerium für Kultur und Medien, Kunststiftung NRW, Deutscher Musikrat, Akademie der Künste der Welt, Kultursekretariat NRW, Ministerium für Familie, Kinder, Jugend, Kultur und Sport des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Landesmusikrat NRW, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Staatstheater Mainz, Staatstheater Hannover, ON Neue Musik Cologne, RheinEnergieStiftung Kultur, Kulturamt der Stadt Köln, Kulturamt der Stadt Düsseldorf, Kulturamt der Stadt Essen, Kulturbehörde Hamburg, Hamburgische Kulturstiftung, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Köln Musik, Acht Brücken, RWE Stiftung für Energie & Gesellschaft, Second Floor e.V., Jazz Offensive Essen, ZKM Karlsruhe etc. He has worked with: Evan Parker, Phil Minton, John Russell, Paul Lytton, Frank Gratkwoski, Michael Vorfeld, Rudi Mahall, Tobias Delius, Liz Allbee, Christian Lillinger, Ute Wassermann, John Butcher, Axel Dörner, Thomas Lehn, Wilbert de Joode, Tristan Honsinger, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Michael Thieke, Sofia Jernberg, Audrey Chen, Peter Jacquemyn, Carl Ludwig Hübsch, Robert Landfermann, Jon Rose, Sebastian Gramss, Tomomi Adachi, Alfred Zimmerlin, DJ Illvibe etc."

"Mia Zabelka is a sound artist, violinist and vocalist from Vienna, who creates hauntingly sensual music and is regarded as one of the leading 21st century proponents of what is known as experimental violin music. Mia Zabelka's projects show her exceptional mastery and a deep understanding of the violin, be it acoustic or electric, solo or as part of a collective. In her hands the boundaries of this instrument fade and paths to uncharted sonic territory open, as she bends genres, the conventional use of electronics and the human voice to expand the spectrum for her to paint her musical language in. Live in concert Mia Zabelka is an electrifying performer. In any context, she has the uncanny knack of commanding the stage and always being the centre of an audience's attention, achieved by the intensity and focus of her performances, rather than any gratuitous showmanship.

At the age of seven, Mia Zabelka discovered the violin. She was eager to find out how this musical object could produce interesting sounds when touched with a wooded stick strung with horsehair. Zabelka was already able to play works by the fabled virtuoso Nicolo Paganini in her first year of instruction on the instrument and at 12 was the youngest member of the Austrian Youth Orchestra. During her classical training with Alexander Arenkov, an assistant of David Oistrach, at the Vienna Conservatory of Music, she already began to play with various jazz and rock bands. With her inborn curiosity for the new and all that was unexpected Mia Zabelka then turned to the study of electroacoustic music at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna , creating a foundation on the basis of which she continues to construct and explore the limits of sound and music in a language entirely her own. She has now developed a unique language based on the de- and reconstruction of the violin's sonic possibilities for over 20 years, expanding the range of the instrument using live electronic devices, preparing it through the insertion of alien objects between or on the strings and innovative performance techniques. Mia Zabelka describes this process as Automatic Playing, continuously exploring sound and music as physical phenomena, always pushing back the boundaries in experimental performances and compositions that question established notions, improving the available techniques and given structures.

Her openness to the most varied musical directions and eclectic artistic influences have resulted in collaborations with numerous prominent international artists including John Zorn, David Moss, Pauline Oliveros, Elliott Sharp, Dälek, Audrey Chen, Maria Chavez, Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner, Lydia Lunch and Electric Indigo among many others. She has been the artistic director of phonofemme Vienna, an international festival of female experimental music and sound art, since 2009. In 2007 Mia Zabelka founded the Klanghaus, a center for sound and interdisciplinary art at her house in southern Styria/Austria. The Klanghaus is a meeting point for international and local artists and hosts the Klang.Zeit festival four times a year."