Ess Whiteley is a composer, performer, sound, & intermedia artist whose work spans across contemporary, electroacoustic, sound art, and ambient-electronic idioms. Their practice combines electronics with acoustic instruments, multimedia, repurposed materials to produce audible worlds that explore temporal elasticity, memory, haunted presents, and strange posthuman mutations. Sometimes hyperreal and maximal, other times hypnotic and meditative, their work plays with perceptual ambiguity, reference, technological agency, and absurdity, generating entangled, synthetic-organic architectures that shift between moving states of entropy, periodicity, and stasis.

Ess’s music has been awarded by the Martirano Composition Award and MA/IN Matera Intermedia Festival, commissioned by ensembles such as Alarm Will Sound, Riot Ensemble, and Popebama and performed/exhibited internationally at: MATA (New York, USA), Int-Act (Bangkok, TH), Mixtur (Barcelona, ES), Dublin Music Current (Dublin, IE), SICMF (Seoul, KR), Nuova Consonanza (Rome, IT), SMC (Graz, AT), MANTIS (Manchester, UK), Espacios Sonoros (Salta, AR), Darmstädter Ferienkurse (Darmstadt, DE), Vox Electronica (Lviv, UA), ICMC (Boston, USA), SEAMUS (New York, USA), TIER (Berlin, DE), Echofluxx (Prague, CZ), WOCMAT (Hsinchu, TW), Centro Ricerche Musicali (Rome, IT), amongst others.

Their work has been featured on publications like Pitchfork, The Wire, New Music Handbook, Relevant Tones, and released on labels like Métron Records, Not Not Fun, 99Chants, Topshelf Records, and others. They were a resident composer at the Mizzou International Composers Festival, and arist-in residence at the I-Park Foundation, Millay Arts, and the Visby International Centre for Composers. Ess has also toured Europe, the UK, the US, and Canada multiple times as a guitarist/multi-instrumentalist with the bands Gulfer, Common Holly and others.

Ess began conservatory pre-college studies at Mannes School of Music (New York) and received a Bachelor of Music degree in Composition from McGill University (Montreal). They hold an MA/PhD from the University of California, San Diego where their primary teachers were Marcos Balter, Michelle Lou, and Roger Reynolds.

👋 contact:

esswhiteley@gmail.com

swhitele@ucsd.edu