Ess Whiteley is an NJ-born, West Coast-based composer and sound artist. Their diverse practice combines electronics with acoustic instruments, multimedia, and repurposed materials to explore temporal elasticity, memory, eco-futurity, strange posthuman mutations, and emergent cyborgian subjectivities that arise in response to technologically mediated life. Sometimes hyperreal and maximal, other times hypnotic and meditative, their work seeks to generate sonic worlds that make audible human and more-than-human entanglements—enacting possible visions of being, becoming, and relationality, and new ways of experiencing time, memory, and futurity.

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 artist-in-residence at the I-Park Foundation, Millay Arts, and the Visby International Centre for Composers.

Ess has toured Europe, the UK, the US, and Canada as a guitarist/multi-instrumentalist with projects like Gulfer, Common Holly, Liila, and others, and their creative and deep listening practice is heavily influenced by the two years they spent living, studying, and practicing intensively at Zen Buddhist monasteries in the Southwest and West Coast of the United States.

Ess holds a Ph.D. in Composition from the University of California, San Diego where their primary teachers were Marcos Balter, Michelle Lou, and Roger Reynolds. Their Ph.D. dissertation was called “Sonic Worlding, Posthuman Listening, and Cyborgian Entanglements - Towards a Theory–Practice Cartography of Electroacoustic Composition,” which can be read here. Ess began conservatory pre-college studies at Mannes School of Music (New York) and received a Bachelor of Music Degree in Composition with a minor in World Religions Studies from McGill University (Montréal).

👋 contact: esswhiteley@gmail.com