kynan tan

Kynan Tan / (1988– )
Biography / Musician / Sound Artist

Kynan Tan is a sound artist based in Perth, Western Australia. Interested in live performance, installation, collaboration and audio-visual relationships, his works create an immersive, temporal environment.

Kynan composes music through a combination of instruments, electronics, computers and improvisation. His live performance works are based on a combination of scored and improvised instrumental parts and real-time manipulation with Max/MSP, the latest shows featuring vocals processed into slow moving ambient textures, with schizophrenic no-input mixer and extended guitar, often in multi-channel speaker environments.

Kynan has been involved with several sound installations, including his own Floating Spires and Threads installations. Kynan is also heavily involved in collaborating with film and dance, scoring 15 works in the past 2 years, including a collaboration with LINK Dance Company and New Zealand Dancer/Choreographer Craig Bary.

Including visual elements into live performances has been a recent focus, manipulating synaesthetic relationships between sound and light to create juxtaposing textures. Currently Kynan is completing his final year of a Bachelor of Music: Music Technology at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, a course coordinated by Cat Hope and taught by Anthony Pateras in 2009.

Press

“Kicking off proceedings was Kynan Tan, who has been establishing himself lately not only as a live musician but as an installation artist as well. Tan displayed a masterful understanding of the dynamics of experimental sound, over three pieces that, despite their disparate source material, held together as a cohesive set with a purposeful overall aesthetic. During each piece guitar, voice and analog electronics, and sampled chimes respectively, were delicately pulled apart and stitched back together via glitchy but warm digital processing.” – Adam Trainer, Drum Media, October 2009.

“I saw Kynan Tan for the first time at a showcase of young Perth composers during the TURA Totally Huge New Music Festival. He had written a computer program that converts visual information into sound, through which he ran a video of abstract colours and shapes for the first time at the showcase. It sounded like digital rain, made the brass quartet that played before him look stone-aged by comparison. You can catch his next sound experiment this Saturday suporting Brisbane sound artist Lawrence English with Splendid Friends at – no joke – Scitech.” – Matt Giles, The Wire (West Australian), October 2009.

Selected Achievements

Installations

2007 – Watched curated by Cat Hope. 10 Video iPods wall mounted.
2008 – Floating Spires by Kynan Tan. Sound installation at Spectrum Project Space. For 20 windchimes, 6 speakers and computer sound manipulation.
2009 – Threads by Kynan Tan. Computer generated tones projected through eight speakers.

Compositions

2008 – Stretched Limb from Light – For clarinet and laptop
2009 – Tides – For piano and laptop with four channel speaker system
2009 – Threads/Hallucinations – live/installated laptop performance for 8 speaker system.

Awards

2007 – Best Soundtrack – Revel8 – Super 8 film festival as part of the Revelations International Film Festival.

Soundtracks

2008 – Dance No.1 – Dance soundscape
2008 – Foresight – Screen Academy Documentary
2009 – Dance No.2 – Electronic Dance Soundtrack