Human’s Got Talent - Artist bios
Solomon Frank
Solomon Frank is a performer and composer living and working on Cammeraygal land, whose inter-disciplinary practice straddles cross-species musical collaboration, vacuum cleaners and time travel. Solomon receives emails from the future including music and musical instructions written by future humans and entities for Frank to perform and carry out in the present. Solomon’s works and those received from the future have been performed by Ensemble Offspring, Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellows, Kirkos Ensemble (Ireland), double bassist Will Hansen, Willoughby Symphony Orchestra and E-Mex Ensemble (Germany) and at Mona Foma (Tasmania), Liveworks, Canberra International Music Festival and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Syd) . Solomon’s improvisational practice expands upon the clarinet, replacing parts of the clarinet with other objects, homemade aluminium and plastic reeds, hoses, vacuum cleaners, watering cans and water.
Liz Yung Cheung
Emerging composer Liz Yung Cheung enjoys messing around with the skeletal sounds of instruments, compiling the noises your teacher tells you not to make during lessons. Specialising in low flutes and Chinese bowed strings, they experiment with curious noises in chamber and solo settings. Liz is a performer-improviser in Adelante Tango, the DeeBeeTees, musician and illustrator in Dreambox Collective, and appears as guest artist with various other ensembles including Meow Meow Casio. In their spare time, Liz can be found sipping tea, practising activism, and writing things like poetry and shopping lists. Liz’s musics are made on unceded Gadigal Land.
Jaslyn Robertson
Jaslyn Robertson is a queer, multidisciplinary composer and researcher. Driven by collaboration and experimentation, she works with video, spatialised audio and new forms of notation to realise her creative concepts. Working closely with improvising performers, artists, writers and fashion designers expands her perspective. The aim of her work is to form multisensory performances that raise questions and unfold into discussion on complex social issues. In her PhD at Monash University, she is developing an opera that queers concepts of censorship. She seeks to contribute to a wider discussion about self-censorship within structures of power through her work.
Shahmen Suku (Radha)
Shahmen Suku was born in 1987 in Singapore and arrived in Australia in 2009. They are a performance artist based in Sydney who explore ideas of racial, religious and cultural identity, gender roles, the home and the kitchen, food and storytelling. Growing up in a modern matriarchal Indian family in Singapore, Shahmen processes his sense of displacement from home as Radha, the Diva from India. Moving to Australia has given Shahmen multiple perspectives on migration, culture, race, colonisation and gender identity. Shahmen discusses these issues openly through his alter ego, Radha, sharing stories the way she learnt them from his mother’s kitchen. Radha’s multifaceted practice has also seen them perform/host numerous music festivals and events, shows and workshops for kids and a Chef for the TV show The Set on The ABC.
Jason Noble
Jason Noble is one of Australia’s most versatile clarinettists – experimental to classical – a soloist and core member of Ensemble Offspring. Jason has performed at festivals locally and internationally, from Warsaw to London, Shanghai to Kabul, and all major cities across Australia. “His expertise and virtuosic playing give new insights into the versatility of the bass clarinet” (Sounds Like Sydney)
His album releases include THRUM (2020) – a collection of improvised ambient sounds created with Kim Cunio on piano – and Chi’s Cakewalk (2017), an album of new Australian works for clarinets. He has also made guest appearances on albums for Gurrumul, Sally Seltmann, ABC Classics, Gondwana Voices, Paul Mac, Halcyon, SICKO improvising orchestra, and the Tiwi women’s choir Ngarukuruwala. Recently he performed at the Adelaide Festival in Incredible Floridas, curated by Kim Williams, appearing as soloist with the Australian String Quartet.
Jason collaborates with living and emerging composers, and is an in-demand music educator and examiner. He has been invited to teach two winter academies at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Kabul, and maintains links with staff and students there.
Niki Johnson
Niki Johnson is a percussionist and composer-performer whose musical practice incorporates contemporary classical repertoire, improvisation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and performance art. Niki has recorded percussion for Trackdown Fox studios, the ABC, and the Sydney Opera House, and has been commissioned to compose and perform solo percussion works at Powerhouse Museum and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Benjamin Ward
Ben is a musician working mainly on the lands of the Gadigal and Bidjigal whose practice has recently focussed on altered tunings, texture and improvisation. outside his work on the double bass w the sso he is inspired by the wonderful community of musicians in sydney. place and history is currently an important foundation of his artistic thought.
Jacob Abela
Jacob Abela is a keyboardist and composer based in Naarm (Melbourne) and specialising in new music and experimental performance. Described as performing ‘like electricity…as if possessed by a musical demon’ (Theatre People), Jacob is the keyboardist for contemporary ensemble Rubiks Collective and regularly works with leading Australian and international artists. Jacob has also worked extensively in theatre music, most recently in composer Kate Neal and animator Sal Cooper’s A Book of Hours, which Rubiks commissioned and premiered in 2023.