Ebe Oke

Ebe Oke is a London-based composer and multimedia artist from South Georgia working with sound and performance to realize experimental compositions exploring identity, technology and our relationship to the natural world. These works often look to the patterns and sounds of nature as starting points and material for rearrangement, i.e. mycelial structures or the calls of birds and insects, inspired in part by a childhood spent on an exotic bird sanctuary in the Deep South.

Oke studied composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen, and since relocation to England has concentrated on the scoring of dance, film and art installations. Their album SPECIES, which penetrates themes of identity, gender, healing and the non-human perspective, uses bird and insect sounds which are processed as instrumentation alongside non-linear percussion, programming, string quartet and Oke’s voice pluralised through treatments to embody the multiple avatars which appear on SPECIES.

Among Oke’s other works is FIELD, commissioned by the artist AA Bronson, a founder of the artist collective General Idea. A sonic landscape in three parts which also features the sculpted vocals of Takako Minekawa, FIELD has been presented at Art Basel in Switzerland, Austria’s Salzburger Kunstverein and the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin.

Oke was commissioned in 2018 by the artist duo Fredrikson Stallard to conceive the soundscape AVALON for an immersive installation housed in a collection on a ship, while DOKUMENT #2 is a collaborative live record culled from a week spent in a studio in Copenhagen in 2016 with Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno.

In November 2021 Aviary was exhibited at Tate St Ives. It featured a generative audio visual installation combining bird sounds and artificial intelligence created in collaboration with Robert Thomas and Sammy Lee. Oke has also been invited by neuroscientist Mendel Kaelen to create generative music for psychedelic therapy for his company Wavepaths.

Oke released SPECIES LP1 & LP2 in November 2022 alongside an exhibition of related paintings at Union Gallery in London.  The show titled I Feed My Skin Upon the Landscape, Awake! features collaborations with Matthew Stone alongside the portraits Stone created for the album artwork.