Trombone
My professional trajectory has been heavily influenced by my career as a trombonist specialized in experimental music. As a soloist, I have performed throughout Europe and North America presenting works from some of the most important compositional voices of the 21st century. The recordings below present a short overview of my engagements with both established and emerging composers, and include both solo recordings and performances as well as solo engagements with prominent European new music ensembles.
Collaborations
While the primary material in this portfolio concerns my commitment to developing close-knit, long-term relationships with materiality and material agency in sound, I am equally committed to fostering close collaboration within more traditional contexts. This section of the portfolio presents several collaborative projects that have been central to my artistic development in recent years, as well as showing the avenues along which these musical-performative relationships will continue to grow in coming years. These collaborative spaces include the musical-theatrical universe I have constructed with Curtis Rumrill (which is threaded through multiple collaborative works, including the hour-long performance presenting in the trailer below), the ever-expanding network of interactive feedback loops I have built with João Carlos Pacheco (ranging from close collaboration through long-term relationships with composers to our hybrid instrument constructions and performances), and the rich and rewarding relationship I have built with my duo partner Winnie Huang that has allowed us to work closely with a number of composers to realize ambitious and imaginative new formulations of our musical, instrumental, and performative practices.
Artistic Research and Solo Projects
Current work revolves primarily around a series of hybrid brass/string/reed/percussion instruments that I develop, build, and perform myself: chimeracords. Salvaged from the waste of industrial production, these materials engage important questions about the source and exploitation of the material world and the ecosystems from which they derive. And although this research braids together multiple expertises that I have honed over the last two decades—from experimental performance to instrument construction and metalworking to academic scholarship and documentation—its primary focus is to reveal and amplify the agencies of these materials themselves. With this in mind, the spaces of the workshop, the sound studio, and the gallery or concert hall are recalibrated to help in disclosing these materials’ capacities to interact, perform, and provoke responses from their own metallic bodies, from myself and the workshop in which we converge, and from the audiences and venues that they encounter. More extensive discussion of these projects can be found in my recent publications, but the following selections showcase recent evolutions within the ongoing collaborations between myself and these dynamic metals.
Piece for Saxophone and Violin Player (2020)
Anna Sowa
performed by hoodwink
(Winnie Huang and Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn)
Solo works for Trombone and Electronics
featuring Zeynep Toraman, Hunjoo Jung,
and Mehmet Ali Uzunselvi
https://vrzvr.bandcamp.com/album/solo-works-for-trombone-and-electronics
Laughter Studies 2 (2016)
Louis d'Heudieres
performed by hoodwink
(Winnie Huang and Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn)
Pierluigi Billone: Ebe und Anders
Klangforum Wien
Clement Power
Sava Stoianov, trumpet
Kevin Fairbairn, trombone
Yaron Deutsch, guitar
Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn: A body of seemingly
Studio LOOS, the Hague
as part of Sounding Sonic Materialism
(Leiden University, art_research_convergence)
full session accessible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyErYoh4fYc&t=3260s
Liza Lim on Trombone
original and arranged solo works for double-bell
trombone and adapted baroque trombone
(self-built and developed)
Lucia Ronchetti: Forward and downward, turning neither to the left nor to the right
(excerpts, documentation)
Collegium Novum Zürich
Jonathan Stockhammer
Imke Frank, cello
Kevin Fairbairn, trombone
Matthias Ziegler, contrabass flute
Sounds of Extraction and Material Agency (2024)
In the Making #4 (Leiden University)
Gallery West Den Haag, The Hague (NL)
(performance installation begins at 1:10:10)
happy talky (2015)
Leo Collin
performed by Blechtrommel
(João Carlos Pacheco/Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn)
sensitive switch (2015)
Santiago Diez-Fischer
performed by hoodwink
(Winnie Huang and Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn)
