Watson & Kleijn Duo

Kari Watson and Katinka Kleijn bring together a wide range of sounds, merging acoustic, analog, and digital sound sources and exploring extended aspects of improvisation such as physicality, attunement, and embodiment. Combining cello, modular eurorack synthesizer, Max MSP, and handheld electronics, the two create tactile performance environments for their audiences.

Hailed by The New York Times as “a player of formidable expressive gifts,” Dutch-born cellist Katinka Kleijn enjoys a genre-defying, interdisciplinary career. Classically trained, she has since cultivated an exploratory, interactive creative practice at the fertile intersection of improvisation, composition, and performance art. Much of Kleijn’s work illuminates the cello’s anthropomorphic qualities, often by placing the instrument in thought-provoking new contexts. Recently featured by the Washington Post as one of the 23 for ’23: Composers and performers to watch this year, Kari Watson (they/them) is a Chicago based composer, performer, and sound artist working between the mediums of contemporary concert music, electroacoustic music, live performance, and interactive installation work. Watson’s concert music and performance alike explores issues of tactility and drama in immersive sonic environments, engaging a customizable spatialization software built in MaxMSP with spatial speaker arrays to create dynamic performance environments for their audience.

Together, Watson & Kleijn have a deep commitment to live performance as a venue for possibility, vulnerability, and variability. The two embrace improvisation as grounds for continual exploration of connection, empathy and risk.