Music in Motion: Kaki King, Nitin Sawhney, and The Thunderstruck Project

Kaki King—the first female on Rolling Stone's "guitar god" list—is known for her percussive and jazz-tinged melodies, energetic live shows, unique tunings on acoustic and lap steel guitars, and stunning visual performances. At Music in Motion, King will perform an excerpt from The Neck is the Bridge to the Body, featuring visual projections.

Composer and producer Nitin Sawhney's residency at Stanford University began with Stanford Live's October presentation of Dystopian Dream, a dance work starring Honji Wang and Sebastien Ramirez featuring music by Sawhney. A visit to the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at inspired an original audio/visual composition by Sawhney, which will be debuted during Music in Motion.

The Thunderstruck Project's Alternating Currents is an intermedial electricity concert choreographed and performed by Maria W Horn, Stina Nyberg, and a frequency-controllable Tesla coil. The concert is one part of a long-term obsession with the inventor Nikola Tesla and the early 1900’s phenomena of touring electricity shows. Through flashing lightning bolts, the Tesla coil creates a sound which resembles distorted trance synths threading piercing melodies through ozone-filled air. In combination with dialogues reflecting on science, magic, and electrocution, the concert creates a womb-like atmospheres with the lingering threat of bodily harm. If there was ever a lack of public fascination with electricity, Alternating Currents is here to cure that.

A moderated conversation will follow with Ge Wang. Ge Wang is an Associate Professor at Stanford University, researching artful design of tools, toys, games and social experiences.  Ge is the architect of the ChucK music programming language and the director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra.  He is the Co-founder of Smule and the designer of the Ocarina and Magic Piano apps for mobile phones.  A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Ge is the author of Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime, a photo comic book about how we shape technology and how technology shapes us.