ZAHRA MANI

Zahra Mani is a musician and composer from Pakistan and London. She lives and works in Austria and travels extensively in the UK, Croatia, Italy and Pakistan. Her work includes compositions for solo instruments, voices and ensembles, radio art, sound installations as well as electro-acoustic and inter-meidal performances. She plays the double bass, various guitars and the piano, and studied Indian classical music in Pakistan. In her compositions and performances, she uses electronics whilst always focussing on “organic” sound, only working with analogue sounds and field recordings she collects in an ever-growing archive.

Zahra Mani’s works are imbued with her distinctive compositional voice, which continues to grow out of a fundamental openness in hearing and listening, always trying to include every acoustically perceptible moment in the creative process. Her approach to sound characterises her musical language, which carries in it a continuous and subtle pulse, and which constantly calls into question traditional aspects such as melody, rhythm, time structure and acoustic aestheteics. As a composer and multi-instrumentalist, she creates pulsing, shifting soundscapes derived from her burgeoning archive of instrumental and found sound. Her work focuses on spaces between, where field recordings, voices, instruments, machines, the sea, the wind, animals and landscapes provide the acoustic basis for auditory worlds.

She is a member of various Austrian and international composers’ associations, curates cultural projects across Europe and has received a number of awards.