Andrea Parkins

is a Berlin-based sound artist, composer, and electroacoustic musician who engages with interactive electronics as compositional/performative process. She is known for her pioneering gestural/textural approach on her electronically processed accordion, and investigation of embodiment and chance with her custom-designed software instruments.

Parkins’ projects encompass multi-channel fixed-media installations, electronic music pieces, electroacoustic solo and ensemble compositions; and sound for contemporary dance, experimental film and intermedia performance. She performs as a solo artist, and has collaborated with artists such as Ute Wassermann, Magda Mayas, George E. Lewis, Nels Cline, Matthew Ostrowski, The Necks, Vera Mantero, The Body Cartography Project, Abigail Child, and many more. Her performances and installations have been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Café Oto, The Kitchen, Experimental Intermedia, Kunsthalle Basel, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, among others. Festival appearances have included NEXT/Bratislava, Cyberfest/St. Petersburg, All Ears/Oslo, Jazz im Augusto/Lisbon, Music Unlimited/Wels, and many others.

Since 2002, Parkins’ ongoing project has been her series of interactive audiovisual performance works inspired by Rube Goldberg’s circuitous machines. In addition, recent projects include her 2016 performance/installation, ‘Two Rooms, Variation 1’, for 40 loudspeakers and ‘Solo Performer’, which premiered at Akousma Festival in Montreal; her fixed-media installation, ‘Studio Drawing 27-4-19’ for 25 Loudspeakers, presented in 2020 at FRST Mini-Festival of Electroacoustic Music in Visby, Sweden, and her series of large-scale amplified performance drawings. Parkins has been an invited resident artist at Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida; Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), Stockholm; Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center (NYC); and by Frei und Hanseastadt Hamburg Kulturbehoerde. Her recordings are published by Important Records, Infrequent Seams, Confront Recordings, Atavistic, Henceforth Records and Creative Sources; and she can be heard as a contributor on numerous other labels.