Josephine Macken

Josephine Macken (b. 1997) is a composer, performer and artist based in Sydney, Australia. Co-founder of SPIRAL Ensemble and the Lost+Sound collective, Josephine is studying a MMus in composition on scholarship under Liza Lim at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music as a participant in the 2018 Composing Women Program.

Her work has been performed by Ensemble Nouveau, Claire Chase, Onsombel Ensemble, SPIRAL, Ensemble MUSE, Sydney Chamber Opera, the 2018 Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellows and Mivos quartet. Josephine was awarded participation in the 2017 Ensemble Offspring Hatched Voices Program with soprano Jessica Aszodi, and embarked on an exchange program with the Shanghai Conservatory of Music at the end of 2017.
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Josephine markets and manages new music showcases programming emerging artists with the Lost+Sound collective, as well as performing frequently with SPIRAL and Onsombel Ensemble.
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Josephine’s work engages with abstractions of the uncanny; cleanly sonic foundations are compromised by sprawling textures, enharmonic convulsions and rhythms that slowly unhinge themselves, driven by an intention to disrupt implied motivic trajectories.
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Her more recent work, both performatively and compositionally, strains to reconcile the ungainly distinctions between the performer’s voice and the voice of their instrument, examining breath as gestural language and facilitating ocurences of psychoacoustic phenomena in performance. 2018 and beyond will see Josephine engaged in a number of interdisciplinary collaborations with fellow Australian artists.