Experience an evening of haunted sonic underworlds and storytelling at the edge of human perception from acclaimed composers and musicians claire rousay and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe.
Los Angeles–based composer claire rousay offers a rare live score performance of The Bloody Lady — a Slovakian animated classic that is widely considered one of Slovak animation’s crown jewels. Viktor Kubal’s 1981 film, The Bloody Lady, is an improbable and bewitching fusion of gothic horror and classic children’s animation that retells a famous folktale often cited as the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Its clean, simple animation style, full of primary colours, is beautifully juxtaposed with the film’s dread-filled story and rousay’s haunting, minimalist score. The film tells the tale of Lady Báthory, who lives in a castle surrounded by Disneyesque wildlife. When she falls ill in a forest during a storm, Lady Báthory makes a deal with a handsome woodsman for her health. But when she returns to the castle, her usually sunny disposition soon becomes murderous and vampiric. For this special VIFF Live concert, claire rousay will perform her new live score of the film.
After being handpicked by director Nia Dacosta to create the beautifully unnerving film score for her 2021 film Candyman, co-written by Jordan Peele, New York composer and sound artist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s mesmeric soundscapes have begun to reach an increasingly wider audience through cinema. Over the last 7 years or so, Lowe’s focus on film work has expanded a studio practice in ways that speak directly to the aleatoric processes Lowe has come to be known for for decades now. Known for electroacoustic composition and performance using voice and modular synthesizers to highlight a heightened physicality of sound, Lowe’s work weaves the sensitivity of modular synthesis with vocal expression to reach a hypnogogic or trancelike state of ecstatic, improvised sound.
For VIFF Live, Lowe will present an improvisation performance providing a window into his cinematic worlds by way of multiple textures and timbres associated with his scores to such films as The Man in My Basement, Candyman, Grasshopper Republic, UNION, Power and two films, Seeds and Life After, which will be screening at VIFF 2025.
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Guests
claire rousay
claire rousay is a Los Angeles-based composer and artist known for crafting deeply emotive sound works from voice memos, haptic textures, and field recordings. Her music — described as radical intimacy — blends musique concrète with ambient, noise, folk, and pop structures. rousay has released acclaimed albums on Thrill Jockey and Shelter Press, and her work has been presented at ICA London, Art Gallery of NSW, and festivals including Unsound, Big Ears, and Rewire. Her compositions often stretch and compress time, embedding the mundane and the momentous into delicate, expansive sonic gestures. She has held residencies at INA GRM, WORM Rotterdam, and The Momentary.
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (born 1975) is an artist, curator, and composer who works primarily with, but is not limited to, voice and modular synthesis in the realm of spontaneous music. Along with works incorporating analog video synthesis, live audio-visual presentation has been a focus of his live performances and installation/exhibitions.
Lowe’s marriage of synthesis and the voice has allowed for a heightened physicality in the style of ecstatic music, both in a live setting and in recordings. The sensitivity of analog modular synthesis echoes the organic nature of vocal expression, which in this case is meant to establish a trancelike state.
Lowe’s works tend toward human relations with the natural/magical world and the repetition of motifs.
Recently, Lowe has focused more deeply on composing for film, both through solo scores and collaborations. Over the last several years, he has collaborated on projects or provided sound for narrative films, documentaries, and television series including Candyman for Nia Dacosta, Power for Netflix, Telemarketers for HBO, Master for Mariama Diallo, Grasshopper Republic, End of Summer, Sicario, Arrival, Last and First Men with Johann Johannsson, and It Comes at Night with Brian McOmber. Recently, Lowe scored Il colpo del cane for Fulvio Risuleo, The Color of Care for Yance Ford, and Seeds and After Life both screening at VIFF 2025.
Within Lowe’s film works, each score is meant to have a very specific voice and sonic palette, and he approaches each project with clear intention. Creating a unique signature for each film through composition and instrumentation is always very important.
He has collaborated with Ben Russell, Ben Rivers, Sabrina Ratté, Rose Lazar, Nicolas Becker, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Tarek Atoui, Hildur Guđnadóttir, Philippe Parreno, Evan Calder Williams, Ariel Kalma, Susie Ibarra, YoshimiO, Alexandra Wolkowicz, Biba Bell, ADULT., and Rose Kallal, as well as many others.
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Image: © Fre╠üde╠ürique Me╠ünard-Aubin
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