Livia Schweizer is a flutist, improviser, researcher and educator based in Helsinki, known for exploring improvisation and non-conventional notation as tools to connect artists across cultures and disciplines. 

Originally from Italy, she graduated from the Conservatory of Livorno and continued her studies in Finland at the Sibelius Academy with Mikael Helasvuo and Hanna Kinnunen as flute teachers. Since moving to Helsinki, she has been active in the Finnish contemporary music scene, collaborating with ensembles such as Korvat Auki, UMUU, and Tampering, and performing at festivals including Flow Festival, Musica Nova, and Hiljaisuus-festivaali. 

Livia is a member of the European Composer Improvisers Orchestra and she is flutist and co-founder of the Earth Ears Ensemble, which highlights music by emerging composers. Alongside her contemporary work, she performs regularly with Finnish orchestras such as the Turku Philharmonic, Jyväskylä Sinfonia, and Helsinki Chamber Orchestra. 

She holds a master’s degree in flute and pedagogy from the Sibelius Academy and teaches at the International School of Music Finland. Since 2023, Livia has been pursuing a doctorate at Uniarts Helsinki, researching how graphic and text scores can foster intercultural and interdisciplinary dialogue in contemporary music.

https://liviaschweizer.com/

@liviaschweizzy

Sergio Castrillón (PhD, Helsinki University) is a cellist and composer deeply dedicated to improvised and experimental music. Within his career Sergio has collaborated with a big number of Finnish and international improvisers and composers, from diverse music genres and in a variety of ensembles. Sergio also performs actively as a solo improviser, featuring in festivals, series of concerts, and music happenings around the globe. In his performances and recordings, Sergio uses different kinds of self made cello modifications, a "campanula" made by Eero Ristilä, the "skillo" built by Andrew Bentley, and the "sercello" designed by himself in collaboration with luthier Markko Sunni. Thanks to these diverse projects and his innovative approaches, Sergio Castrillón has established himself as one of the central figures of his generation in the field of cello improvisation and experimental cello music.

https://sergiocastrillon.com/

Jaak Sikk (PhD, Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre) is Lecturer in Improvisation at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre (EAMT) and principal investigator of ministry-funded artistic-research projects on ensemble improvisation and self-determination. He has led projects supported by the Estonian Ministry of Culture, including work on imagination-based prompting in group improvisation, and coordinates multi-institutional activities with Uniarts Helsinki and EAMT colleagues. His publications span a peer-reviewed chapter on serendipity in music (Palgrave, 2022), a CEPROM/ISME paper on imagination and teleodynamic constraints (2024), and the monograph Raamat improvisatsioonist. Kuidas kehtestada end loovalt ja empaatiliselt (2023). Sikk’s recent activity includes conference presentations (ISME World Conference; CEPROM; EPARM), masterclasses at Uniarts Helsinki, Santa Cecilia Conservatory, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and others, and performance projects with open scores and cross-genre improvisation. He was elected to the Estonian Young Academy of Sciences in 2021.

https://www.interacademies.org/person/jaak-sikk

Kristjan Kannukene is an Estonian violist, singer, electric guitarist, performer-composer, improviser, and intermedia artist whose work brings together different traditions and aesthetics. Classical and rock music have created symbiotic forms in his artistry, ranging from performing Bach’s violin concerto on electric guitar to improvising rock solos on viola with the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra. Kannukene has presented his compositions, among others, at Wigmore Hall in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and released his debut album 333, after which he has focused on his intermedia instrument and interactive sound installation project 9. His artistic focus lies in finding the symbiosis between voice and viola and connecting it with other art forms. 

Since 2025, Kannukene is a doctoral student and junior researcher at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, conducting artistic research on the topic “The Symbiosis of Viola and Voice.” He is the founder and artistic director of HETKfEST, an international festival of improvised arts based in Tallinn. 

https://kristjankannukene.ee/

@kannukene

Vaim Sarv is a chronically ill vocalist, organizer, and writer. She is a student of the oral tradition of Estonian runosong which he interweaves with acoustic, bodily noise music and free improvisation. Mutating her voice with extended vocal techniques, his sensual and abrasive sound is interrupted by stories and spoken word. Her performances are gatherings which amplify the disruptive and celebratory power of shared physical experiences. He sings of land and kin, speaks of dispossession and desire, makes sounds of solidarity and silence. 

Vaim is a part-time janitor at Massia where he helps take care of things such as basement flooding, foraging, rye bread baking, and sauna building. Together with others in the soil model, she engages with questions of self-organization, community living, and care work. He dreams of Massia as a place for seasonal gatherings responsive to the surrounding multispecies landscape through practices both ancestral and otherwise. This past summer, Vaim co-hosted a gathering for traditional and experimental vocalists with Bua. She also sometimes heats the wood-fired stove at Logi Saun, where he helps run a monthly Queer Sauna event.

Vaim writes poetry about wastelands and migration, among other things and takes photos, too, of things such as slugs, cruising spots, lovers, and garbage. She used to host Land Services, a radio show that troubled the distinction between traditional and experimental musics. 

https://vaim.net/

@vaim_sarv

Born and raised in Crete, Greece, Sofia Filippou (1995) is a sister, daughter, friend, lover, cross-contaminator, mover, poetess, partly academic, most often art-making human. 

She mostly makes dances to understand life -sometimes just to enjoy it. She has been investigating ways to be in the world as a body, as anecosystem, as a dance. 

Her artistic practice is located at the intersection of movement, embodied storytelling and ecological imagination. Often engaged in site-responsive performances, Filippou creates spaces where human and more-than-human narratives intertwine. 

Rooted in a desire to cultivate practices of deep sensing, her works are poetic explorations of world-making; worlds that exist at the edge of things. 

The TantsuRuum residency brought her to Estonia in 2020, and she has since then been based in Tallinn. In March 2023, her collaboration with dance artist Eline Selgis titled ABOUT US//choreographies of hugging, received the Estonian Theater Award for Best Dance Performance 2022. 

Dreaming of tasting the interweaving of known and unknowable, she works with sensing & intuition and follows the body as a main source of wisdom and knowledge. 

She aims to get bodies into dialogue. She likes bodies; moving bodies, resting bodies, delusional bodies, bodies of water, bodies of dissonance…She also likes stories, riddles, rolling on the floor, and speaking into a microphone. Sometimes she likes to sing. 

She always likes to dance.

https://sofakifil.wixsite.com/sofiafilippou

@elamoude_

Roxanna Albayati is an Iranian-Iraqi interdisciplinary artist, researcher and music educator. Driven by embodied artistic research, her transcultural practice centres around combining experimental music with multilingual art forms and audio-visuals, where her music merges cross-cultural improvisation with Iranian Dastgāh and the physicality of performance. Roxanna explores the conscious/subconscious and self/other, interrogating their interplay internally, spiritually & materially, whilst considering this through the perspective of Orientalist constructions and female place in society, fascinated by process and natural evolution of discovery.

In Spring 2025, Roxanna had her first solo exhibition: Shekare Azadi/Chasing Freedom, a multimedia project, exhibited in Dentro gallery in Porto after being previously supported, featured and re-comissioned by Zaratan Arte Contemporânea (Lisbon) across 2022-2024. Her book chapter ‘Unmuting the ‘other’: constructions and constrictions within an Iranian Dastgah and Western Art Music discourse’ is also set to be published by Routledge this year. Roxanna is currently working on her latest project, Tavalode Dobare/Reborn - a transcultural AV work, merging Persian, Sicilian & Sufi poetry, music & ritual practice.

In addition to her solo and collaborative works Roxanna is the Founder and Artistic Director of Displaced - a concert series which brings artists and audiences together through interdisciplinary storytelling and collective memory. She has performed and worked extensively at venues including at Cafe Oto (London, 2023), Northern Ballet (Leeds, 2023), CRL- Central Elétrica (Porto, 2024),  Espaço MIRA (Porto, 2024),  Bozar (Brussels, 2022), METRIC IP (Tallinn, 2020), Sound Festival (Sound Scotland, 2021) and Abastan Factory (Armenia, 2023). Roxanna's work has been supported by Arts Council England, Help Musicians, Criatório Porto, Halaqat - Goethe Institute, Marchus Trust, Arts & Humanities Research Council, & i-Portunus. 

​She completed her BMus in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, studying cello with Rebecca Turner. In 2020 she completed her MA in Performance and Music Education at Trinity Laban, achieving a distinction as well as the Directors Prize in Music Education, for outstanding work and contributions to the music education department and wider institution. She studied cello performance with Natalia Pavlutskaya, music education with Tim Palmer, improvisation with Douglas Finch and singing with Linda Hirst. 

​Roxanna is currently the lead tutor for Improvisation at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, previously having worked there as a  graduate researcher from 2021-2024. Her research was looking into the inequalities which exist between different student groups in a conservatoire setting. She is also a guest improvisation tutor at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.

https://www.roxannaalbayati.com/

@roxhsana

Andro Manzoni is a multimedia artist specialised in sound. He works with new technologies in contemporary theater, researching musical expression through contemporary compositions that incorporate sensor-based programming and interactive performance. As an artistic director of a multimedia art company Folding House Productions, works with mediums such as 360º video installation, site-specific and immersive theatre productions and interactive installations.

Marija Androva is a multi-disciplinary project that combines various elements of Krk's cultural identity into a cohesive artistic experience. This initiative seeks to celebrate and reinterpret the island’s microtonal music tradition, dance, language, and alphabet through a contemporary lens.

andromanzoni.com

@0312random
@contemporary.sopile

KATARIIN RASKA / VILLEM JAHU

bagpipes + electronics

Katariin Raska is a multiinstrumentalist and improviser based in Tallinn, Estonia. She is active in both contemporary electroacoustical experimental music as well as in the traditional music scene where she performs century old music on jaw harp and bagpipes.

Katariin has collaborations with improvisers, folk musicians as well as poets and storytellers. She is one of the front figures in Estonian jaw harp music and the pioneer of improvisational music on Estonian bagpipes.

Villem Jahu is a sound-artist, synthesist, free improviser, cultural organizer from Estonia.
Villem works with abstract electronic sounds in the form of live performances, sound installations, sound design for exhibitions, dance pieces etc. In performing live, important aspects are total improvisation, close listening to other players and instruments, high dynamics, fun.

Together Katariin and Villem bounce the soundwaves and weave timbres into a charmingly irritating soundscape.

katariinraska.com

@katariinraska

villemjahu.com

@villemj

Jürgen Rooste on Eesti luuletaja. On õppinud Tallinna Ülikoolis eesti filoloogiat, avaldanud arvukalt luulekogusid, mitmete kirjandusauhindade laureaat. Töötanud õpetaja ja lektorina erinevates üldharidus- ja ülikoolides. Korraldanud kirjandusfestivale Sotsia (2001–2009) ja HeadRead (2009–2013), vedanud luuleteatrit Cabaret Interruptus (2010–2014), organiseerinud sadu luuleõhtuid ja -esinemisi, astunud üles ligemale sajas koolis ja paljudes maaraamatukogudes, kirjutanud kirjandus- ja kultuurikriitikat ja lugenud inimestele luuletusi, rääkinud lugusid alates aastast 1997. Esinenud kümnetel Euroopa luulefestivalidel ja -sündmustel. Kirjutanud teiste autoritega kahasse paar kirjandusõpikut, olnud mitme sõnaraamatu kaaskoostaja, -toimetaja. Toimetanud-koostanud noorte autorite luulekogusid. Olnud dramaturgiline tugi vähemalt kolme lavastuse juures, lisaks kaasprodutsent ja meediakoordinaator, ning lavastanud Vabal Laval rahvaliku jandi „Sugu M” (ühtlasi dramaturg), aidanud kõiki neid toota.

Siim Aimla on jazzimaastikul tegev juba paarkümmend aastat – tema energiat ja teravmeelsust on jagunud kõigile, kes on muusikuga koostööd teinud. Jazziprojektid, koosseisud triost orkestrini ja kamaluga albumeid on muusiku tegemistest vaid jäämäe veepealne osa. Musitseerimise ja muusika kirjutamise kõrval võtab Aimla elust suure osa MUBA rütmimuusika instrumendi eriala arendamine, kooli bigbändi juhatamine ning saksofoni, ansambli ja arranžeerimise õpetamine. Vaatamata oma suurele jazzi- ja funkiarmastusele pole Aimla risti ette löönud ühegi žanri ees: teda on kuuldud ja nähtud ka räpis, popis ja isegi muusikalides. Erinevate žanrite vahel liikumist vajavat muusik enda kui looja ja instrumentalisti vabaduse ja värskuse hoidmiseks.

Jaan Krivel – clarinet, voice

https://www.jaankrivel.eu/

@jaankrivel

Krista Köster – singing bowls, gongs

https://kristart.weebly.com/

@kristakoster_____