Luke Nickel (b. 1988) is an award-winning Canadian interdisciplinary artist, composer, and researcher currently living in Berlin, Germany. His works knot together themes of memory, transcription, translation, queer identity, technology, and impossible roller coasters.
"…there is an unusual quality of rawness. The players are participating in an oral, folkloric tradition without any sense of irony or flippancy" — Jennie Gottschalk, Experimental Music Since 1970
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Presentation Videos
Videos to be added.
Current Research
My current research interests are: orally-transmitted experimental music; the music of Éliane Radigue; impossible roller coaster simulations; memory; queer identity; gravity and music.
I am currently working on: a new VR installation with Dr. Tyler Marghetis exploring foraging in apes as related to human art-making across multiple timespans; research with Zubin Kanga on drag cyborgs and gesture-mapping technology; and new research on synthesis and speculative fiction.
Publications
Contemporary Music Review · 2023
Radigue at 90, co-edited with William Dougherty
Double issue celebrating the life and work of Éliane Radigue.
Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Taylor and Francis · 2023
A dialogue intertwining neuroscience with art on the subject of artificial intelligence
Aural Poetics ed. Michael Nardone · 2023
"I Feel Love" and "White Fang Field Recording
Reflections and verbal scores on the subject of listening.
Circuit 31.1 · Spring 2021
Queer Perspectives in New Music
Discussing queer identity as it relates to music, edited and curated by Gabriel Dharmoo.
Tempo New Music Journal · 2020
Scores in Bloom: Some Recent Orally Transmitted Experimental Music
Charting the overlaps between orally-transmitted collaborative practices. A guiding metaphor frames these practices as gardens.
TENOR'19 · Melbourne, July 2019
Palace64: Impossible Roller Coasters as Scores for the Performance of Experimental Music
Examining the ways in which music composition and virtual roller coaster design might influence one another.
Tempo New Music Journal · 2015
Occam Notions: Collaboration and the Performer's Perspective in Éliane Radigue's Occam Ocean
Focusing on Radigue's scoreless working method through interviews with performers and Radigue herself.
Leonardo Music Journal · 2017
Memory Piece: Memory as a Compositional Process
Describing the use of memory as a compositional process in orally and digitally transmitted compositions.
CeReNem Journal
Correspondance on Tuning – Mira Benjamin and Luke Nickel
Thoughts on portraiture, space, and metaphors about tuning.
Impossible Simulated Roller Coasters
Before I became interested in music creation, my first love was designing roller coasters. At an early age, I began using a 3D roller coaster design program called No Limits. Growing up in Winnipeg, I designed roller coasters before ever having ridden one in real life.
Fifteen years later, I am exploring a rich potential for merging these two interests. I am interested in the idea of an 'impossible' roller coaster. How can the design features of a roller coaster experience become abstracted? What might it mean for a lift hill or a 'drop' to go on forever, for a track to be a tangled knot of sculptural potential, for a roller coaster to float in endless space?
PhD Thesis · Bath Spa University, 2017
This commentary reflects on a portfolio containing five orally-transmitted experimental music compositions created between fall 2013 and fall 2016. These living scores investigate transmission, community, orality and forgetting.
Luke Nickel (b. 1988) is an award-winning Canadian interdisciplinary artist, composer, and researcher currently living in Berlin, Germany. His works knot together themes of memory, transcription, translation, queer identity, technology, and impossible roller coasters. In addition to orally-transmitted music compositions, he creates traditionally-notated musical works, audiovisual performances, installations, videos, and texts. He has created work with internationally-established soloists and chamber ensembles such as Mira Benjamin, Zubin Kanga, Quatuor Bozzini, and EXAUDI. He has created work with visual and multimedia artists such as Freya Olafson and Beth Frey. About his work, Jennie Gottschalk writes: "…there is an unusual quality of rawness. The players are participating in an oral, folkloric tradition without any sense of irony or flippancy" (Experimental Music Since 1970).
Honours include five SOCAN Awards for Young Composers (including first prize for his work Kyrie in the Godfrey Rideout category), first prize in the Canadian Music Centre Prairie Region's Emerging Composer Competition, and a shortlist for the Canadian League of Composers's ICSM Canadian Selection. He was one of Sound and Music's New Voices in 2015, and subsequently holds a place in the British Music Collection. In addition, he has received support from organizations such as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council and Sound and Music.
I am one of the co-founders of Cluster: New Music + Integrated Arts Festival, which is now being directed by Ashley Au.
Cluster: New Music + Integrated Arts Festival is Canada's most dynamic take on contemporary art and sound. Presenting thought-provoking concerts and an annual core festival in Winnipeg, Cluster is a platform for artists to create, to experiment, and to collaborate. Cluster is propelled by strength found in numbers and the energy created by integrating diverse artistic communities – combining collective mentality with individual sensibility.
Created in 2008 by composers Heidi Ouellette and Luke Nickel, the inaugural Cluster: New Music and Integrated Arts Festival took place in Winnipeg, MB in 2010. What began as a single thread of boundless enthusiasm has evolved into a complex set of ideals and goals. Along with the annual festival, Cluster collaborates with individuals and organizations to create events throughout the year, engaging and enriching both the local and the greater artistic community.
Cluster's programming is unapologetic in its innovation, and unrelenting in its optimism and integrity, forging a new path forward through joyous exploration of endless possibility.
In loving memory of Patricia Bouk
Updating my website has been a bittersweet task. Since I was 17, my aunt Patricia Bouk has been my web designer and guru. She set me up with the earliest version of my website when I barely had any compositions to put on it, and then later updated it to a wordpress site once I had more complex needs. Aunt Pat passed away suddenly in 2018, leaving many of us bereft and grieving. Pat has always meant a lot to me... she is the aunt who was also an artist, who lived some similar experiences to me (from living abroad to enrolling in a PhD to loving cooking and baking). Throughout my childhood and teenage years, Pat always took an interest in my work and contributed to my success in any way she could, from designing my website to flying out to my graduating recital of my undergraduate degree and designing a menu of catering for the event. It meant a lot to have Pat in my corner. But after nearly 8 years of trying to upkeep the last website she built for me on my own, it's time for a change. I know she would agree (and in fact, probably would have set me up with a new site years ago!) so I dedicate this website to my aunt, an extraordinary woman, a tastemaker, a lover of food and art and travel, and an inspiration as I grow older. Miss you, Aunt Pat.