Sound Noise Music

Tanya Thielke, Composer

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ABOUT

Tanya Thielke grew up on classical music, beginning violin lessons at age 4. Moving between the United States and Germany, her mother’s piano was ever present, as was the vinyl collection of the great composers and also narrated stories. Many hours were spent listening on headphones while looking at record jacket art and the portraits of her heroes: the composers, performers and voice actors. At age 12 she was introduced to entirely new music: Kraftwerk’s Mensch Machine and Computer World. The mere idea that music and computers could actually come together to create this was unbearably exciting, like science fiction coming to life. Out of reach for a classical violin student who wasn’t going to own a computer for another 10 years, it was nonetheless a harbinger of things to come. Meanwhile, a 12th birthday present of a cassette tape recorder, and her father’s shortwave radio became a portal into another sonic dimension. Hours were spent recording swatches of the world, from conversations to tv shows, to those mesmerizing frequencies between shortwave stations, strange time messages and barely audible voices seemingly from the beyond. She began formal musical studies on full scholarship at 16, completing her Undergraduate in Violin Performance at the University of MD. Hours of practice that had been interrupted with ideas and improvisations documented on tape grew over time into an interest in composition. Completing the Master of Music in Composition at the University of MD, she went on to receive a fellowship to a unique interdisciplinary Master of Fine Arts in Composition program at New York’s Bard College. This experience immersed her in a community of artists which made a permanent impact her work. After graduating from Bard, she became composer in residence of a performing theatrical troupe for over a decade, creating live midi scores combined with violin, and contributing as creative director. But the call to create music for its own sake again became overwhelming. By chance, a studio upgrade to a hard disk recording environment was the catalyst for a huge creative shift. The stretching of the first recorded audio, her own voice, complete with bizarre digital artifacts, opened a whole new set of creative possibilities. From there, all sound and noise became her fascination. Obsessively recording and manipulating sound digitally, she developed her own unique sonic palette and released two solo albums under the moniker Tantroniq: “Mantra Machine” and “Hello Zero One”. Expanding into multimedia storytelling, she produced “After River” an interdisciplinary work combining music, narration, sound design and visuals. Her love of developing new sonic materials and the focused time provided by the pandemic brought “Other Worlds” into being. Another entirely solo project, it represents the arrival of mature artistic expression from decades of experimental explorations of musical time and space. For more info visit: Projects and Electromusings