About – Ensemble Decipher

Ensemble Decipher is a modular, experimental music group that performs with vintage, contemporary, and emerging technologies. Founded in 2017 by Niloufar Nourbakhsh, the ensemble strives to redefine performer virtuosity by drawing on the technological advancements of our time to highlight new voices and ways of listening. Ensemble Decipher seeks to reflect on and challenge the power structures that lace the field of electronic music by reexamining technology’s role in their performance practice. Recent works commissioned by the group have mobilized network technologies, amplified gardening, machine learning, kinetic sculptures, acoustic instruments, and laptops. Ensemble Decipher consists of Joseph Bohigian, Robert Cosgrove, Eric Lemmon, Chelsea Loew, Taylor Long, and Niloufar Nourbakhsh.

Ensemble Decipher has collaborated with composers and technologists including Bora Yoon, Mari Kimura, Margaret Schedel, Daria Semegen, Erin Rogers, Jose Tomás Henriques, Mara Helmuth, Yaz Lancaster, Paul Leary, Lyn Goeringer, and Lainie Fefferman and premiered works by many others. Recent feature performances include concerts at the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, International Computer Music Conference, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Roulette Intermedium, Rhizome DC, New Music Gathering, and an ensemble residency at the New Music for Strings Festival in Denmark. Decipher has been in residence at Peabody Institute, Michigan State University, Stony Brook University, and the National Philharmonic Orchestra Summer String Institute. Their work has been supported by the MAP Fund, New Music USA, American Composers Forum, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Alice M. Ditson Fund, Amphion Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Chamber Music America.

Decipher’s 2024-25 season will include performances in the Midwest featuring world premieres by Rob Cosgrove and Eric Lemmon along with existing works by Erin Rogers and Niloufar Nourbakhsh. In summer 2025, Decipher will workshop a new evening-length multimedia work with Joseph Bohigian and Khatchadour Khatchadourian in California, to be premiered in 2026 in San Francisco.

photo by Sophia Sagaradze

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Niloufar Nourbakhsh

Described as “stark” by WNPR and “darkly lyrical” by the New York Times, a winner of 2022 Beth Morrison Projects Next Generation competition, an awardee of National Sawdust’s Second International Hildegard Commission, and a 2019 recipient of Opera America’s Discovery Grant, Niloufar Nourbakhsh’s music has been performed at numerous festivals and venues including Ojai Festival, Mostly Mozart at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and Direct Current Festival at the Kennedy Center. A founding member and co-artistic director of Iranian Female Composers Association, Nourbakhsh is a strong advocate of music education and equal opportunities. She currently teaches composition at Longy School of Music of Bard College. Niloufar holds a doctorate degree from Stony Brook University.

Joseph Bohigian

Joseph Bohigian is a composer and performer of acoustic and electronic music. His work focuses on issues of memory, cultural reunification, and diaspora, drawing on his experiences as an Armenian-American raised in the Armenian exile community of Fresno, California. With a strong interest in reestablishing a relationship with lost elements of our past to better envision our future, he makes use of archival materials in his music, such as sound recordings, interviews, and written texts, synthesizing fragments of song lyrics and reviving ancient musical notations. Bohigian’s music has been performed at the International Computer Music Conference (Limerick, Ireland), June in Buffalo, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Suoni Per Il Popolo (Montreal), New Music on the Point Festival, TENOR Conference (Melbourne), and Aram Khachaturian Museum Hall (Yerevan) by the Mivos Quartet, Decibel, Great Noise Ensemble, Argus Quartet, Fresno Summer Orchestra Academy, and Playground Ensemble.

Chelsea Loew

Chelsea Loew is a composer and performer whose interests are rooted in emotion, vulnerability, humanity, and interaction. Her work often explores the relationships (both constructive and damaging) between language, communication, and intended expression. She is the recipient of two Fulbright research grants in composition and is the composer-in-residence for the Taylor Festival Choir. She has worked with groups and performers including Chór Narodowy Forum Muzyki, Yarn/Wire, Latitude 49, Charleston Symphony Orchestra, members of Talea Ensemble, Popebama, and Tony Arnold. Her music has been performed at Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocławiu, Musica Polonica Nova, Sacrum Profanum at Play Kraków, the Composer’s Conference at Brandeis, the National SCI Composers Conference, the Ball State New Music Festival, New Music on the Point, Southern Division ACDA, and Piccolo Spoleto. She has received degrees from Stony Brook University (Ph.D.), Eastman School of Music (M.A.), and College of Charleston (B.A.). Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Composition at University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

Robert Cosgrove

Rob Cosgrove is a percussionist, composer, and artist interested in creating embodied sounding through intermedia installations and performances. His works explore the feeling of a sound as a tactile, visual, and visceral entity by investigating the peripheries of sonic experience and the ways these contexts affect our perception. Rob has exhibited/performed at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn), Harvestworks (Manhattan), Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (Troy), Chicago Design Museum (Chicago), National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), Practice Gallery (Philadelphia), Coaxial (Los Angeles), Eastern Bloc (Montréal), DOX Centre for Contemporary Art (Prague), and KM28 (Berlin).

Eric Lemmon

Eric Lemmon’s artistic practice and academic research is preoccupied with the politics that circumscribe and are woven into our musical technologies and institutions. His music has been reviewed by the New York Times, and he has been awarded numerous fellowships, residencies, and grants for his artistic research and profile as a composer, including from the Fulbright Program and the Tofte Lake Center. Eric’s scholarly writing has been published in the Journal for Network Music and Arts and Organised Sound. He received his Ph.D. in Music Composition from Stony Brook University.

Taylor Long

Taylor Long is a percussionist, sound artist, and educator interested in experimental, technological, theatrical, and post-instrumental mediums. He has appeared at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse (Germany), New Music for Strings Festival (Denmark), Oh My Ears New Music Festival (Phoenix), and at venues including Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (Troy), Pioneer Works (Brooklyn), Roulette Intermedium (Brooklyn), Rhizome (Washington DC), Harvestworks (Manhattan), and Carnegie Hall. He also performs/creates with Rob Cosgrove as low pass, with performances and sound installations at various universities and art galleries. Taylor is Assistant Professor of Percussion at Valley City State University and was formerly Percussion Teaching Fellow at the Bard College Conservatory.