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About the Artist
Eli Berman (she/they/זי/זיי) is a vocalist, improviser, composer-producer and new instrument builder from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She creates electroacoustic music using experimental vocal techniques across a variety of her ancestral vocal technologies, including khazones (Ashkenazi Jewish cantorial music), Yiddish and Appalachian folk songs, and western classical repertoire for countertenor and baritone. For the past three years, Eli has been developing feedback instruments that extend the human voice using PVC pipes, metal sheets and frame drums amplified by transducers and modulated by delay pedals. In the past year she has begun to create beats from digital samples of her voice.
Eli has premiered her music at the Watermill Center, Banff Centre, New Music On the Point, Yiddish Summer Weimar, New Explorative Oratorio Voice Festival, Atlantic Music Festival, Gender Unbound, Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and the New School. Eli recently opened the 2023 Snug Harbor Dance Festival (Staten Island, NY) with Bonita Oliver in her new work “Trans Water Stories,” for which Eli built digital feedback instruments designed for singers. Eli performed in and contributed to Anna Lublina's 2023 Undying in Yidderland: Jargon Rituals at Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt, Germany), and she performed her originally produced track for the live premiere of Sanni Est's critically-acclaimed album PHOTOPHOBIA for the closing of the 2022 Pop-Kultur Festival at Kulturbrauerei (Berlin, Germany). In addition to her experience as a countertenor and baritone in vocal ensembles such as C4: The Choral Composer/Conductor Collective (New York, New York), Eli has sung as a soloist in the 2018 US premiere of John Tavener's Total Eclipse and a 2018 New York Times critically-acclaimed concert of works by Eve Beglarian. She has presented her music and creative research at the 2021 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, 2020 Pan-American Vocology Association Symposium, and 2019 Transgender Singing Voice Conference. Instagram: @_eliberman_
