Freely traversing borders and genres, David Ogborn is a composer, guitarist and performer of electronic sound and video.  At the centre of his work is the combination of traditional performance arts with electronic elements — whether these be recordings of diverse outdoor environments around the world, improvisations on a laptop or altered guitar, video projections influenced by live musical gestures, or massive synthesized sounds on immersive arrays of loudspeakers.

Emigrating to Canada from South Australia as a child, Ogborn's earliest professional experiences came as a guitarist in Winnipeg's thriving jazz scene.  His compositional mentors have included Michael Matthews at the University of Manitoba, Yves Daoust at the Centre d'Arts Orford and Christos Hatzis at the University of Toronto, where he completed a doctorate in 2006.  His ongoing study of the life and works of Luigi Nono has also been a formative influence — especially the Italian composer's life-long insistence that music be a moment of challenge and transformation with an impact on culture beyond the concert hall.

Ogborn's work is performed across Canada, the United States and Europe by a diverse and expanding group of virtuoso musicians and ensembles, including the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra, New Adventures in Sound Art, and Tapestry New Opera. His sound installation Dream House was featured at the Canadian Music Centre's Chalmers House during Toronto's inaugural Nuit Blanche and his live electronic music for Fritz Lang's silent film Metropolis was a special event at the Esprit Orchestra's 2007 New Wave festival.

A highlight of the 2007-8 season will be the premiere of several recent operatic projects. The Canadian Music Centre's "New Music in New Places" program is supporting the first run of Opera On The Rocks, an ambient opera for four voices and electronically-augmented classical guitar, with libretti from Leanna Brodie, Dave Carley, Lisa Codrington and Krista Dalby. The short electronic operas The Translator (with Leanna Brodie) and Peace of My Heart (with Dave Carley) will be showcased at Toronto's Enwave Theatre by Tapestry New Opera in February 2008. In November 2007 the Transatlantic Transient tour will see Ogborn perform on guitar and electronics in Amsterdam, Belfast, Berlin, and several Canadian cities.

Ogborn is in increasing demand both as a teacher and as a producer of electronic and experimental art. He recently completed a post-doctoral teaching fellowship in the humanities at the University of Toronto, offering a workshop series on soundscape composition and an interdisciplinary seminar on the work of Luigi Nono. He is an Associate of the Canadian Music Centre and a founding member of the angelusnovus.net group, which has presented concerts of experimental music in Toronto since 2004. He serves on the board of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC) as its Treasurer and chaired the Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium 2007 on behalf of the CEC.

(Click here for catalogue, audio and scores.)