Luís Antunes Pena is a composer of electroacoustic and instrumental music. He describes his approach to music and composition based on the consciousness of uncertainty which is a method for promoting the ambiguity of the writing, sound and form using various manifestations of noise.
His works often include different instruments and sounds from low-fi custom-made electronic circuits and megaphones to acoustic instruments of the western music tradition as well as other percussion instruments such as stones, sounds of analog synthesizers and computer-generated structures.
His recent production includes works using self-made hardware electronics based on microcomputers to control the spatialization (The small book of misreadings), or to extend instruments as drums or saxophone (27 Ossos, Narcosis). In Das Gedächtnis Gebrauchsanweisung for violoncello, percussion baschet, electronics and ensemble he mixes improvised and written music, constructing the form as a puzzle of immediate and distant memories. In Tracking Noise #4 the flow of a fixed electronic music is controlled by the three performers using buttons, and it is transformed in real-time through different noise sources such as loose jack cables and dimmed lights.
Luís Antunes Pena was born in Lisbon, Portugal, and settled in the city of Cologne in Germany. He studied composition in Portugal with Evgueni Zoudilkine, Christopher Bochmann and António Pinho Vargas at the Escola Superior de Música in Lisbon and in Germany with Nicolaus A. Huber, Dirk Reith and Günter Steinke at the Folkwang University of Arts and the Institut for Computer Music and Media of the same university. He received important impulses from Gérard Grisey at the IRCAM in Paris and from Emmanuel Nunes at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.
His teaching activity includes composition and electronic music related subjects at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe, the Zurich University of the Arts, and at the Folkwang University of the Arts.
He is an active electronic music performer with the groups ruído vermelho, an improvisation trio with Nuno Aroso (percussion) and Francesco Dillon (cello) and with MONOPASS, a synthesizer quartet with Oxana Omelchuk, Mark Polscher and Florian Zwissler. Collaborations with musicians and ensembles include Ensemble Mosaik (Berlin), asamisimasa (Oslo), hand werk (Cologne), Inverspace (Basel), Drumming - Grupo de Percussão (Porto), Remix (Porto), Nadar (Antwerp), S201 (Essen). He is regularly involved in dance productions from Jana Griess and Mara Tsironi.
