Christopher Williams (1981, San Diego) is a wayfarer on the body-mind continuum. His medium is music.
B.A., University of California San Diego, PhD candidate, University of Leiden (Holland). As a composer and contrabassist, Williams’s work runs the gamut from chamber music, improvisation, and radio art to collaborations with dancers, sound artists, and visual artists. Performances and collaborations with Derek Bailey, Compagnie Ouie/Dire, Charles Curtis, LaMonte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, Ferran Fages, Barbara Held, Robin Hayward (as Reidemeister Move), Hans W. Koch, filmmaker Zachary Kerschberg, Christina Kubisch, Maulwerker, Mary Oliver and Rozemarie Heggen, Ben Patterson, artist Tanja Smit, and dancer Martin Sonderkamp. In addition to the usual North American and European experimental music circuits, this work has been presented by VPRO Radio 6 (Holland), Deutschlandradio Kultur, the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, and the American Documentary Film Festival. Williams’ artistic research on improvisation, notation, and his body-mind continuum has been published in Open Space Magazine, The Improvisor, and Critical Studies in Improvisation, and has been presented at major universities and international conferences in North America, Europe, and India. Scholarships, grants, and prizes from the University of California, the Darmstadt Summer Courses, the Arts Council of Catalunya, Goethe Institut, Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin, the Festival Acanthes, and the American Documentary Film Festival.
He co-curates two series in Berlin, Certain Sundays and KONTRAKLANG, and works with sound experience designer Charles Morrow Productions.