Ni Zheng is a composer of electroacoustic music. Her work unfolds as sonic ritual that catalyzes mystical states of ecstatic communication with both humans and non-humans. She surrenders unconditionally to deviant and altered states of knowledge—intimate, sensual, relational, and immanent—in encounters with the other and the chthonic realms of the land she inhabits. Her mediums of communication include atavistic vocal performance, field recordings, and a fusion of electronic and acoustic instruments. Ni’s debut album, Body of Immanence, was released by Syrphe (DE) in 2023. La Revue des Ressources described it as “a tear in the order of the world and an ordeal reminiscent of Artaud’s ‘theatre of cruelty.’” Commissioned and supported by Don’t Look Back Records and S. C. Van Fonden (DK), her second album, fetid things, was released in 2024. Ni is the recipient of the Talea Ensemble Commissioning Program. Her works have been commissioned or presented internationally at festivals including Festival d’Automne, Podium Festival, impuls, MA/IN, Mixtur, Sound Spaces + Intonal Festival, and ICMC, among others. She is a PhD candidate in Music at the University of California San Diego and now lives in Philadelphia (US).

“Many days I drifted toward the edges of town with my field recorder, following whatever sounds pulled at me as small acts of documenting and sonically evidencing a continuous existence both my own and the landscape I felt myself slowly slipping into. I spent unexpected hours improvising with the Truhenorgel in the Landesmusikakademie and the Ott Orgel in St. Brictius, recording samples that have already folded themselves into the work I am developing. Time here moved in a strange, cyclical way, a kind of haunted return that blurred the edges of the days and opened an attentiveness I had not felt in a long time. I began noticing the minutiae of sound, from the sudden flare of unfamiliar bird chorus to the distant singing of owls I had never encountered in my city, machinery murmuring at the fields’ edges, and the subtle textures that appear when nothing demands to be made of them. The work formed itself through these rituals of listening and wandering, dissolving and returning in a way that felt more like being carried than constructing anything at all.”