Borut Kržišnik

Borut Kržišnik (born 7 October 1961) is a Slovenian composer of contemporary music, based in Ljubljana. He is best known for his “polyglot musical style”, and his concept of integration between live acoustic music with digital environment and technology. More specifically, what he does in the process of composing is he makes spontaneity of live music confront mechanical nature of digital technology and, by doing so, he rethinks the human condition in the material world.

He uses spontaneous composition, which allows him to compose in a more direct way, namely by impromptu playing and recording as opposed to writing a traditional score. Only after enough raw recordings have been created does he start working on the structure of the composition. This marks the second stage of his compositional process, which diametrically differs from the first one and in which he works primarily on musical dramaturgy and contextualization.

In 2014, on the occasion of his second appearance at the Music Biennale Zagreb, editorial board wrote in the festival's programme presentation: “Composer Borut Kržišnik is a music artist who, with his intense creative abilities, has left a trace primarily as the most notable representative of the historical avant-garde and as a postmodern classical composer. Amongst the most important elements of his musical language is the synthesis of technologically advanced (digital) composer interventions and classical ones. A special mention should be made of his work with so-called samples, which enable not only the creation of a virtual sound of a whole symphony orchestra, but also of many other sounds that do not exist in natural surroundings. (…) The composer's polyglot musical invention freely navigates between various techniques and stylistic influences: from popular, cacophonic, atonal, or strictly tonal, all the way to minimalistic and (neo) classical music.”

He has released nine albums and composed music for numerous dance, film and theater productions. His most notable collaborations include Peter Greenaway, Gerald Thomas, Edward Clug, Janez Janša (then Emil Hrvatin), and Julie Anne Robinson, among others.