Lara Candland with composer Christian Asplund

Utah-based poet and singer, Lara Candland and composer-performer Christian Asplund have evolved a unique style of performance involving an ethereal and lush mix of speech, singing, live sampling, looping, layering, drones, and electronics. They will draw from poems in Candland's recently published Alburnum of the Green and Living Tree and her recently completed chapbook about surgery Physic at the Table.
Lara Candland’s book Alburnum of the Green and Living Tree was just released from BlazeVox. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, The Colorado Review, Barrow Street, Greatcoat, Fine Madness, The Quarterly and other journals. Her pamphlet, Tongue Child was published by the University of South Carolina’s Palanquin/TDM series. She has been a finalist in The Motherwell, Hudson, and St. Lawrence book awards. She has also been the recipient of an AWP Intro Award, She is a founder and the librettist for Seattle Experimental Opera, and a finalist in the Genesis Prizes. Her opera, Sunset with Pink Pastoral with husband and composer Christian Asplund, was performed by Almeida Opera in London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre. Candland has taught poetry, college writing, food writing and fiction writing at various colleges and universities around the country as an itinerant grad student/follower of a grad student, and is currently exploring the intersection between written down works and live improv with electronic sampling.
Christian Asplund is a Canadian-American composer-performer based in Utah where he is Composer-in-Residence at Brigham Young University. He has degrees from University of Washington, Mills College, and Brigham Young University where his teachers have included Stuart Dempster, John Rahn, Joel-Francois Durand, Alvin Curran, Chris Brown, Thea Musgrave, and Meyer Kupferman. He cofounded Seattle Experimental Opera which has produced seven of his operas. He has performed with such musicians as Christian Wolff, Eyvind Kang, Larry Polansky, Daniel Good, Francois Houle, Michael Bisio, Robert Reigle, Gino Robair, and Phil Gelb in a variety of venues and recordings in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. His scores are published by Frog Peak Music. Asplund is also an active scholar and has published articles and chapters on music theory and critical theory.