Renée T. Coulombe is a Berlin-based American composer of instrumental, electronic and acousmatic works; an improvising experimental pianist, vocalist, and performance installation artist; as well as a scholar engaged at the nexus of theory, contemporary music, and media culture. Classically educated in music at the Conservatoire de Nantes and Columbia University before earning her PhD in composition from UC San Diego, she has since methodically dismantled conventional disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of new sonic and performance territories. Her transmedia compositions include immersive/interactive performance suites like 2016’s Sympathetic Resonance or a 2024 collaboration with Berlin’s Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester, I Haunt Three Ghosts. These embody tensions between structure and spontaneity, lavishing in rich sensory ambience and timbral complexity. They frequently combine field and archival recordings, often transformed into complex soundscapes in dialogue with her extended vocal and instrumental techniques.
A Deep Listening certified teacher since 2017, her attentive sonic practice informs her work as founder of Berlin’s new experimental and improvised music label, Banshee Media, as well as her founding of the community arts space, teaching and production platform The Willows Nest. She is in the process of releasing a multi-year artistic research project through eight individual audio collections. Entitled The Posthuman Series, each album foregrounds co-creation and collective art-making, across borders, genres, and disciplines.
Her original compositions have been performed across the globe at notable venues from Roulette in New York, to the Open Fist Theatre in Hollywood or The Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, the Bimhuis in Amsterdam to Sonic Arts Research Center for the Sonorities Festival in Belfast. As founding member and performer with Erroneous Funk, she has thrown down insane grooves for over a decade at venues big and small, like the Viper Room in Los Angeles, Dizzy’s in San Diego, and The Roy O. Disney Hall at CalArts. As a founder of Improvised Alchemy performance ensemble She has pieces available on Open Space as well as her own label, Banshee Media.
She teaches artistic research and critical theory in the Creative Production Masters Programme at Catalyst Institute for Creative Art and Technology, in the historic Funkhaus facility in Rummelsberg, Berlin. She is also Founder of The Willows Nest, a collaborative production platform and informal arts space in Friedrichshain, which houses the experimental and improvisational music label, Banshee Media.
As Assistant Professor at UC Riverside (2000-2010), she pioneered artistic research methodologies both as a resident of the UC Humanities Research Institute (2002) and while serving on the board of the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, shaping interdisciplinary artistic research across the UC system (2004-2009).
Her critical writings have been published in books, anthologies, and journals, with topics ranging from feminism and race in Punk and Blues, postcolonial analyses of Drum and Bass, sonic hauntology in televisual media, improvisation and collective performance in post-techno EDM praxis. She presents regularly as artist and scholar at conferences and festivals around the globe both as invited and peer reviewed presenter. From 2000 until 2010 was an Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the University of California, Riverside, where she taught graduate and undergraduate theory and composition courses. There, she also founded and directed the UCR Free Improvisation Ensemble, and produced an international improvisation festival (2004), a Digital Arts Network Research Exchange (2007) and the UC Institute for Research in the Arts’ annual conference/festival Demonstration (2008). In addition to founding the genre-bending free funk band Erroneous Funk (Los Angeles) in 2001, and in 2004 she created the Adaptable Girl digital performance collective. From 2012-2014 she taught music theory and composition at Mesa College in San Diego, and in 2019 she was a Mentor in the Performance Studies Masters Program at Universität der Künste, Berlin.