Marco Wedel is a Berlin-based musician, composer, and humanities scholar whose work bridges music, political philosophy, and technology. His practice follows a transdisciplinary approach, integrating artistic exploration with social-scientific inquiry.

With a background in jazz, composition, and improvisation, his works can be understood as playful essays on human presence and creativity in music. They engage with the physical, intellectual, emotional, and social dimensions of music-making, seeking the point at which these layers converge.

Máté Balogh is a Hungarian composer and Associate Professor at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. He received his doctoral DLA degree at the Liszt Academy and currently teaches in the Department of Music Theory. He has also held a professorship at the International Kodály Institute and is a regular guest lecturer at the Conservatorio di Trieste. Until 2018, he served as Editor-in-Chief of Universal Music Publishing – Editio Musica Budapest, working closely with the works of György Kurtág.

His music has been performed throughout Europe and internationally, including in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Ethiopia, China, Taiwan, Japan, Canada, and the United States. He composed the score for Zsófia Szilágyi’s film One Day, which received the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.

Balogh’s works have been presented at major festivals such as Manifeste (IRCAM, Paris), Milano Musica, Ostrava Days, and Café Budapest, among many others. He has collaborated with ensembles and orchestras including JACK Quartet, Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra, Janáček Philharmonic, UMZE Ensemble, Hungarian Radio Orchestra, and Concerto Budapest.

His compositions are published by Editio Musica Budapest, Impronta Edition, Universal Edition (Vienna), and Pizzicato Verlag Helvetia. In 2026, he will serve as composer-in-residence for the Hungarian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale.

Niko D. Schroeder is a composer and multimedia artist whose work reflects his Midwestern (U.S.) upbringing through rugged joy, unpretentious clarity, and subtle humor. His sound and video art often depart from the familiar and mundane, recontextualizing everyday materials through unusual formal and situational frames. Processes of fragmentation, focal shift, and self-reference shape his aesthetic, informed by early encounters with conceptualism, minimalism, American folk traditions, and underground rock culture.

A deeply collaborative artist, Niko has worked as a bandleader, engraver, and audio engineer. Performers of his music include Sō Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, Nadar Ensemble, Quatuor Bozzini, Het Residentie Orkest, Sinta Quartet, and Orkest de Ereprijs. His work has been presented and supported by institutions and festivals such as Gaudeamus, Dutch National Opera & Ballet, Nederlands Dans Theater, the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, and Darmstadt Summer Course.

He studied at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague, the University of Missouri, and Grand Valley State University, where he received multiple awards including the Sinquefield Prize. Niko lives in Michigan with his spouse and their two cats, Johnny Cash and June Carter.

Louis Franz Aguirre (b. 1968) is a Cuban composer based in Denmark. Educated in Havana as composer, violinist and conductor under Harold Gramatges and Roberto Valera, he became artistic director and chief conductor of the Camagüey Symphony Orchestra at the age of 27.

Since the early 2000s, Aguirre has lived in Europe, studying in Amsterdam and later completing the soloist class in composition at the Århus Music Conservatory in Denmark under Karl Aage Rasmussen and Hans Abrahamsen.

His catalogue of over 170 works spans opera, orchestral and chamber music, solo and vocal works. Deeply influenced by Afro-Cuban Santería traditions, his music merges modernist intensity with ritualistic force. Often described as uncompromising and visceral, his works demand extreme virtuosity and explore microtonality, complex rhythmic structures, and raw, transformative sound worlds.

Aguirre is widely performed internationally and is considered one of the leading contemporary Cuban composers of his generation.

Sebastian Zaczek (born 2002) began playing the piano at the age of seven and soon started composing. He received early piano training with Mihai Zaharescu and later completed a bachelor’s degree in computer science before turning fully toward composition. He is currently studying composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg with Prof. Gordon Kampe.

Sebastian has received multiple awards at the Bundeswettbewerb Jugend Komponiert. In 2024, he was awarded a scholarship within the project NEUES ZEUG – Musik aus dem Jetzt für junge Entdeckerinnen*. The same year, he received Second Prize at the Gustav Mahler Composition Prize for his vocal quartet Schluss. Recent commissions include works for the Musik21 Festival Übergänge and Hamburg Contemporary 2025.

In addition to his compositional work, he has been active as a juror and transcriber with Score Follower, an organization dedicated to expanding access to contemporary music online.

Rafael Marino Arcaro is a Brazilian composer from the countryside of São Paulo, currently based between Berlin and London. His music draws on the sensibilities of his rural childhood — fruit trees, insects, nocturnal creatures — intertwined with reflections on Brazilian artistic identity. Known for an aesthetic of clarity and restraint, his works balance emotional directness with a refined, playful seriousness, gently reworking classical tradition from within.

His orchestral work invention in the language of child, Op. 22, was commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra and premiered in the 2024/25 season at the Barbican Centre under Maxime Pascal. Earlier orchestral works have been performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orquestra Petrobrás Sinfônica, and at Sala São Paulo. His music has been described as “extremely sophisticated and accessible to a more attentive listener” (João Marcos Coelho, Estadão).

He studied Philosophy before completing a Master’s degree at the Royal Academy of Music and a PhD at King’s College London under the mentorship of George Benjamin. He is currently developing a project supported by MusikFonds (Germany), focusing on South American composers and a large-scale song cycle based on the poetry of Manoel de Barros.