Riley Erin Flora MacKenzie is a queer/transfeminine composer and experimental musician, originally from South London and currently living and working in Glasgow.
She is making music that is both beautiful and disgusting, that is malleable, fluid and always in transition, and that positions itself to the listener with an introverted yet uncomfortable closeness. Her work is driven by the exploration and discovery of new musical forms and grammars, and the exploration of their unique expressive potentials; previous projects include new rhythmic notations bridging precise durational relationships and semi-indeterminacy, works of concurrent extreme brevity and difficulty, spatialised semi-installations exploring multiplicity and heterophony, and open-score acousmatic pieces intended for live performance.
Riley has been fortunate enough to work with a wide array of talented musicians and ensembles, including Sarah Watts, Calum Huggan, Stephanie Lamprea, Hoolan Ensemble, Dopey Monkey, Red Note Ensemble, and the Edinburgh Quartet; she enjoys particularly close and long-standing collaborative relationships with soprano and writer Eilidh Bisset, and movement artist and performance maker Tsoi Huen Wong. As an improviser on various guitar and electronics-based setups, she has performed across Glasgow, Edinburgh and London, including with members of the Glasgow and London Improvisers Orchestras and at long-running improvised music concert series Mopomoso.
Riley is currently in the final year of her undergraduate degree in composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where she studies with David Fennessy and Dr Bekah Simms as well as pursuing private study in composition with Dr Evan Johnson.