Press Kit

Biography

Short (54 words)

Leah Kardos is an Australian composer, author, and Associate Professor of Music at Kingston School of Art, London. She is the author of Blackstar Theory: The Last Works of David Bowie and a 33 1/3 volume on Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love, writes regularly for The Wire, and releases music with Bigo & Twigetti.

Medium (166 words)

Leah Kardos is an Australian composer, producer, writer, and Associate Professor in Music at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London, where she is Course Leader of the MA Music and MA Music Production courses. In 2016, with Isabella van Elferen and producer Tony Visconti, she co-founded the Visconti Studio, a teaching and research recording facility, and has directed it since 2022. Her research treats the recording studio as a site of creative authorship. She is the author of Blackstar Theory: The Last Works of David Bowie (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022) and Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love (Bloomsbury, 2024), and is editing the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook of David Bowie. She writes regularly for The Wire and is an associate editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. As a composer she releases music with Bigo & Twigetti, and in 2019 she founded the Kingston University Stylophone Orchestra. She makes sound design and music for Elizabeth Price's moving-image works, shown at the Liverpool Biennial and Manifesta 16.

Full (422 words)

Leah Kardos is an Australian composer, producer, writer, and academic. She lives and works in London.

She makes eclectic, mostly instrumental music that usually explores a specific limitation: a single piano in Feather Hammer, spam emails as lyrics in Machines, the distance between score and interpretation in Three Preludes, analogue instruments and technologies in Rococochet, the reuse and reversal of her own earlier material in Bird Rib, and two machines she does not know how to use in Deliberate Unfamiliarity.

Her music training started with classical piano, studying with Dorothy McCormack, before moving to contemporary composition and studio production at the University of Queensland under Philip Bracanin and Robert Davidson. She releases records with Bigo & Twigetti, and makes sound design and music for Elizabeth Price's moving-image works, most recently for the Liverpool Biennial and Manifesta 16. Her music has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 6 Music in the UK, Triple J and Double J in Australia, and NPR in the United States, and performed by ensembles including the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Ruthless Jabiru and Curve Ensemble.

She is the author of Blackstar Theory: The Last Works of David Bowie (Bloomsbury, 2022) and a 33 1/3 volume on Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love (2024). She is editing the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook of David Bowie, writes regularly for The Wire, and is an associate editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies, where she edits Field Notes.

She is an Associate Professor in Music at Kingston School of Art, where she leads the MA Music and MA Music Production courses and supervises doctoral research across subjects linked to popular music production, consumption and analysis: analogue recording practices, extended vocal technique, accessible music technologies, heavy metal and British youth, and the impact of AI and voice cloning on pop music expression, authenticity and identity.

In 2016, with Isabella van Elferen and producer Tony Visconti, she co-founded the Visconti Studio, a teaching, research and knowledge exchange facility built around analogue and hybrid recording, and has directed it since 2022. In 2019 she founded the Kingston University Stylophone Orchestra, sponsored by Dubreq, which brings together staff, students, alumni and local residents and has released two albums.

Across the music, the writing and the research, her work circles a set of shared questions. What can sounds mean beyond their musical content? How does the studio shape the work that passes through it? What happens when material filters through human bodies, histories and technologies? How do recordings hold memory? Who gets to compose, and with what?