Musician and artist Ebe Oke’s Open Rehearsal at The Watermill Center, New York

UPCOMING next month is experimental artist Ebe Oke’s open rehearsal at Robert Wilson’s The Watermill Center in New York, where he is a current artist-in-residence.

Oke is an operatic spoken word artist-cum-electroacoustic composer, marrying eclectic sounds and instrumentation with impactful, provocatively performed language. His performance is entrancing, reminiscing some sort of lurid Gregorian chant — holiness belied by oft-sacrilegious or unsettling verse, and performed by a kinetic, spirited David Byrne.

Ebe Oke’s performance background has had quite a star-studded record of affiliation. He has been personally and professionally influenced by Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson, having performed in a show she curated in New York City and having publicly dedicated performances to her. He’s also participated as a resident performer through Clocktower at Dustin Yellin’s Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.

Despite connections to New York, Oke cites London as his home base. The multimedia, multidisciplinary artist pulls from these disparate geographic and relational experiences for his performances and music — informed by his growing up on an exotic bird farm, Oke has used sounds from the natural world in his compositions, and birdsong in particular; he’s composed tracks as ‘character studies,’ imbuing personal relationship into music as a subtle homage; he is perceivably informed by his wonderfully imprecise perception of gender and sexuality, his performances fluidly embodying a boundary-less specimen of hypnotizing musical ephemerality.

Aside from the genius spectacle of his work, Oke is clearly a beautifully adroit musician. String instruments, electronics, piano, percussion, and powerful, interesting vocals are all strongly and expertly manipulated for and present in his oeuvre. The nonconformist, sonically inclusive way in which he develops his music and his performances is sometimes scathing, sometimes soothing and entrancing. Either way, it is, inarguably, both physically and psychologically affecting.

Ebe Oke. Photograph: Jose Montemayor