Han (they/them) is a settler flutist, electronic musician, composer, thinker and improviser living on the unceded land of the Yuggera Ugarapul and Turrbal Peoples.
Their music explores the sweetness in unsettling difficulty, and reveals the monsters lurking in traditionally beautiful instruments. Their work and thinking are rooted in queer and feminist collaborative and contaminative co-creation with other soundmakers and artmakers, physical and social environments, ecologies, histories, and narratives, exploring the possibilities of making-kin and finding agency within community. cyberBanshee is a musical haunting/invocation rooted in the understanding that the musicker is never alone: “musickin” (Reardon-Smith, 2021).
Han performs solo on Ableton-extended flute as cyberBanshee and are an active member of Brisbane’s experimental music community, playing with Meanjin’s radically inclusive symphonic pop collective Matt Hsu’s Obscure Orchestra, and improv and experimentation trios Rogue Three and It’s Science And Feelings, and is part of the curation team for Cave Inn Experimental. Previously, Han was a founding member and co-director of contemporary art music ensemble Kupka’s Piano. In 2019/2020 they curated the concert series “Kin-Makers” presented by the Brisbane City Council and Arts Queensland through Creative Sparks, were one of the “Boundary Riders” commissioned by Clocked Out and Jocelyn and Bruce Wolfe, and were awarded a stART grant through Arts Queensland to create three cyberBanshee music videos in collaboration with digital media artist Amelia Hine.
Han has been awarded funding by the Australia Council for the Arts, Sidney Myer Fund, Ian Potter Cultural Trust, and PPCA Trust Fund, and they have served as a peer assessor for the Australia Council. They have performed in international festivals including ManiFESTE (Paris), IMD (Darmstadt, DE), SPOR (Aarhus, DK), Kunstenfestival des Arts (Brussels), BIFEM (Bendigo, AU), Sound Out (Canberra), Totally Huge New Music Festival (Perth), Tilde New Music Festival (Melbourne), Woodford Folk Festival (Woodford), Dots+Loops Nonstop (Brisbane), the Queensland Music Festival (Brisbane), Yonder (Sunshine Coast), and was invited to appear as a soloist at the 2021 BLEACH* Festival (Gold Coast; sadly cancelled due to COVID).
Han works as postdoctoral research associate to Wiradjuri trans-nonbinary Professor Sandy O’Sullivan on their ARC Senior Future Fellowship project Saving Lives: Mapping the influence of Indigenous LGBTIQ+ creative artists at the Centre for Global Indigenous Futures and the Department of Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University. They are one of the community organising thinker-troublemakers behind the Brisbane Free University, its Radical Reading Group, and its 4ZZZ offshoot Radio Reversal. They are also producer of the podcast Saltwater Library, with RMIT DECRA scholar Dr Rebecca Olive.
Han’s PhD—Sounding Kin (Reardon-Smith, 2021)—explores a queer-feminist thinking of free improvisation founded in sympoiesis and contamination, featuring the work and voices of women, trans, and non-binary folk practicing in the field, and interrogating the use of the word “freedom” in music in the context of settler-colonial australia. They completed their doctoral studies at the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University under the supervision of Prof Vanessa Tomlinson, Dr Alexis Kallio, and Dr Louise Denson. They have a previous Advanced Master in Contemporary Music Performance from the School of Arts in Ghent, Belgium, under the mentorship of ensemble ICTUS and flutists Mike Schmid (ICTUS) and Helen Bledsoe (musikFabrik), where they undertook a detailed study of Richard Barrett’s codex scores for improvising ensembles.
han reardon-smith 