Kari Watson and Katinka Kleijn are a Chicago-based duo blending cello, modular eurorack synthesizer, Max MSP, and handheld electronics. Their work merges acoustic, analog, and digital sound sources, often exploring extended aspects of improvisation like physicality, attunement, and embodiment to create tactile performance environments. Kari Watson (they/them) is a Chicago-based composer, performer, and sound artist working across contemporary concert music, electroacoustic music, live performance, and interactive installation.

Katinka Kleijn is a cellist and multidisciplinary artist — praised by The New York Times as "a player of formidable expressive gifts" — whose genre-defying career spans improvisation, composition, and performance art. She's a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the International Contemporary Ensemble, and often explores the cello as a body corollary to her own.

Their recent album, VISTAS (Elektramusik, Berlin), is a single 35-minute track exploring the contrast between acoustic cello and analog modular synthesizer.

Caroline Jesalva and Katinka Kleijn have carved out a shared practice that continuously morphs their beings, bodies, presents, and pasts—both as women and as string players—into a mix of heavy instrumentalism, conceptual theater, and experimental sound worlds. Seemingly tethered to their instruments as extended creative limbs, both welcome and loaded, they clearly consider their entire selves as the source of their creative practice. Eclipsed Bodies is a theatrically devised work for improvised cello, violin, and electronics by the intergenerational duo of Jesalva and Kleijn. Drawing from post-structuralist theories on female identity, Eclipsed Bodies explores resisting stereotypical representations of the ‘feminine physique’ through unorthodox performance and parodic identities.