Isuru Kumarasinghe is a self-taught musician and sound artist from Sri Lanka. He is currently a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. His work primarily focuses on electro-acoustic music, improvisation, field recordings, sound installations, and performances.
Through a listening practice, Isuru emphasizes the experience of sound perception and movement. He creates tools to transmit and affect philosophies of listening as well as the relationship with the body into sound production. Isuru takes a critical approach to the musical influences that dominate and marginalize local music practices, particularly within the context of Sri Lanka and South Asia. In his work today he explores resonance as a means of understanding the interplay between the body, architecture, and sound, for which he has developed his own resonator instruments. As a key figure in the first wave of experimental music and sound art in Sri Lanka, his work has significantly influenced the local music and sound art scene.
Kumarasinghe is a co-founder of the Musicmatters collective in Colombo, which has been instrumental and pioneered in organizing various experimental music formats, including public concerts, festivals, collaborations, and teaching both music and extended music practices, as well as music and sound philosophies. Musicmatters organizes and curates the Musicmatters festival, the only experimental music festival in Sri Lanka. Isuru collaborates extensively with musicians, as well as dance, theatre, and film makers, and has produced numerous albums for Sri Lankan bands, films, and documentaries. His work has been showcased at CTM Festival (2023), the Venice Biennale (public program, Italian Pavilion, 2024), the Colombo Biennial, Morphinraum, Standards Studio, Serendipity Art Festival, Downtown Pulse Festival, Colomboscope, Goethe-Institut Chennai, among others. He won the CTM Radio Lab Prize in 2023, leading to his work being streamed on Deutschlandfunk Radio and featured as part of ORF Musikprotokoll at Steirischer Herbst festival.