Ivan Penov is a musician and composer whose work explores the intersections of electroacoustic music, sound art, and the experience of listening. Moving between acoustic instruments, electronic media, field recordings, and collaborations with movement and image, his practice seeks to expand sound beyond conventional frameworks and into spaces where perception and imagination overlap.
His artistic language emerges from an early fascination with the musical avant-garde of the 20th century, which inspired a free and experimental approach to composition. During his studies he developed a particular interest in acousmatic music, focusing on how the projection of sound shapes the listener’s experience. This reflection continues to inform his work, where sound is not only a medium of expression but also a way of structuring time, space, and attention.
While his early period was marked by predominantly solo work, the more recent years have been characterized by an ongoing dialogue with other artists, profiles, and disciplines. He has collaborated with dance companies, musicians, visual artists, and theatres, embracing contexts where sound can be shaped and reshaped through encounter and exchange. Alongside electronic and electroacoustic media, he has also returned to acoustic instruments such as the cello, which he played in his childhood, using them in highly personal and unconventional ways.
Penov’s sonic world investigates extreme conditions of sound — exploring the audible margins of a source and manipulating it to evoke strong emotional resonances from unfamiliar or even harsh sonic territories. Found sounds, often collected in rural environments, play a central role in this process, becoming material for transformation as well as carriers of memory and place.
His works have been presented in various international contexts, including the International Computer Music Conference, STEIM (Amsterdam), Sonorities (Belfast), Musiques et Recherches (Brussels), Estonian Music Days, VAEFF (New York), the New York Electroacoustic Music Festival, Membranes Out of Order (Berlin), the European Cinematography Awards, IMAL (Brussels), the Institut international de musique électroacoustique de Bourges, Pixxelpoint (Slovenia), TTT conference (Ljubljana) and the Cense Symposium (Ljubljana), among others.
Through this approach, Penov develops a language that is less about fixed form and more about transformation — a process in which listening becomes an active, imaginative act, and sound becomes a living space of exploration.