Praised as The Wire magazine as "iridescent delicacy" and "dissolves it (musical material) in a vat of acid", Anqi Liu is a composer, interdisciplinary/multimedia artist, photographer and film maker. Her solo album featured her improvisatory performance with synthesizers, was described as “detailed, narrative-driven sound that traipses across the physical and historical world to make connections we might not initially perceive.” by Boomkat. The San Diego Union-Tribune reviewed her orchestral work How Light Arrives... praising her unique sense of musical color and compositional introspection. Her portrait album, Veiled Erosion (KAIROS), was reviewed as "Liu’s works are abstract soundscapes, at times frightening, at times heartbreakingly beautiful. They move organically and possess almost tangible textures." by de Volkskrant, and "Each of Liu’s works is characterized by complex sonic construction and by the involvement of performers with a high degree of technical and expressive demand. Within this framework unfolds a fragile, intimate, and experimental sonic universe, marked by extreme attention to microform, texture, and the material relationships between sounds. It is an acoustic research space that engages with questions related to culture, memory, history, and the conditions of perception." by Sonograma Magazine, as well as "a spiritual force is unfolding in the arts that points toward a shared future, beyond the oppositions of tradition and experiment, concert hall and alternative venue, elitist and inclusive, art for connoisseurs and broad accessibility, aesthetics and message." by Reportersonline.
Her works—both written and freely improvised—have received international recognition, with performances across the U.S., Europe, and Asia at venues and concert halls like Coaxial Arts Foundation (Los Angeles), Solarc Brewing (Los Angeles), Oracle Egg (Los Angeles), Automata Theater (Los Angeles), The P.I.T (NYC), Downtown Music Gallery (NYC), Le Poisson Rouge (NYC), Shapeshifter Lab (NYC), The Firehouse Space (NYC), Dusk Dawn Club (BJ), Beijing Mao Live House, INNER FIELD (NYC), Spectrum (NYC), MIRY Concertzaal (Belgium), Hotelier Porto (Portugal), Palace of Fontainebleau (France) and others. She has been commissioned by and has been closely working with a group of musicians, ensembles, conferences, residencies, organizations and festivals such as Project [Blank], The Reiefestival 2023 (Belgium), Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik 2022 (Austria), ACTOR (McGill University, Montreal), Steven Schick, Kynan Johns, King Britt, Kyle Motl, Nina Vanhoenacker, New Brunswick Chamber Orchestra, Mivos Quartet, DECODA Music, Darmstädter Ferienkurse 2021, Ensemble Dal Niente Summer Residency 2021, International Society of Bassists Convention 2021, Oh My Ears Festival 2021, Ircam ManiFeste the Academy 2020, ELECTRONIC MUSIC WEEKEND MISE-EN_PLACE Bushwick 2019, Kalv Music Academy (Sweden), California Electronic Music Exchange Concert (Stanford), Ecoles d'Art Américaines de Fontainebleau (Paris), International Computer Music Conference 2017 (ICMC), Connecticut Summerfest Contemporary Music Festival, and many others.
Her work unfolds within what she terms the Ecology of Fraysonics—a framework that reconceives sound as a fray-field: a tensile weave of material, gesture, and environment continuously abraded and rethreaded through acts of listening and performance. Rather than treating sound as a fixed object or neutral event, she approaches it as a living ecology of thresholds—where bodies, instruments, and spaces encounter one another through friction, fragility, and transformation. Across her compositions and improvisations, sonic matter is not shaped toward stability but invited into states of erosion, renewal, and relational becoming. Each piece emerges as a site of negotiation, revealing the ways music can both document and reimagine the delicate interplay between the physical and the perceptual, the human and the environmental. Rooted in her long-term research with Mongolian long-song singers and fiddle artists at her home site, as well as sustained close friendship with experimental artists, her work traces the audible textures of vulnerability, connection, and endurance—the frayed edges through which listening itself becomes a mode of care.
Her design approach to signal processing and patching is deeply rooted in sonic evolution, balancing the unpredictability of electronic systems with the tangible artistry of fine-tuning controls. Her practice of recording and mixing embodies a ritualistic ethos, where sonic phenomena arise organically from the system’s possibilities and the known, yet unfold with effortless, ecological fluidity, embracing the unknown, the unpredictable and even accidents. Her audio visual works draw on her photography to generate both gestural and textural elements.
Anqi is part of the Motl/Liu Duo (free improv), the Liu/Bourdeau Duo (audio-visual ecology), and the cross-disciplinary āññā Duo (with Han Zhang). Anqi has taught and designed courses in music theory, composition, multimedia and sound studies at UC San Diego, and currently serves as a subject matter expert at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design (RMCAD), shaping the BFA in Music Production. A Ph.D. (ABD) candidate in Music Composition at UC San Diego, she holds a Master of Arts in Music Composition from Rutgers University and dual degrees in Music Performance and Law from Xiamen University.