Speak for Change was founded with the mission of creating positive and lasting social change in our local and global communities. From a studio at the Tannery Arts Center in Santa Cruz, Thomas Sage Pedersen has hosted over 100 podcast episodes – and now, Speak for Change and Indexical bring you a series of live events! Each event features an interview and a musical guest, with new and custom sets tailored to the topic of conversation.

Mimi Tempestt is a daughter of california. Her works are aimed at disrupting stereotypical narratives and the iconography of black and queer people in media representations. Her debut album, Rough Diamond, was released in 2019. She graduated from Mills College with a ma in literature. Her debut collection of poems, The Monumental Misremeberings, is published with Co-Conspirator Press (2020). She is currently a Doctoral student in the Creative/Critical PhD in Literature at UC Santa Cruz.

German film enfant terrible Rosa von Praunheim trained his lens on the trans and gender-defying Americans who sought refuge in Berlin’s 80s club scene, catching some of the most honest and alarmingly prescient intergenerational dialogues about trans life ever dedicated to celluloid in the process.

In this hands-on workshop, learn a simple game engine and how to hack it to create musical work.  GB Studio is a quick and easy to use retro game creator for your favorite handheld video game system. No programming experience is needed! Leave with your own unique musical software for both your computer and a Game Boy cartridge to take home.

Participants enter a fictional laboratory and engage in an activity in which they are asked to visually align images of their hands on a video monitor, seeking to establish intuitive human-to-human synchronization within the system. 

Rodrigo Barriga is a Mexican composer and performer. His work explores ensemble interaction and communication through the use of openness and structured improvisation. Myles Morgan opens with a new set for synthesizers and samplers.

Indexical presents Tatsuya Nakatani’s non-traditional contemporary sound art project, the Nakatani Gong Orchestra (NGO). In each NGO performance, local musicians are trained in Nakatani’s technique for playing his adapted bowed gong, and are conducted in the performance of an original composition. In the last decade, the NGO has performed hundreds of concerts involving thousands of participants around the world in the creation of these transformative sound works.

Meerenai Shim leads a group in a Feldenkrais awareness through movement class. Participants are asked to bring a yoga or exercise mats, as well as an instrument of their choosing (if desired). Shim leads participants through sound exploration using Feldenkrais principles of curiosity, exploration, and observation without evaluation.

Roberto Fatal [they/them/ellos] is a filmmaker and storyteller. They come from Rarámuri, Tewa Pueblo, Ute, and Spanish ancestors and Mexican-American culture. Their Queer, gender fluid, Mestize/Mixed identity informs the sci-fi, apocalyptic films they make. 

Anna Friz & Gabriel Saloman present an installment of a larger composition and recording project in-progress called Between the Fires. A concert that listens for risk and regeneration, drought and the hints of persistent moisture in burn scars from the local CZU Lightning Complex fires, as the cycles of fire intensify. Anna and Gabriel experiment with listening and playing with the changing land, moving between chaparral and coniferous forests, performing with recordings made among the trees together with live electronic instruments, and analog and digital processing techniques.

Come create electronic music of the moment with local musicians Michael Logue and David Tristram in this collaborative event. Bring your acoustic or electronic instrument and plug in for shared sync, signal processing, and gorgeous playback on the superb Indexical sound system.  

Multimedia works by percussionist Ryan Nestor with solo contrabass improvisation set from Meerenai Shim, plus post-concert conversation with Charissa Noble.