Chuck Johnson is a California-based composer, producer, and musician. He approaches his work with an ear towards finding faults and instabilities that might reveal latent beauty, with a focus on pedal steel guitar, experimental electronics, alternate tuning systems, and composing for film and television. Recordings of his work have been published by VDSQ, Thrill Jockey, Temporary Residence, Kompakt, Ghostly, and Three Lobed, among others.

Valerio Tricoli is a Palermo born and Munich resident composer and performer of electro-acoustic music. His main instrument for live presentations is the Revox B77 reel-to-reel tape recorder, used as a completely analogue / ergonomic device for live sampling and real-time transformation / editing / mixing of pre-recorded (field or studio recordings) and made-on-the-spot sound sources, the latter usually being vocalizations (including speech and singing), small acoustic and electronic instruments, objects, the amplified sound of the room itself in which the concert takes place and - in the case of group sets - whatever is produced by the fellow musicians.

Tricoli's electro-acoustic studio compositions are aligned to the tradition of Musique Concrète and explore themes of the internal - represented both by the psychological and the physical - and of the occult, which together with the large use of spoken text makes them often deeply existential works, self-investigations of the psychological, emotional and irrational horror within.

Born and bred in Maine, a New Yorker since 2006 and currently living between Berlin and Brooklyn. An artist interested in multiple musical directions and one who strives for quality and sincerity in his work. His exciting energy has compelled him towards many different musical directions and projects. Gray’s fresh approach to modern drumming has enabled him to play with many of the world's great jazz musicians. He has performed and recorded with saxophonists David Liebman and Gary Thomas, and recently released a trio with the politically charged title Melt all the Guns, featuring Ralph Alessi and Angelica Sanchez.

On his recent record "Most Definitely" (for solo percussion & electronics, 2023), Gray writes, "This recording represents another musical offering of which is my first ever solo. I wanted to create a work of high detail where people can listen closely in more nuanced ways to what it is that I am communicating in my playing as a widely influenced active human listener, artist, and drummer. As you can guess, this project took me some time, roughly 40 years in the making. I truly hope you are able to find some fun as well as a deeper understanding of expression from me and all of the musical artists from the worlds (and planets) of past, present, and future."

Bill MacKay is a guitarist, composer, singer and improviser based in Chicago. A deep radiance envelopes even MacKay's most dissonant explorations, and his trajectory travels seamlessly from the avant-garde to folk modes and further. He has created an extensive body of original work, while energizing the folk, avant-garde, and experimental diaspora. MacKay’s blissful harmonic control and outside-the-box guitar mastery are one with his compelling songwriting, and his creative voyage and imaginative influences are fully displayed across his discography. In his music, tradition is invited to be reinvented. This show celebrates the release of his latest solo record Locust Land (Drag City, 2024) which forms the basis of his current tour.

Olivia Block (1970) is a media artist and composer. Her discography, spanning many years, is published on Another Timbre, Black Truffle, Erstwhile, Glistening Examples, NNA Tapes, Room40, Sedimental, and Touch, among other labels. She performs live experimental music, where at any given concert she might be playing electronic instruments, piano, organ or amplified objects. Block also creates surround sound concerts, sound installations and scores. 

Her latest release, The Mountains Pass, is on Black Truffle records.

Joy Guidry is a bassoonist, versatile improviser, performance artist, and composer of experimental, daring new works that embody a deep love of storytelling. Joy’s music channels their inner child in honor of their ancestors and predecessors. 

AMEN is Joy's third release. The conception of this album came from many talks with her ancestors, which then turned into an eight-track project. Amen meets at the intersection of many subjects in music, gender, sexuality, and Blackness. Joy approached this album from her own lived experience as a Black transwoman who was raised in Houston, Texas, and southwestern Louisiana. This project experiments with different southern Black American music forms, such as jazz, gospel, and ambient. This project was created to provide her peace, warmth, community, and release for this chapter of her life. This performance features Joy on bassoon, electronics, voice, and poetry.

Will Guthrie is an Australian drummer / percussionist living in France. He plays solo using different combinations of drums, percussion, amplification and electronics, and leads the contemporary hybrid percussion / gamelan group ENSEMBLE NIST-NAH. His music has been released on labels such as Black Truffle, Editions Mego, Erstwhile, Clean Feed, Gaffer Records, Hasana Editions, 23five, iDEAL and his own label Antboy Music.

Guthrie first made a name for himself within the Australian jazz scene, establishing himself at a young age as a major presence by winning the Wangaratta National Jazz Awards for drums in 1997 and going on to perform with many of Australia’s most celebrated jazz musicians such as Mark Simmonds, Julien Wilson and Ren Walters. In the new millennium, his work took a long detour away from the drum kit through junk electronics, extreme amplification and electro-acoustic techniques, documented on a series of solo and collaborative recordings from these years.

Alongside continuing his electro-acoustic work, in the last decade, Guthrie has returned to the drums with a vengeance, developing a series of solo works marked by a radical single-mindedness, from relentless rhythmic workouts to earth-quaking explorations of the bass frequencies of gongs and other metal percussion instruments. In the crowded world of free jazz/improv percussion, Guthrie’s work is distinguished from the delicately pointillist approach of much European improvisation by its rhythmic sophistication, unashamed virtuosity and undeniable physicality, touching on aspects of world musics from Javanese gamelan to South Indian Carnatic music.

Jaron Lanier plays a pathological number of rare acoustic musical instruments, a malady you can read about in one of his pieces for the New Yorker Magazine.  Since the pandemic, he has played with Les Claypool, John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, T Bone Burnett, Sara Bareilles, Sean Lennon, Stanley Jordan, Will Calhoun, Harper Simon, Bill Frisell, String Cheese Incident, and many others.  Before the pandemic he wrote orchestra music and played with tons of other people like Philip Glass and Ornette Coleman.  He’s also a writer of books like You Are Not a Gadget and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.  He’s won literary awards like the German Peace Prize for Books, one of the world’s highest lit honors.  He’s that guy on Social Dilemma on Netflix.  He’s also a scientist and technologist, known for his work initiating the field of Virtual Reality among other things.  He won a Lifetime Career Award from the IEEE.  He’s also the Prime Scientist for Microsoft, against all odds.

Join us on Saturday, November 2nd for a special event to mark the closing of "Why is There Something Instead of Nothing?," a site-specific installation by Ann Altstatt. We will feature a conversation with the artist and special live performance by Kite Hands Glowing.
Free to attend. Light refreshments will be provided. 
 

pent is an electronic music composer & sound synthesist based in new york city. Her work examines the phenomena of synthetic sound, dissecting and reconstructing how the concept of the “unnatural”  replicates the organic world and vice versa. 

pent’s cultural framework pulls from computer music, noise, dance music tropes, and 20th century classical to create fluxing immersive sound sculptures that defy realities & transverse stream of consciousness narratives. Her exercises as a sound synthesist are largely in the area of additive synthesis & pulsar synthesis, blending each fields techniques into a model of acoustical simulation that draws environmental sounds into physically impossible territories. 

Through these techniques she creates a sonic world that floats between stasis, burst, confusion, distraction, and cohesiveness. 

Natacha Diels’ work combines choreographed movement, video animation, instrumental practice, and cynical play to create worlds of curiosity and unease. Recent work includes Papillon and the Dancing Cranes, for construction cranes and giant butterfly (2018/2021), a solo project entitled Somewhere Beautiful (2022), and Beautiful Trouble, an ongoing ‘opera’ for string quartet with the JACK quartet. Forthcoming is a solo album (Carrier Records 2024), a new ‘opera’ for Festival Nueva Opera Buenos Aires (2024), and a work for headphoned audience with La Muse en Circuit for Ensemble Contrechamps (2025). With a focus on collage, collaboration, and the ritual of life as art, Natacha’s compositions have been described as “a tour de force of reckless imagination and confident craft” (Musical America), “a fairy tale for a fractured world” (Music We Care About), and “the liveliest music of the evening” (LA Review of Books). Natacha is a founding member of the composer/performer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse (est. 2003).

This performance is a journey into a strange landscape occupied by sounds and image that are at once familiar and unknown, reassuring and unsettling. The works are divided into three acts— a brief overview of life-to-death (Somewhere Beautiful), an unravelling of cohesion through incessant rigor (Untitled Art Piece), and a directionless journey to a long golden road (The God-Fearing Woodsman).