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.

Indexical is pleased to present a solo performance by bassoonist and composer Joy Guidry. Followed by a conversation with the artist hosted by acclaimed composer and theorist James Gordon Williams, Assistant Professor of Music at UC Santa Cruz.

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. 

spatial facilitation, a term of art in physiology, refers to stimuli that contribute to the accurate processing of visual information. That is to say, there are certain things that we see, that help us see more precisely. spatial facilitation is an ongoing project of mapping clearer vision through walking, noticing, the breath, and the saxophone. ANALOG SOLUTIONS FOR ANALOG PROBLEMS.

for spatial facilitation #10 we will visit the exhibition Young, Gifted, and Black at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. We will look for the tethers that bind, and release.

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).