Sound artist and electroacoustic composer Jeanie Aprille Tang creates a moving array of timbres with saturated transitions of stark polarities. With a background in behavioral science and electroacoustic synthesis, her sound is shaped by cross-modal synesthetic abstraction with an urgency of tension and release through spatial manipulation. Nevertheless, the progression of her improvisations maintains a linear filmic approach, responding to the ever-present moment.
Born in Hong Kong, Tang gravitates towards rhythms of construction sites, inaudible conversations, and airplanes. Upon her time at Mills College in Music Composition with focus in Audio Engineering and Media Technology, studying under Maggi Payne and Fred Frith, Tang has been an active audio engineer, sound designer, composer, and performer internationally.
Under the moniker AMMA ATERIA, she explores the relationship between resonance and luminance, utilizing electric circuits, triggered by deliberate pulsating fragments of light through glass. Her work has been presented in installation ‘Dimension Divided‘ as artist-in-residence at SoART Millstättersee, Austria in 2013, and Titanik Gallery, Finland in 2014. She has performed with John Zorn, Fred Frith, and Ikue Mori among others at The Stone, and The Performing Garage in New York City. She is also a member in filmic and sound-scape projects IMA and Dapplegray.
Stephanie Barber is an American writer and artist. She has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media.
Barber’s films and videos have been screened nationally and internationally in solo show and group shows at MOMA, NY; The Tate Modern, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Paris Cinematheque; The National Gallery of Art; The Walker Art Center, MN; MOCA Los Angeles among other galleries, museums and festivals.
Many of her videos, including her recent feature DAREDEVILS, are distributed by Video Data Bank and her films can be found at Canyon Cinema and Fandor.com.
"The crux of Bennett’s output is formed through his anomalous showmanship and in the resourceful nature of the instruments he tailors. If there is “value” to be found in his art, then these aspects surely make for a sensible starting point. Recycled objects and household items are transformed into contraptions assembled for a purpose unknown to the performer until the very moment he drags them before baffled onlookers, inserting them into an orifice or smashing them with an unrelated implement. Such instances of universal obscurity add to the queer web of noise that makes the resulting sound so riveting from the perspective of the audience." -Tiny Mixtapes
"It appears that he is psychically and physically communed with sound itself in a way that is unique in our modern electrified music world, and that gives him the ability to sonically both reflect and compete with the urban and industrial environment, even while standing in opposition to it." -Chuck Hoffman
Andrew Bernstein is a Baltimore based composer, performer and sound artist whose work attempts to make sense of reality through the exploration of acoustics, rhythm, sense perception, and emergent systems. He works primarily with saxophones, percussion, and computers, using a range of computer music applications. Recently he has developed work for the emerging Web Audio platform. He plays saxophone and percussion in the experimental rock band Horse Lords and has played with Teeth Mountain, Matmos, and Dan Deacon. He has composed scores for productions by the Annex Theatre, Effervescent Collective, and the Baltimore Rock Opera Society and has releases on Ehse Records, NNA Tapes, and Hausu Mountain. He holds a BA in Computer Music Composition and is currently pursuing an MFA in Digital Arts from Goucher College. Since 2010 Bernstein has been a member of the High Zero Foundation and Red Room Collective.
Transplanted to Baltimore through her studies at Peabody, Rose quickly found the local experimental music scene and took root. Rose is an active organizer and performer, playing straight ahead soul covers with the Bellevederes and helping organize shenanigans of all sorts with the Red Room Collective. Rose has taught electronic media at Goucher, JHU, MICA, and BSFA, and currently is living the startup life with her co-founders at Yet Analytics. Primarily a reeds player, Rose will play most anything she can get her hands on, but she is best known for her work with the Bari Sax.
Composer, programmer and improviser of music, Alexandra Cárdenas has followed a path from Western classical composition to improvisation and live electronics. Using open source software like Super Collider and Tidal, her work is focused on the exploration of the musicality of code and the algorithmic behaviour of music. An important part of this exploration consists of the practice of live coding, including performances at the forefront of the Algorave scene. Currently she lives in Berlin, Germany and is doing her masters in Sound Studies at the Berlin University of the Arts.
photo credit: Ruud Gielens
Mei Mei received her Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Ohio University 2002. Mei Mei has received numerous awards and residencies, including at the Vermont Studio Center, Great River Art Association, the ARCH Residency at Honfleur Gallery, the Montgomery College Artist Residency, and second place in the Contemporary South Exhibition. Mei Mei's work was selected in the Studio Visit Magazine Volume 10, 2010 and was featured in The Studio Visit in June 2011. Recent exhibitions include: PAPER PARADOX at Carroll Square Gallery and upcoming exhibition at The Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Arts Center, Silver Spring, MD. Chang is in residence in Utah for the Beijing- Salt Lake City/ Imaging the Effects of Air pollution project that features the Living Gallery.
Mei Mei explores various media to bridge her internal and external worlds. She is a lifelong student of the human psyche, fascinated by the mind's ability to focus on details great and small without limits. Using her internal symbols, she creates rich visual images that are both highly personal and accessible by all.
Miha Ciglar is a composer, curator and researcher in the field of audio technologies. He holds an MSc degree from the Academy of Music and the University of Technology in Graz, Austria. In 2008, Ciglar founded the Institute for Sonic Arts Research – IRZU . He is the initiator and curator of the international sonic arts festival EarZoom, which takes place annually, since 2009 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 2011 he founded Ultrasonic audio technologies – a start-up company, developing a wide range of products including new musical interface controllers based on contact-free tactile feedback and computer vision, directional speakers based on modulated ultrasound, as well as several mobile applications combining music making and gaming – www.ultrasonic-audio.com. Ciglar was the conference chair of the 2012 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), which was held in September 2012 at IRZU in Ljubljana, Slovenia. - www.ciglar.mur.at
Tashi Dorji grew up in Bhutan, on the eastern side of the Himalayas. Residing in Asheville since 2000 and soaking up a vast array of music. Along the way, Dorji developed a playing style unbound by tradition, yet with a direct line to intuitive artistry. His recordings feature improvisations that spasmodically grow along tangential, surprising paths. All references break loose during a composition, as Dorji keys into his own inner world. After a handful of releases on various labels since 2009, Dorji presented his debut LP on Hermit Hut, the label created by Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) in 2014. Since then Tashi has released music in various formats on labels like Bathetic Records, Cabin Floor Esoterica, Blue Tapes and Marmara Records.
Nava Dunkelman is a Bay Area based percussionist and improviser. Born in Tokyo, Japan and raised in a multi-cultural environment by an American father and Indonesian mother, her musical interests span the globe from Japanese taiko to Indonesian gamelan to American marching band, and from classical to contemporary to the avant-garde. Nava studied percussion under Eugene Novotney at Humboldt State University before attending Mills College, where she studied with William Winant, Fred Frith, Maggi Payne, Zeena Parkins, and David Bernstein.
Since graduating with a degree in music performance in 2013, she has performed and collaborated with William Winant, Fred Frith, John Zorn, Ikue Mori, George Lewis and many others.
Nava has performed classical and contemporary pieces with the William Winant Percussion Group, inkBoat, The Luna Ensemble, San Francisco Girls Chorus, among others.
She also formed the improvisational trio Dapplegray, as well as electro-percussion experimental noise duo IMA, and improvisational duo DunkelpeK.
Nava enjoys discovering her own musical language by exploring experimental approaches to communication, progression and space.
photo credit by Mido Lee Production
Heejin Jang’s work manifests itself in the forms of interactive performance and sound installations. Improvising a score of live noise, she transforms the ordinary portrait, the landscape, and the noise of daily routine into something unusual. Distorting ambients, field recordings, and sound samples from the Internet, Jang creates a reverberating force that gets one lost in the echoes of invisible itineraries to the outer world. The performance addresses the moment when the countless struggle to establish a sense of connectedness eventually conjure up a monster that overwhelms the physicality of life. Heejin currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
Bonnie Jones is a Korean-American writer, improvising musician, and performer working primarily with electronic music and text. Born in 1977 in South Korea she was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland. Bonnie creates improvised and composed text-sound performances that explore the fluidity and function of electronic noise (field recordings, circuit bending) and text (poetry, found, spoken, visual). She is interested in how people perceive, “read” and interact with these sounds and texts given our current technological moment. Bonnie has received commissions from the London ICA and has presented her work in the US, Europe, and Asia and collaborates frequently with writers and musicians. She received her MFA at the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.
Andrew Lafkas is a musician currently living in Berlin, Germany. His primary instrument is the contrabass. He is currently focused on developing pieces for largish ensembles that encourage group intuition; this interest is greatly inspired by and influenced by experiences working in groups led by Milo Fine and Bill Dixon. He is also active in the groups Oceans Roar 1000 Drums, with Todd Capp and Bryan Eubanks, and a trio with Marcia Bassett and Barry Weisblat. He has performed at venues and festivals including Walker Art Center, The Living Theatre, Experimental Intermedia, the Vision Festival, and the Seattle Improvised Music Festival.
Caroline McCrystle Marcantoni creates dance and sound work and lives in Baltimore, Md. Her work focuses on the alchemical process inherent in the collaborative relationship between body and sound. Her works are created in a deeply intuitive manner; exploring and integrating many different perspectives but serving allegiance to none. She seeks in both sound and movement to access a source of creation that comes from a place deeper than intellectualism, in order to serve as a device which may annihilate, illuminate, and recreate patterns and archetypes of the personal and collective psyche. She sees the process of creating, and particularly movement and voice (for her), as a deeply effective tool for accessing uncensored and culturally repressed modes of expression.
Her interests and studies which contribute to her personality and work include but are not limited to; phenomenology, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, tarot, astrology, authentic movement, and pleasure.
Jamal R. Moore is a native of Baltimore Maryland whom is a multi-instrumentalist, composer/performer and educator. His background include California Institute of The Arts (M.F.A. 2012), Berklee College of Music (B.M 2005), Eubie Blake Jazz Orchestra (2000) under the direction of Christopher Calloway Brooks and historical acclaimed Frederick Douglass Sr. High whom notable alumni Thurgood Marshall, Cab Calloway, and Ethel Ennis graduated from.
Some notable luminaries Jamal has worked with are Wadada Leo Smith (2013 Pulitzer finalist) whom he studied with at California Institute of The Arts, Nicole Mitchell, Sabir Mateen, Roscoe Mitchell, David Ornette Cherry (Organic Roots Nation), Dr. Bill Cole, DJ Lou Gorbea the late George Duke and Sheila E.
He is a long-term member of KREation and Conference of The Birds ensembles directed by Kevin Robinson. A member of The Pan African Peoples Arkestra of the late Horace Tapscott, Calvin Gant ensemble directed by Calvin Gant and Nicole Mitchell; and Joyful Noise Band under the direction of Luke Stewart.
Jamal currently leads his own groups, Akebulan Arkestra, Napata Ensemble, Black Elements Quartet, Organix Trio, and Interstellar Duo.
Stewart Mostofsky does many things, often simultaneously. One of them is that he plays electronic instruments. He is also a member of the Red Room collective and the High Zero Foundation.
Baltimore resident Paul Neidhardt plays drums and percussion. He has been a member of the High Zero Foundation and Red Room Collective since 2004.
Shelly Purdy is a contemporary percussionist committed to performing and teaching experimental music. She performs with various ensembles including the percussion quartet Umbilicus, the science/music ensemble The Inverse Square Trio. Constantly pursuing new solo and ensemble repertoire, in partnerships with local composers, dancers, sculptors, and visual artists. Ms. Purdy’s passion for contemporary works has led to a vast array of opportunities including performances at Baltimore’s Artscape Festival, So Percussion’s Summer Institute, IFCP at Mannes, June in Buffalo, Make Music New York, The Live Wire Festival, and The Center for Advanced Musical Studies at Chosen Vale.
Purdy received her B.A. in Percussion Performance at UMBC, where she was a recipient of the Linehan Artist Scholar Award, and her Masters from the University at Buffalo where she studied with Tom Kolor of the Talujon percussion quartet. Ms. Purdy is currently teaching at Carroll Community College and performing in the Baltimore area.
M.C. Schmidt has lived in Baltimore for 8 years or so and has enjoyed it very much. The music scene here seems to him to be lively, caring, brave, and possibly even reckless. He hopes it is rubbing off on him and his band Matmos in which he has been playing for 17 or 18 years with his evil-genius boyfriend Dr. Drew Daniel. He has played lemons and heaters and water and oatmeal and canisters and ice. He has also played with and for Robert Wilson, Terry Riley, The Kronos Quartet, Antony, Bjork, Wobbly, Marshall Allen, Jason Willett and 11 other people. He tires of writing in the third person now, but looks forward with excitement toward listening to and playing "music".
Sydney Spann is a Baltimore born musician and performance artist whose solo work exists under the moniker Sunatirene (sún- ah-chur-ráin). Drawing from musique concrete, folk music, and pop motifs, she uses field recordings, archival samples, strings, and her voice as soundscaping and storytelling tools. Props and projections are symbols that contribute to her narrative. She will graduate this coming academic year with a BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture and Sound Art from Maryland Institute College of Art.
Multi-Instrumentalist Luke Stewart is a seminal figure in DC’s music community and a key organizer of important musical presentations. His regular ensembles include Trio OOO with drummer Sam Lohman, and legendary DC Free Jazz saxophonist Aaron Martin. He is also a member of experimental electronic group MOM^2 (Mind Over Matter, Music Over Mind), with whom he was invited to perform and lecture at the University of South Carolina, as well as being invited to perform at the Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music. He also is a solo performer, having presented original material and improvisations throughout the East Coast.
Luke is a founder of Union Arts DC, a collective space for artists in Washington, DC, and regularly presents challenging performances of Jazz and Avant Garde music through CapitalBop, an organization devoted to presenting and promoting jazz in DC, and his own “Creative Music in DC” series. He was called a “Jazz Revolutionary” when profiled in the “People Issue” of the Washington City Paper in 2014.
Irena Tomažin is a dancer, choreographer and a singer, who mainly performs in the context of dance-theater and vocal performances, as well as concerts of experimental improvised music. So far, she has created seven vocal-dance projects (Hitchcock’s metamorphoses with composer Mitja Reichenberg, Caprice, Caprice (re)lapsed, as a rain drop into the mouth of silence, Ptih with Hanna Preuss, Out of discord with Josephine Evrard and Taste of silence) and worked with many choreographers, theatre directors and musicians in Slovenia and abroad. Since 2006 she has been working on the solo project named »iT« for voice and voice recorders, of which she made her CD »Crying games«. With »iT« or as vocal improviser in experimental and improvised music she performed also abroad and in Slovenia on festivals like Rdeče Zore/Red Dawns, Break, Sound Explicit– Gallery P74, Druga Godba, Sajeta, Sound Disobedience /Ljubljana, ULTRA HANG /Budapest, Mostogradnja/Bratislava and Mostar; Club 5, Studio Aman/ Wien; Dis-patch/Belgrade, CultureScapes / Swiss, Densites/France... She collaborated in Aldo Ivančič's Bast Collective and performs in band Borghesia and has played with musicians: Tomaž Grom, Bratko Bibič, Christof Kurzmann, Tim Blechmann, Okkyung Lee, Lee Patterson, Xavier Charles, Tetsuya Umeda, Liz Allbee, Christian Kesten… She regularly teaches voice workshops in Slovenia and abroad.
Neil Young Cloaca (b. 1976) makes sounds, moving images, and events. Often performing solo as Bromp Treb, Cloaca uses/misuses intentionally-unstable systems of busted circuits, collaged beats, cheap effects pedals, tape manipulation, poor drumming technique and obtuse gesture to dance with failure. Cloaca remains a member of the absurdist baroque noise quintet Fat Worm of Error, currently enjoying a hibernation after over a decade of activity.
Solo and in collaborations, Cloaca has screened in and performed at ICA Boston, EMPAC, Block Museum of Art, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Kunstencentrum Belgie, Instants Chavirés, Nightingale Cinema, and Vox Populi. His recordings have been released by Load Records, Open Mouth, Ormolycka, Ultraeczema, Ecstatic Peace!, and many others.
Since the late 90’s, Cloaca has been programming experimental art events and building enthusiastic audiences. Projects have included performance and screening series such as the Bright Rectangle, the Montague Phantom Brain Exchange, Phantom Erratic, and The Peskeomskut Noisecapades, an outdoor winter landscape sound/performance festival held on the ice of a frozen river.
Neil Young Cloaca lives in Western Massachusetts, North America.
photo credit: Keliy Anderson-Staley
C. Spencer Yeh is recognized for his interdisciplinary activities and collaborations as an artist, improviser, and composer, as well his music project Burning Star Core. Recent presentations of work include "Modern Mondays" at MoMA NYC, "The Companion" at the Liverpool Biennial, “99 Objects” at the Whitney Museum NYC, "Great Tricks From Your Future" at D-CAF in Cairo Egypt, "In Tones From Light to Dark" at Performa 13, Borderline Festival in Athens Greece, Kinomuzeum at Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw Poland, All Ears Festival in Oslo Norway, “Synth Nights” at The Kitchen NYC, LAMPO at the Renaissance Society in Chicago IL, and a Jerome Foundation Commission from Roulette Intermedium. Yeh also collaborated with Triple Canopy for their contribution to the Whitney Biennial in 2014. He is currently an Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room NYC.
Recent recordings include "Solo Voice I-X" (Primary Information), "Wake Up Awesome," with Okkyung Lee and Lasse Marhaug (Software Recording Company), and “Long Pig” by New Monuments, his trio with Ben Hall and Don Dietrich (Bocian).
Yeh also volunteers as a programmer and trailer editor for Spectacle Theater, a microcinema in Brooklyn NY. His video works are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix. He is also a contributing editor to BOMB magazine, as well as contributing to The Third Rail and Personal Best.
photo credit: Bartosz Stawiarski
Michael Zerang was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1958, and is a first-generation American of Assyrian decent. He is a practicing musician, composer, activist, and producer since 1976, focusing extensively on improvised music, free jazz, contemporary composition, puppet theater, experimental theater, and world musical forms. As a percussionist and composer, Michael has over ninety titles in his discography and has toured nationally, and internationally to 34 countries since 1981. He works with and ever-widening pool of collaborators in many disciplines, including regularly with Hamid Drake, Blair Thomas, Peter Brötzmann, Joe McPhee, Jim Baker, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Kent Kessler, Axel Dörner, Johaness Bauer, Mars Williams, Clayton Thomas, Magda Mayas, Jean Luc Guillonet, Kathleen Baird & Taralie Peterson.
As an arts activist, Michael founded and was the artistic director of the Link's Hall Performance Series in Chicago from 1985-1989 where he produced hundreds of concerts of jazz, traditional ethnic folk music, electronic music, and other forms of forward thinking music. Michael was also a Board Member of Links Hall from 1989 - 2013. He continued to produce concerts at Cafe Urbus Orbis from 1994-1996, and at his own space, The Candlestick Maker in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood, from 2001 - 2005.
photo credit: Svetlana Selezneva
Eva Zöllner studied classical accordion in Cologne and Copenhagen and is one of the most active accordionists of her generation. As internationally acclaimed soloist she appears in projects ranging from experimental solo performances to concerts with renowned ensembles. An important part of her work is the close cooperation with composers of her generation. She has premiered more than 100 new works for her instrument. Lately she has been particularly interested in the potential of the accordion within electro-acoustic music and multimedia art. Eva is based in Hamburg and lives as a nomadic musician, travelling around the world to explore her instrument in different cultures and contexts.
photo credit: Henning Bode
