Casey Adams
percussion, electronics
Seattle

Casey Adams is a noise maker from Seattle, WA, who focuses his energies on percussive materials and electronics.

photo credit: Haley Freedlund

Heather Bentley
viola
Seattle

Seattle-based violist and composer Heather Bentley has trailblazed a career as one of the West Coast’s most visible improvisatory musicians, specializing in creating evocative atmospheres and textures. Classically trained, she has shifted to an unabashedly experimental artistic output: As a performer, she can be seen performing on instruments like her electric seven string and five string violins or her electronic pedal board in numerous chamber ensembles that utilize improvisation, electronics, and often both. As a composer, her work for chamber ensembles and orchestras has been performed by organizations across both California and Washington. Relentless in her pursuit of creativity, she continues this work as co-founder of Kin of the Moon, a 501(c)3 organization which fosters collaboration between artists in service of creating unique art.

Kin of the Moon

Raven Chacon
electronics, guitar
Santa Fe

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. Collaborations include KILT with Bob Bellerue and Sandor Finta, Endlings with John Dieterich, Mesa Ritual with William Fowler Collins, an ongoing duo with Laura Ortman, previous membership in the artist collective Postcommodity, and as co-conductor of the massive New Mexican ensemble Death Convention Singers. Every year, he teaches 20 students to write string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). He is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, and the American Academy's Berlin Prize for Music Composition. Chacon operates the Sicksicksick/Sssk label out of his home in Albuquerque, NM

spiderwebsinthesky.com

Allison Clendaniel
voice
Baltimore

Allison Clendaniel is an interdisciplinary artist in Baltimore, MD. Her work encompasses sound, classical & extended vocal technique, performance art, movement, technology, and theatre.

A versatile performer and improviser, Allison has composed and played music for voice, synthesizer, piano, computer, cello, and theremin in both solo and collaborative environments. She currently focuses her artistic attention at the intersectionality between technology and acoustic instruments. She has studied voice and movement with legendary performer and composer, Meredith Monk at the House Foundation, clowning with Globus Hystericus, and has toured extensively through North America as a teacher and performing artist.

An avid advocate for the arts, she is the Artistic Director of Mind on Fire, a modular chamber orchestra. During the day, she works supporting designers of theatre with Baltimore based company, Figure 53.

She tries to build beautiful things around her, crafting songs, making theatre, and working permanently as a solo artist and with her collaborative projects: Mind on Fire, Pants, and In the Womb of the Everything Room

www.allisonisonline.com
www.mindonfire.org

Marisa Demarco (Bigawatt)
voice
Santa Fe

Marisa Demarco is an installation and performance artist, musician and composer based in Albuquerque, N.M. She's the founder of Gatas y Vatas festival for boundary-pushing performance and Milch de la Máquina, a women's performance art crew. She's a leader with Death Convention Singers, the largest noise collective in the Southwest. She tours and performs solo as Bigawatt. Demarco teaches Sound Art at the University of New Mexico and leads workshops primarily in New Mexico on small electronics projects. She is also a longtime journalist with a focus on criminal justice reform and public health. 

marisademarco.space
bigawatt.com
gatasyvatas.com

photo credit: Marya Errin Jones

Billie Howard
multiple instruments
Chicago

Billie Howard is a multi-instrumentalist sound artist. She composes experimental music that focuses on breathing cycles, chronic pain, and mediation on both quiet and extremely loud sounds under the name Akosuen.

Billie is a founding member of the contemporary music collective a.pe.ri.od.ic. and the experimental improvisation group NbN Trio. In addition to classical music, she writes and performs with her band The Paver and plays keyboards and violin with the legendary Bobby Conn.

She holds a M.Mus. in piano performance and pedagogy from Northwestern University and B.A. in piano and violin performance from Montana State University.

billiejeanhoward.com

photo credit: Marya Errin Jones

Jim Knodle
TBA
Seattle

Jim Knodle was a member of the free jazz group Holus Bolus and a founding member of Circular Cowboys and Inside Out. He has recorded and/or performed with Wayne Horvitz, Robin Holcomb, Vinnie Golia, Lynette Westendorf, Michael Vlatkovich, Andrew Hill, Dave Storrs, Rob Blakeslee, Sue Ann Harkey, Jonathan Edwards, Caroline Kraabel, Paul Rucker,Michael Owcharuk,KMDFM, and others. He has released three CD's: "Wending", on the Nine Winds label,"Unprepared", with Dave Storrs, on Louie Records, and "Keeping the Devil Out" (self-released).

After college and university studies in music and many years playing rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and jazz music he began focusing on extended techniques and improvisation and methods of integrating these elements with composed music. A lengthy period of study and performance with the late composer and pianist Al Hood served to sharpened his awareness of the need to strive for musical growth through the application of contemporary compositional ideas to jazz and other forms of American art music.

His compositions have been performed in concerts presented by the Open Music Workshop, the Earshot World Jazz Festival, Marzena Arts' Spring Festival of Contemporary Music, Portland's Creative Music Guild, the Dumaurier Jazz Festival in Vancouver, BC., Seattle Composers' Salon, Tacoma New Music, the Composers and Improvisers Workshop, and the Seattle Jazz Composers' Ensemble.

Mallory Linehan (Chelsea Bridge)
violin
Chicago

Chelsea Bridge is Chicago violinist Mallory Linehan: manipulated melodies and ethereal electronic experiments.

Bandcamp

Norman Long
sound, art, design
Chicago

Norman W Long’s practice involves walking, listening, improvising, performing, recording and composing to create environments and situations in which he and the audience are engaged in dialogues about listening, place, culture, memory space, value, silence and the invisible. Norman finds inspiration in the Creative Music and electric imaginations of The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sun Ra, Pauline Oliveros, Phuture, Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi, Hildegard Westercamp and King Tubby. Norman Long has performed and exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center, Experimental Sound Studio, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Links Hall, Elastic, Chicago Humanities Festival, Chicago Cultural Center and 2017 PRIZM Art Fair (Miami). Norman performs with Angel Bat Dawid and the Brothahood and has performed with Damon Locks, On the Corner, Cher Jey, Sara Zalek, Cristal Sabbagh, Dan Bitney and Todd Carter. Norman has received 3Arts Award for Visual Art in 2011, 3Arts Djerassi (Woodside, CA) Artists Residency Fellowship in 2014, BOLT Artist in Residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition in 2014-2015, 3Arts Fellowship for AS220 (Providence, RI) 2017 Artist in Residence program, Three Walls RaD Lab and Outside the walls Fellow for 2017-2019 and Guest Composer at EMS Elektronmusikstudion, Stockholm, Sweden made possible in part by the City of Chicago’s DCASE grant.

normanwlong.wix.com
Blogspot
Soundcloud

photo credit: Marya Errin Jones

Duncan Moore
reel to reel, voice, computer
Baltimore

Duncan Moore is an intermedia artist and musician from Baltimore, MD. He works primarily in the realm of abstract sound and movement and usually performs under the moniker Headband. He also performs both traditional and free form music on the highland bagpipes based on the classical techniques of piobaireachd, the original music composed for the highland pipes dating back to the 17th century.

Jamal Moore
reeds, percussion, electronics
Baltimore

reeds

Jamal R. Moore is a native of Baltimore Maryland whom is a multi- instrumentalist, composer/performer and educator.

His background includes 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), Tomeka Reid, Dr. Bill Cole, DJ Lou Gorbea, George Duke, Sheila E, David Murray, JD Parran, Ras Moshe, Tatsua Nakatani, Hamid Drake and Yahyah Abdul Majid (Sun Ra Arkestra).

He is a long-term member of KREation and Conference of The Birds ensembles directed by Kevin Robinson. A affiliate of The Pan African Peoples Arkestra of the late Horace Tapscott, Calvin Gant ensemble directed by Calvin Gant and Nicole Mitchell; Joyful Noise Band, and co- creator of Ancestral Duo with Luke Stewart.

Jamal currently leads his own groups, Akebulan Arkestra, Napata Strings, Black Elements Quartet, Organix Trio, and Interstellar Duo

“As musicians we are healers of humanity and have a responsibility to cleanse dis-ease through positive tones, frequencies and vibrations. Music is the nucleus and universal language of the oversoul, mind, body and spirit.”
Jamal R. Moore

Tatsuya Nakatani
extended percussion
Santa Fe

Tatsuya Nakatani is an avant-garde percussionist, composer, and artist of sound. Active internationally since the 1990’s; Nakatani has released over 80 recordings and tours extensively, performing over 150 concerts a year. His primary focus is his solo work and his large ensemble project, the Nakatani Gong Orchestra. With his activity in the new music, improvisation and experimental music scenes, Nakatani has a long history of collaboration. He teaches master classes and lectures at universities and music conservatories around the world. Originally from Japan, he makes his home in the desert town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

Nakatani creates his distinctive music centered around his adapted bowed gong, supported by an array of drums, cymbals, and singing bowls. In consort with his hand carved Kobo Bows, it is an instrument he has spent decades developing. Nakatani approaches his orchestral project (NGO) as an arrangement of formations of vibrations, incorporated in shimmering layers of silence and texture. Within this contemporary work, one can still recognize the dramatic pacing, formal elegance and space (ma) felt in traditional Japanese music.

tatsuyanakatani.com

Timothy Nohe
video synthesis, modular analog synthesis and sampling
Baltimore

Timothy Nohe is an artist, composer and educator engaging traditional and electronic media in civic life and public places. His work has been focused upon sustainability and place, and musical and video works for dance and live performance. Nohe has exhibited and performed his work in a range of national and international venues: IMPAKT, Utrecht, The Netherlands; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Louvre Museum, Centre Pompidou; ISEA: Paris and the Baltic Sea; Ars Electronica, Linz; the Danish Institute of Electro-Acoustic Music, Århus; Museu da Imagem e do Som, São Paulo; the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Oxfringe Festival, Oxford; Fed Square, Melbourne; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The National Aquarium, Baltimore; Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia; and The Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York. He composed a music score for Ann Sofie Clemmensen’s dance In To and Out Of, which debuted at The Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, in October 2019. Nohe continues to collaborate with the dance and music community in Baltimore, notably with Mind on Fire. He currently serves as a professor of Visual Arts at UMBC and is an ACE Fellow.

Baker Artist Page
Vimeo

Melody Owen
film
Seattle

Melody Owen is an ecologically minded conceptual new media and multi-disciplinary artist from Portland, Oregon. She is currently exploring virtual reality and animal studies as a PhD candidate at UNSW in Sydney, Australia. She is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland and has a MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts as well as a MA in Environmental Arts and Humanities. She has done artist residencies in Paris, Quebec, Iceland, Switzerland, Austria, New York, California and Oregon. She has exhibited in museums, festivals, and artist organized events.

melodyowen.net

Neroj Patrick (Jeron White)
Bass performance title (resident of earth X2 AmeriKKKa)
Baltimore

Jeron White bassist from Baltimore MD He leads his group Polarity from time to time throughout the region.

"Like any bassist worth his salt, White can provide the bare harmonic outline of a ballad, engage in serious walk-it-home swing, or hold down complex melodies himself, whether in composition or improvisation."

"he composes and performs grooving music influenced by hip-hop and soul; and he plays free music with command and sensitivity"

Polarity opened for Michael Formanek’s Ensemble Kolossus in April 2017 at NYU Theater. Jeron’s discography include Jamal Moore’s “Organix Trio Ancestral Communion”, “Theljon Allen "Prospective", Dimitri Nassar "Cresent Piano".

Soundcloud
dimitrinassar.com

Ada Pinkston
movement, mixed media/uncategorized
Baltimore

Ada Pinkston is a multimedia artist, educator, and cultural worker living and working in Baltimore, Maryland. Born in New York, raised in New Jersey, with roots in Mississippi her art explores the intersection of imagined histories and sociopolitical realities on our bodies using performance, digital media and sculptural forms. Her work has been installed at a variety of spaces including The Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, The Walters Art Museum, The Peale Museum, Transmodern Performance Festival, P.S.1, The New Museum, Light City Baltimore and the streets of Berlin, Baltimore, and Orlando. She is a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Grit Fund Grant in Visual Arts, administered by The Contemporary (2017), and a Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Ruby's Project Grant in Visual Arts (2017). A graduate of Wesleyan University (B.A.) and Maryland Institute College of Art (M.F.A.) she has presented lectures on public space and equity at The French Embassy, NYU, UCLA and The National Gallery of Art. She is currently a lecturer of Art Education at Towson University.

Shelly Purdy
percussion
Baltimore

SHELLY PURDY is a contemporary percussionist and teaching artist from Maryland, currently living in Baltimore City where she has for the past decade been committed to presenting new and experimental music. Her sonic explorations tend to favor the mingling of found objects with more traditional instruments and an affinity for chance and silence whenever possible. These sonic worlds are explored through work with ensembles such as Umbilicus; a percussion quartet consisting of Baltimore improvisers’ Tom Goldstein, Paul Neidhart, and Will Redman. She is also a founding member of the science/music ensemble The Inverse Square Trio which seeks to demonstrate and illuminate acoustic properties and aural illusions through the works of Alvin Lucier, Steve Reich, Diana Deutsch, Richard Feynman and others. Purdy also embraces more traditional musics, most recently being her study with Professor Gina Beck on Javanese & Balinese Gamelan percussion. Purdy has been a member of The High Zero Foundation and Red Room Collective since 2016 and is happy to announce the forthcoming release of her duo tape “Six Improvisations for Two Vibraphones” with Will Redman on 20/20 Records.

Soundcloud
inversesquaretrio.com/

Dana Reason
pianist
Seattle

Dana Reason is a Canadian-born pianist, composer, improviser, and musicologist working at the intersections of twenty-first century musical genres and interdisciplinary practices. Reason was part of The Space Between trio with the electronic music pioneer Pauline Oliveros; and is documented on over 17 recordings. She has been long-listed for Grammys in several categories including jazz, arranging and contemporary classical music. She has recorded music by the 2020 NEA Jazz Master, Roscoe Mitchell, and DJ Spooky and has performed with a wide range of acclaimed artists, some of whom include: Joe McPhee, Joëlle Léandre, George Lewis, Stuart Dempster, Barre Phillips, Cecil Taylor, Mark Dresser, India Cooke, Kyle Bruckmann, and Lori Goldston. Reason is part of the ReSoundings trio with Catherine Lee and John Savage.The trio recorded and performed Roscoe Mitchell’s seminal work: Nonaah Trio at the Park Avenue Armory in NYC, 2019. Recording of the work is available on “Roscoe Mitchell with Ostravaska Banda”, on Hive Records, 2020. Since 2018, she curated the “Site of Sound” series in Corvallis, Oregon where she is also Assistant Professor of Contemporary Music at Oregon State University.

Carlos Santistevan
upright bass, electronics
Santa Fe

Carlos Santistevan is a musician, sounds engineer, and organizer. Since 2001 he has helped establish an oasis of creative music in the high desert southwest as the director of the High Mayhem Emerging Arts collective based out of Santa Fe, NM. Using an upright bass and electronics he creates soundscapes and spontaneous compositions from the extremes of acoustic and electric music. Early influences of punk rock and free jazz have led him to develop a unique approach to music and improvisation. He has performed at venues such as The Stone, The Outpost Performance Space, High Zero Festival, Outsound Creative Music Festival, The Olympia Experimental Music Festival, High Mayhem Festival and more performing with such artists as: Marshall Trammell, Laura Ortman, Roscoe Mitchell, Chris Jonas, J.A. Dino Deane, Henry Grimes, Nicole Mitchell and more. Carlos is a seasoned improviser and a member of diverse ensembles such as In Defense of Memory, iNK oN pAPER, The Late Severa Wires, Out of Context, Black Iron Trio, Taiji Pole and more.

highmayhem.org

photo credit: Marisa Demarco

Sue-C (Susan Slagel)
video
Baltimore

Sue Slagle (stage name SUE-C) is a video artist and educator working at the intersection of creative coding and live performance. For the past 18 years she has created handmade videos and live media performances, taught college level courses and workshops, and traveled extensively in the USA and internationally. Her works challenge the norms of photography, video, and technology by blending them all into an organic and improvisational live performance setting. Employing a variety of digital tools to create an experimental animation "instrument," she synthesizes cinema from photographs, drawings, watercolors, hand-made papers, fabrics and lighting effects using custom software created in the Max programming environment.

Sue is the recipient of a 2020 Creative Capital Award and a MacDowell Fellowship. She has performed and exhibited at many national and international venues and festivals including the Library of Congress, San Francisco International Film Festival, Oberhausen Short Film Festival, SFMoMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, REDCAT, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Arts, Pacific Film Archive, EMPAC, Ars Electronica, MUTEK, SONAR, Sonic Light, Transmediale, Marco Museum, ICA London and Laboral. She has toured extensively throuhgout the USA and Europe.

Current and past collaborators include Negativland, Dynasty Handbag, Laetitia Sonami, Morton Subotnick, Luc Ferrari, Antye Greie (AGF), Golan Levin, Joshua Kit Clayton, Wobbly, Sutekh, Matmos and Vladislav Delay. Sue has taught courses and workshops at California College of the Arts, San Francisco Art Institute, Portland Community College, Pacific Northwest College of Art, UCLA, Open Signal and La Casa Encendida.

sue-c.net
Vimeo

Luke Stewart
TBA
District of Columbia/NYC

Luke Stewart is a DC/NYC-based musician and organizer of important musical presentations, and has a strong presence in the national and international Improvised Music community. He was profiled in the Washington Post in early 2017 as “holding down the jazz scene,” selected as “Best Musical Omnivore” in the Washington City Paper’s 2017 “Best of DC,” chosen as “Jazz Artist of the Year” for 2017 in the District Now, and in the 2014 People Issue of the Washington City Paper as a “Jazz Revolutionary,” citing his multi-faceted cultural activities throughout DC.In New York City, Luke collaborated with Arts for Art in hosting the first ever “Free Jazz Convention” to share resources and strategies among the community. He has also performed in a myriad of collaborations and performances in venues such as the Kitchen, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pioneer Works, Roulette, and Issue Project Room.

Luke is also a presence in the greater community of Creative Musicians, with regular multi-city ensembles including.

His regular ensembles include Irreversible Entanglements, Heroes are Gang Leaders, and Ancestral Duo, Six Six featuring guitarist Anthony Pirog, and experimental rock duo Blacks’ Myths.

As a solo artist, he has been compiling a series of improvisational sound structures for Upright Bass and Amplifier, utilizing the resonant qualities of the instrument to explore real-time harmonic and melodic possibilities.He has performed at many important venues in DC, NYC, and around the world.As a scholar/performer, he has performed and lectured at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Medgar Evers College, George Mason University, Wayne State University, University of Montana, New Mexico State University, and the University of South Carolina.

He holds a BA in International Studies and a BA in Audio Production from American University, and an MA in Arts Management and Entrepreneurship from the New School. In 2019, Luke was also a finalist for the Johnson Fellowship, citing his work in changing the musical fabric of Washington, DC.

Thollem
sound for New Mexico: Outside In
Santa Fe

Thollem (NM) is a perpetually traveling pianist, keyboardist, composer, improviser, singer-songwriter, activist, author and teacher. His work is ever-changing, evolving and responding to the times and his experiences, both as a soloist and in collaboration with hundreds of artists across idioms and disciplines. Thollem's known internationally as an acoustic piano player in the free jazz and post-classical worlds, as the lead vocalist for the Italian agit-punk band Tsigoti and as an electronic keyboardist through a multitude of projects. "Thollem inhabits a world uniquely his own, rhythmically, harmonically and formally. A true original." - Terry Riley

www.thollem.com

Evan Woodle
percussion
Seattle

An integral part of the Pacific Northwest jazz and creative music scene, drummer Evan Woodle serves as a driving force behind several diverse bands while maintaining a healthy reputation as a first-call performer, recording artist, and private instructor locally and nationally. Evan is also a co-founder of the arts non-profit Table & Chairs (which hosts the Racer Sessions, among other events) and works regularly with local organizations Earshot Jazz and Origin Arts.

Lucas Yasunaga
ecosystem of synthetic animals
Baltimore

Lucas Yasunaga is a Japanese American media sculptor who makes tools, instruments, and synthetic beings to seek new ways of seeing; to witness the fragile and dynamic relationships they create with the human body, each other, and their surroundings.

electronicentomology.com
yasunaga.work

photo credit: Becca Gohn

Jenny Ziefel
clarinet, saxophone
Seattle

Clarinet and saxophone player Jenny Ziefel is a Seattle area performer and teacher who is very active in multiple genres of music. She plays regularly with such diverse groups as the Lake Washington Symphony, Spirutus Wind Quintet, Seattle Women’s Jazz Orchestra, Seattle Bass Clarinet Project, and various jam sessions.