Japanese-Korean working with installation, performance and composition, residing in Huddersfield, UK.

Her works sculpt daily tools and scrap wastes with invisible energy such as heat, magnetism and gravity into kinetic contraptions. Her work is both an aural / visual occurrence as one entity, embodying ‘almost nothing’ aesthetic, creating ephemeral situations that magnify silence, time and space.

Interested in cultural thinking and perception, her artistic practice examines environment, architecture, immigration, sociological structure & relativity.

She also composes and performs a diversity of alternative scores in collaboration with other artists and musicians worldwide. She is an artistic director for ame c.i.c. and co-runs the independent publisher mumei publishing and melange edition.

Ryoko Akama is currently supported by PRS Foundation’s Women Make Music 2020 and Develop your Creative Practice grant 2021.

ryokoakama.com
amespace.uk

photo credit: FILMLOVE

Tetuzi Akiyama specializes in creating music with elements of both primitivism and realism by connecting his own aspirations, in a minimal and straightforward way, to the special instrumental qualities of the guitar. Sometimes delicately and sometimes boldly, he controls sound volumes ranging from micro to macro, in an attempt to convert the body into an electronic entity. Besides making a variety of solo albums which covers from fingerpicking and slide acoustic guitar atonalism to noisy experimental drone to never-ending boogie, Akiyama has made many albums in collaboration with highly praised artists such as Jozef Van Wissem, Donald McPherson, Greg Malcolm, Bruce Russell, Günter Müller, Jason Kahn, Michel Henritzi, Phantom Limb, Gul3, Tim Barnes, Oren Ambarchi, Martin Ng and Alan Licht, just to name a few. Akiyama is also a band member of "Koboku Senjû", "Satanic Abandoned Rock & Roll Society" and "Hontatedori". Akiyama has been frequently invited for international music festivals in Asia, East & West Europe, North & South America, Australia, and New Zealand in recent years.

Ka Baird is a multi-instrumentalist, recording artist, producer, and performer based in New York City. She is known for her live solo performances which include extended vocal and breath techniques with electronics and psychoacoustic interplay of flutes and other aerophones. She creates a present tense sound with a vigorous delivery that seeks extreme release through physical exertion and psychic extension.

She is one of the founding and continuing members of Spires That In The Sunset Rise founded in Chicago in 2001. Her debut solo album "Sapropelic Pycnic" was released through independent Chicago label Drag City in 2017. Her latest recording "Respires" was released through Brooklyn based imprint RVNG Intl in October 2019. Recent national and international engagements have included performances at the Unsound Festival (Krakow), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), MoMA PS1 (NYC), Issue Project Room (NYC), The Hirshhorn Museum (Washington D.C.), The Kitchen (NYC), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), TUSK Festival (Newcastle, UK), Incubate (Tilburg, Netherlands), KRAAK (Brussels, Belgium), Le Guess Who (Utrecht, Netherlands), and the Festival Of Endless Gratitude (Copenhagen,DK). She has been a music resident at Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago), Pioneer Works (Brooklyn) and was a 2018 Jerome Foundation Artist-in-Residence at Roulette Intermedium (Brooklyn).

kabaird.com
Bandcamp

photo credit: Claudio Höhne

John Berndt is a Baltimore based cultural worker with a diverse set of interests and a long history as founder of The Red Room and participant in many decades of freely improvised music. His primary concerns are "the big ones"—epistemology, consciousness, individual agency, and the role of civilizations. These days his cultural activity is relatively narrowly focused on Relabi (a new gestalt which is like a paradoxical, but not random sounding, inversion of "rhythm") and on creating diverse new forms of electronic music production. He still plays (and loves) the saxophone.

"T.J. Borden is a multifaceted sound shaper, noise maker, collaborator and community organizer. As an interpreter, he brings his technical brilliance to his cello playing by working closely with composers in solo works and in group formations like the Switch Ensemble and the Mivos Quartet. As an improviser, he can be found piling into a shitty car with his bandmates and touring across the country to play in broom closet sized venues and sleeping on strangers’ floors. As an organizer, he can be seen putting together shows for experimental artists, most notably co-founding High Desert Soundings, a multi-day festival located in the desert of Southern California’s Wonder Valley." -Michelle Lou

photo credit: Peter Gannushkin

Jaimie Branch is a Colombian-American Brooklyn-based musician and artist working in the areas of improvisation and composition. Through her musical practice, her main interests lie in extending and expanding the technical limitations of the trumpet and the musical language of free jazz and improvised music. branch has a Bachelor of Music in jazz trumpet performance from the New England Conservatory of Music. Before moving to Brooklyn in 2015, she was an active member of Chicago and Baltimore creative music scenes as a performer, presenter, and recording engineer. She has collaborated with many musicians across the globe including: William Parker, Matana Roberts, Moor Mother, Rob Mazurek, Chad Taylor, Nicole Mitchell, and Tomeka Reid. Her own projects FLY or DIE and Anteloper have been met with critical acclaim by The New York Times, The Wire, NPR, Sterogum, The Guardian, and many others. jaimie has performed all over North America, Europe, and The United Kingdom at many festivals and venues such as The Chicago Jazz Festival, Berlin Jazz Festival, Vancouver International Jazz Festival, BOZAR Center for Fine Arts, The Kennedy Center, Bimhuis, Lollapalooza, and more. In 2020, branch became a Jerome Foundation at Roulette resident and recently won the inaugural 2021 Deutscher Jazzpreis for Wind Instruments International Award. branch is a storyteller who’s artistic output has continuously dealt with themes of social justice, gender and racial equality, and getting folks to wake the fuck up.

Daniel (A.K.A Ivan Decoud) Is a trombonist and sound artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Focusing on the intersections of improvised music, composition, physical processes of instruments, noise, movement and electronics, Daniel explores the diversity of sound and technique in diverse contexts. With a passion for media, nature, and technology, Daniel has created a large body of experimental work that evokes both human instinct and industrial innovation. Daniel continues to research ways in which he can deconstruct instrumental functions to find an individual identity as a soloist, collaborator, and sideman.

Rose Hammer Burt is a saxophonist, among other things, primarily playing the baritone saxophone. Conservatory trained but exploratory-minded, Rose looks to find the wild, joyful, ecstatic, mournful, playful, meditative moments in making music with friends. In non-pandemic times you can find her playing out jazz with Will Redman's The Compositions, raucous brass band music with Bedlam Brass, and occasionally 60's soul B-sides with the Bellevederes. Rose has been helping to organize the Red Room series and High Zero Festival since 2005, though she is semi-retired from organizing these days.

My work deals with four things: media, technology, money, and trash. In other words, all the shiny new tech we consistently consume can also be viewed as future garbage. With this mind, I use technology as a raw material that allows our relationship with obsolescence and decay to be felt.

I am a sound artist specializing in installations, compositions, and performances inspired by the consequences of technological objects and practices. My work examines technological production, its ownership, and the waste it produces. In the rush to get the newest and shiniest things, the less new and shiny are cast off: today's hot commodity is tomorrow's garbage. I make art in solidarity with these abandoned objects and the hands that put them together.

joecantrell.net

Jeff Carey makes synthetic noise music with a physically controlled software based instrument of his own development called ctrlKey. His music is abstract and sculptural, full of shapes and gesture, colored by noise bursts, percussive glitches and shifting resonance. In recent work, he has incorporated lighting projection to explore the space between visceral and the external embodiment of sound. He builds physically controllable custom software synthesis instruments and is interested in exploring immediate and flexible sound production with virtuosity in electronic music.

During the pandemic his virtual “global” tour had 14 dates with local artists from cities in 12 countries. This project evolved into a platform for presenting synthetic, mechanical and experimental noise music on twitch.tv/2xmono in the form of two weekly shows from January until the end of April: Executive Summary for very short (5 minute) performances on Monday mornings at 9 am and Imaginary Network Topologies Season Two for longer performances on Friday nights. Over 5 months the @2xmono stream has hosted over 200 performances from 183 performers.

Jeff Carey has performed throughout the US, Japan and Europe at music festivals NuMusic (Stavanger Norway), Night of the Unexpected (Amsterdam), Ekko Festival (Bergen Norway), Ende Times Liberation (NYC), Only Connect (Oslo, Norway) and Recombinant Festival (San Francisco) to name a few. He has been tour support for Matmos, Hijokaidan and Torche.

Carey's work has received support from the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance Rubys Artist Grant, the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award, and the New Media and Audio Grant from The D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and The National Endowment for the Arts. Internationally, he was awarded funding from Norwegian arts organizations, including Norsk Kulturåd, KulturKontakt Nord and Bergen Kommune. He has evolved his custom software as an artist in residence at USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway and refined his electro-instrumental music practice through several residencies at the Studio for Electro Instrumental Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Jeff Carey has a Bachelors of Science in Audio Technology from American University in Washington D.C. and studied computer music at the Institute for Sonology, Koninklijk Conservatory in The Hague, The Netherlands.

jeffcarey.foundation-one.org

Musician, drummer, producer, drum teacher. He is part of the performing arts company “La Mujer Mutante”. He is presenting his solo set called Colapsso; is part of Folga Duo with Tatiana Castro Mejía and “Paso de Sombra” with Luis Baumann. In 2015 he founded the Roseti cultural center, where he is the general director. He was part of the trio “Roseti Project” and “Falsos Conejos”.

Dan Deacon is a Baltimore-based recording artist and performer renowned for his five studio albums of innovative electronic music, his live performances in both contemporary and classical settings, and his extensive body of work in film scores. Deacon has premiered compositions at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and collaborated with artists and institutions including Kronos Quartet, Sō Percussion, The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the LA Philharmonic, and Justin Peck with the New York City Ballet. Deacon has also toured internationally with popular recording artists including Arcade Fire, Miley Cyrus, Future Islands, and The Flaming Lips. His albums Spiderman of the Rings and Bromst were both named Best New Music by Pitchfork, and his album Gliss Riffer received 4-star reviews from outlets such as AllMusic and The Guardian. Three of his latest film projects as composer—Strawberry Mansion (Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley), Philly D.A. (Ted Passon and Yoni Brook), and All Light, Everywhere (Theo Anthony)—premiered at Sundance 2021, and a fourth, Jessica Kingdon’s Ascension, won Best Feature Documentary at Tribeca 2021. His most recent studio album is 2020’s Mystic Familiar.

Tashi Dorji is a guitarist improviser based in Asheville NC. Tashi was born and raised in Bhutan. Tashi has released music both as a soloist and as a collaborator.

tashidorji.bandcamp.com

Emma Elizabeth (Liz) Downing is a Baltimore based artist who uses voice, bowed electric banjo and paint to create sounds and images.

With my ear against the chests of women singing, I sounded with and against their voices. I began singing along with the hum of household appliances, long notes of transfer truck horns, the gentle modulations of mourning dove calls and on and on.

Downing's current schooling is with musicians and poets: Greg Hatem in the Queer-Appalachian duo "Curving Tooth"; Rupert Wondolowski in the Absurdist Miserablist "Mole Suit Choir"; Allison Clendaniel in the vocal experimental duo "In the Womb of the Everywhere Room"; Susan Alcorn in "Crone Porch Improvisations"; Stephanie Barber and Greg Hatem in the improv trio "Joint Combo"; Chris Mason and Mark Jickling in "Old Songs," which translates works from Ancient Greek poets and turns it into folk music; and Hanna Olivegren and Steve Strohmeier in the psych folk trio "Underworld Orchard."

Downing has earned degrees in painting from Auburn University and the Maryland Institute College of Art with Grace Hartigan as Advisor. Downing creates and performs plays and concerts in museums, theaters, colleges, fields and basements, creating work during residencies and using funding from the NEA, MSAC grants, Franklin Furnace Archives, and most recently at the Ucross Foundation Residency.

Tim Feeney performs, composes, improvises, and builds environments in and for forests and grain silos, specifically concerned with unstable sound and duration. He appears in bookstores and basements with Sarah Hennies and Greg Stuart as the trio Meridian; in galleries and libraries with Vic Rawlings and Annie Lewandowski; in living rooms and warehouses with Clay Chaplin and Davy Sumner; in tunnels and train stops with Cody Putman and Cassia Streb as the trio Tasting Menu; in colleges and museums with Andrew Raffo Dewar, Holland Hopson, and Jane Cassidy; on recordings for Weighter, Intakt, Black Truffle, Rhizome.s, Caduc, Full Spectrum, Sedimental, and Marginal Frequency; and in the occasional festival or concert hall with Anthony Braxton and Ingrid Laubrock.

He is a faculty member at CalArts.

links:
timfeeney.com

Jarrett Gilgore is a multi-instrumentalist, improviser, composer, and teacher currently residing in baltimore, maryland. He performs actively in the usa and internationally in a wide variety of contexts.

Current projects: heart of the ghost with Luke Stewart & Ian McColm, USA/Mexico Collaborative trio Tulpas, duos with Anthony Pirog and Anna Roberts-Gevalt, and a new solo project called lilypicker

Recent collaborations: Jaimie Branch, Tony Malaby, Susan Alcorn, Laraaji, Lonnie Holley, Mabe Fratti, Chris Pumphrey, Zach Rowden, No Land, Anna & Elizabeth, Dan Deacon, Cass McCombs Band

Recent pre-pandemic performances: Bucareli 69 (Mexico City), Firehouse 12 (New Haven), Casa del Popolo (Montreal), Constellation (Chicago), Philadelphia Museum of Art, le Poisson Rouge (NYC), Duke University, Jazzorca (Mexico City), Zaal 100 (Amsterdam)

links:
Jarrett Gilgore Bandcamp
Heart of the Ghost Bandcamp
Lilypicker Bandcamp

Adam Goodwin (b.1986) is a composer, double bassist and visual artist based between Berlin, Germany and the United States of America.

He received degrees in classical and contemporary double bass performance from the University of North Texas (BM, 2009) and University of California San Diego (MA, 2012), as well as studying composition at both universities. He remains active as an interpreter of contemporary and classical music as well as organizing his own creative projects throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Goodwin's compositions often place a heavy emphasis on the use of harmonics, overtones and microtonality on string instruments, as well as using non-idiomatic and unconventional sounds as compositional elements, resulting in a vast universe of resonant textures reflecting elements of drone music, extended just intonation, minimalism, free improvisation and noise. His compositions often include graphic notation, text instructions and conceptual ideas intertwined with a more traditional approach to musical notation.

His work examines the balance between performer and composer in contemporary music practice, in addition to exploring elements of physicality and mental state during performance and addressing socio-political and environmental issues.

Tom Goldstein, percussionist, has performed with the Orchestra of St. Lukes, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Gregg Smith Singers, Steve Reich and Musicians, Pauline Oliveros, American Festival of Microtonal Music, and Continuum. He has performed in many chamber groups, Broadway shows, nightclubs, and Klezmer bands. Mr. Goldstein has premiered over one hundred solo and chamber works, many of which were written expressly for him. He was a founding member of the New York City new-music group GAGEEGO. He performs and records with the Hoffmann/Goldstein Duo and the percussion quartet Umbilicus. He has composed works for percussion, chamber ensemble, theater pieces, and numerous songs. He has published articles in Perspectives of New Music and Percussive Notes and for Mellen Press. Mr. Goldstein has recorded on Neuma, Vanguard, Polydor, Opus 1, O.O. Discs, CD Tech, Capstone, Innova, Centaur, I Resound Press, and CRI labels. Mr. Goldstein has received a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artists Award. He is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Emilio Gordoa is a Mexican composer, sound artist, percussionist/vibraphonist based in Berlin since 2012. He’s involved in numerous projects including his work as a soloist and in collaboration with theater, dance, performance and other interdisciplinary frameworks. Emilio especially focuses on experimental music, sound art, noise, free jazz, improvisation and contemporary music. He is redefining the vibraphone as a source, treating it with preparations and extended techniques. He is a busy composer as well, writing graphic scores for a variety of ensembles, large and small, for theater, documentary films, and audiovisual media. In recent years his work has also been presented in the form of sound installations and in 2016 he founded the platform WildSonico.

emiliogordoa.com

photo credit: Cristina Marx, Photomusix

The Great △ is a trio by Makoto Oshiro, Takahiro Kawaguchi and Satoshi Yashiro, which started out from the exhibition “Great ̊” held in 2010 at gallery Baikado (Osaka). They occasionally gather and do live performances.

Makoto Oshiro (b. 1978, Okinawa) is a Tokyo-based performer and artist. His primary medium is sound, but he also combines other elements including light, electricity and movement of objects. In live performances, he uses self-made tools and instruments that are based on electronic devices, every day materials, and junk. His installation work handles sound as a physical and auditory phenomenon, and focuses on characteristics such as vibration and interference.

Takahiro Kawaguchi (b. 1980, Osaka) creates installations, performances and recorded works through composing spaces with sound-making devices and everyday objects that generate light and wind. Recent work includes Amorphous Spores from Erstwhile Records with Utah Kawasaki and self titled Takahiro Kawaguchi from Senufo Editions. He also writes, designs T-shirts, and composes music for others.

Satoshi Yashiro (b. 1981, Gunma) had made a self-propelled woofer on wheels and began to show it at exhibitions and use it at live performances sometime around the year 2003. He is a former member of the artist run space “HIGHTI,” which is an abandoned factory that was renovated by him and several artists. He also belongs to the drum and mobile woofer band “Motallica.”

The tuba player and composer Robin Hayward, born in Brighton, England in 1969, has been based in Berlin since 1998. He has introduced radical playing techniques to brass instruments, initially through the discovery of the 'noise-valve' in 1996, and later through the development of the first fully microtonal tuba in 2009. In 2012 he invented the Hayward Tuning Vine, partly out of a desire to visualize the harmonic space implicit within the microtonal tuba. His approaches to the tuba have been documented in numerous solo and collaborative releases. He has received both the International Tuba and Euphonium Association’s Clifford Bevan Award for Excellence in Research, and the ITEA’s Jim and Jamie Self Creative Award.

photo credit: Brad Marcum

Talbolt Johnson is an alchemist, dancer, dreamer, and advocate for dance since 2005. He pursued a career in art only to discover movement for over a decade in the Baltimore are and the east coast. Johnson explores the functions of the human body, imagination, mythos, and space in unison. His work attempts to contemplate and comment on the intersection between expression and identity. He is a street dancer, writer, and musician of life.

Twin Jude (they/them) is a vocalist, electronic musician, and interdisciplinary artist living in Baltimore, MD. As a portal being, Twin Jude co-creates sounds that explore space and time freely through voice, electro-acoustic instrumentation, and sampling; reaching through lapping and layered realms unbound by oppressive time constructs. Early in life, Jude found their way exploring sound by collaging composed songs and poems on walkmans and tape players, singing in church each week, and undertaking various forms of training musically. In 2014, they created the project Twin Jude to express deeper rumination in a way that comes from an ethereally organic, self-actualizing place. With releases, “MĒM (2016) , LÜ (2019), and various live-only song releases, they are able to transform show spaces into sacred healing circles where an energetic call-and-response can take place. Having performed extensively throughout DC, Baltimore, and Virginia, including performances at the Kennedy Center and twice at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Twin Jude has shared the stage with incredible musicians including Thomas “BUSHMEAT” Stanley, Jamal Moore, Luke Stewart, Janel Leppin, Layne Garrett, Machell André, YÀNJÚ, and more. Their current work is exploring ethnobotanical connections and frequencies as a vehicle to birth new conditions and realities.

Bandcamp
YouTube
Instagram

photo Credit: Vanessa Dos Santos

Dirar Kalash (b. 1982) is a musician and sound artist whose work spans a wide range of musical and sonic practices within a variety of instrumental, compositional and improvisational contexts. Kalash also extends his practice into inter-disciplinary theoretical research. He has produced several solo and collaborative musical albums and is active as touring musician, in addition to that he also created several sound installations, live audio-visual performances, and photography projects.

photo credit: Ziga Koritnik

A Baltimore native, Eric Kennedy is a drummer, vocalist, percussionist, educator, and composer.

Eric has performed, toured, and recorded with Curtis Fuller, Jimmy Heath, Gary Bartz, Phil Woods, Billy Harper, Curtis Lundy, Bobby Watson, Gary Thomas, Fred Wesley, Wallace Roney, Ethel Ennis, Larry Willis, Cecil McBee, Donald Harrison, Joe Locke, TK Blue, Nnena Freelon, John Hicks, Richard Wyands, Yusef Salim, Eddie Henderson, Joe Bonner, Carl Grubbs, David Murray, Oliver Lake, Pansori master Ahn Sook Sun, and many others. He is a bandleader and a member of several ensembles. He also had the honor of being the last drummer/vocalist of the National Heritage Award Winners The Holmes Brothers.

Eric has studied percussion with Dennis Kennedy, John Locke, Leroy Williams, Johnny Polite, Billy Hart, and Jamal Wilson; voice with Timmy Shepherd, Odell Wilson, and Dr. Nathan Carter; and music education/composition with Dr. Barry Harris and Bobby Watson.

Eric has given masterclasses, clinics, workshops, concerts, and lessons worldwide. He taught in the Baltimore City Public School system, Peabody Conservatory of Music Jazz Department, and currently teaches for the Baltimore Symphony Orchkids program (2014-present) and Towson University Music Department. Eric has received numerous awards and grants for performance and composition. He was the 2004 runner-up in the Billie Holiday Vocal Competition and first place band member in the Chick Webb Jazz Combo Competition in 2008 and 2009. He is also co-composer for the award-winning documentary Footprints of Pan Africanism and indie film The Big Muddy.

Jessica Keyes is a Baltimore-based performer and composer. Her compositions explore trickster characters, ecstatic energy, and communion with the audience. Her solo practice for saxophone and electronics explores the tensions and transportive nature of durational performance with slowly building complexity. Jessica leads an 11-piece punk brass band called Bedlam Brass and is a member of the experimental chamber group Trucker Talk.

Mueo Bandcamp

photo credit: Devon Rowland

Pianist, improviser and composer. Today, improvisation plays a leading role and seeks to cross lines with dance and theater, with writing and poetry.

Among her latest projects are Castro Mejía-Salgado Duo (piano & trombone). Her project Trío+Una (where she works music and text). El Cuarteto Instantáneo, group led by bassist Guillermo Roldán, whose grounds is improvisation with Enrique Norris (cornet) and Francisco Salgado (trombone). She is part of the trio Eriza, with Cecilia Quintero on cello and Amanda Irarrázabal on double bass (improvised music). And more recently: The duo with guitarist Gonzalo Muruaga Olguín, the duo with drummer Matías Coulasso, Folga Duo; and she is part of the project “La Jaula se ha vuelto pájaro y se ha volado”, collective of improvising women. She is the curator since 2016 of Plataforma IMPRO, an interdisciplinary cycle with a focus on improvisation.

Liz Meredith is a violist, improviser and composer from Baltimore, MD. Her music explores intersections between acoustic chamber music, instrumental improvisation, electro-acoustic composition, and ambient music. Liz’s recordings include 2 solo albums, The Disposition of Vibrant Forms, a 5 LP set in collaboration with John Somers (brother of Alex Somers), and various solo and collaborative works on cassette. Her most recent solo album Repro, released on Spleencoffin, received critical acclaim from publications such as Tiny Mix Tapes, Vital Weekly, ATTN Magazine, and the Sound Projector. In addition to performing her own music, Liz has premiered new works by emerging composers, and has also contributed her sound to recordings by a wide range of artists.

Liz’s performance record is fittingly diverse. She has performed at rock clubs, D.I.Y. spaces, art galleries, chamber music venues, music festivals, and academic conferences throughout the United States. Career highlights include performances at Signal Flow Festival, Mills College; High Zero Festival (Baltimore, MD); several performances at the Baltimore Museum of Art; The Walters Art Museum (Baltimore, MD); and The Stone (New York City, NY).

Liz holds a Masters of Arts Degree in Music Composition from Mills College (Oakland, CA). She has studied music composition with Fred Frith and viola performance with Hank Dutt of Kronos Quartet.

Spleen Coffin
lizmeredith.com

*(woodwind physics experiments in a remnant of war I would like to remain hidden as to maintain its access)

Jayve Montgomery is a site-specific improviser who breathes epigenetic listening into woodwind instruments as a sustained decay descendant of the sound at the bottom of a slave ship. Breathe. Water. Brass. Wood. Skin. Indigo. These are the materials of this current performance - a ceremony being held in an American architectural product of war in remembrance of the sounds of the Aniyvwiya and their enslaved Africans on the nearby trail of tears; and the sounds of the re-enslaved Black convicts leased out to provide free labor for the local steel companies who saw their highest profits as a result.

jayvemontgomery.com/music
Bandcamp

photo credit: Price Harrison

Toshimaru Nakamura has been producing electronic music on a self-named instrument, "no-input mixing board." The name describes the method of his music-making. "No" external sound source is connected to "inputs" of the "mixing board”. Nakamura’s principle is being an improviser, and “no-input mixing board” is the vehicle so far to embody his music itself. According to the nature of the set-up, Nakamura always has to deal with unpredictability, therefore, he is willing to abandon his control over the instrument to some extent, and place himself in the realm of obedience and resignation. He has been performing live in Tokyo and elsewhere by traveling around Europe, North America, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia, Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia since the mid-90's, to meet, work and play concerts with local musicians from those places and ones from different places.

Kjell Nordeson is a Swedish percussionist and drummer living in San Francisco. In the late 80's he formed AALY Trio, together with fellow Swede Mats Gustafsson. AALY Trio became one of the leading groups in the Swedish experimental scene in the 90's. He has toured extensively in Europe, North America, North Africa, and Japan with various groups; altogether over 1200 performances in around 30 different countries and recorded over 50 CDs. He has performed with Peter Brötzmann, Barry Guy, Ken Vandermark, Joe Morris, William Parker, Mark Dresser, Gerry Hemingway, Frank Gratkowski, Stefano Scodanibbio, and many others. Nordeson participated i Derek Bailey’s Company Week in 1990.

In 2004, Nordeson relocated to California and is now active in the San Francisco Bay Area scene with its thriving community of free-improvised, experimental, and new music. He has a Ph.D. in music from UC San Diego, where he wrote a dissertation named "Why do you play the way you do? - Musical Improvisation, Identity, and Social Interaction.”

kjellnordeson.com
Bandcamp

photo credit: Peter Gannushkin

Morten J. Olsen Joh is a musician and producer, sometimes a composer, born in Stavanger Norway in 1981. He has been based in Amsterdam since 2001, Berlin since 2006 and in Stavanger since 2021. He is known as the drummer of various bands such as N.M.O., MoHa! and Ultralyd and as the vibraphonist in The Pitch. He has released a solo rotating bass drum album and appears on numerous collaborative releases. Since 2018 he has been working with just intonation via Norwegian folk music and is currently busy retuning equal-tempered instruments like the vibraphone and analogue synths.

Ariel Invernizzi Oviedo is an Argentinian musician and visual artist from Buenos Aires. He has played and recorded with various musicians from all different generations of the local jazz, free, noise and improvisation music scene. As a visual artist, he is developing improvisation with video. He has collaborated with different musical artists of the improvised music scene. He trained as a scriptwriter at the film school “Guionarte” and as an audiovisual producer with Diego Aldana. He is currently working on the transdisciplinary between performance, music and visual arts.

An accomplished saxophonist and educator, Tyrone Page Jr. has had tremendous success working with composers and other musicians to expand contemporary saxophone repertoire. Actively involved in the performance of new works, Tyrone performs regularly in the Baltimore area and across the United States as a soloist, chamber, and orchestral musician. Tyrone recently joined the Symphony of the Mountains in a performance of Glazunov’s Concerto in E-flat Major. Recent commissions include collaborations with Gabriella Ortiz, James David Young, and Stacy Garrop.

In collaborations with his alma mater, Tyrone was featured in performances with the Peabody Concert Orchestra, Peabody Modern Orchestra, and the Peabody Wind Ensemble. Gaining proficiency with the contemporary repertoire, he’s a regular performer with Mind on Fire, a musical arts cooperative that strives to engage with an inclusive community through engaging concerts, outreach programs, and special events. In collaboration with the group’s Artistic Director, composer James Young, Tyrone recently released an album recording of “True Fluorescent Skeleton” with Ehse Records. The piece is a 50 minute, unaccompanied, work for tenor saxophone.

Tyrone is a graduate of the Baltimore School for the Arts, where he studied with Dr. Chris Ford. He holds degrees in Saxophone Performance and Music Education from Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University as well as a Master of Music in Saxophone Performance and Wind Conducting.

True Flourescent Skeleton album on Ehse Records
Tre Pezzi by Giacinto Scelsi, Mind on Fire performance with Danah Bellah Danceworks

Christine Paluch, a DC based multi-instrumentalist, performs and records a range of experimental, improvised, and composed pieces. Her performances can range from embracing chaotic electronic experimentation, free improvisation, or deeply personal instrumentals. She has two solo projects: PraxisCat, which delves into various electronic and experimental pieces, and Under Night, which includes cathartic and heavier compositions. In addition she has taken part in free improvisation performing groups Tower Folly (with CK Barlow) and Concentric Circles (with Abe Mamet and Daniel Newhauser).

Undernight Bandcamp
PraxisCat Bandcamp

Lee Patterson exploits mechanical and chemical synthesis, using sound making and recording to devise performances with a selection of amplified objects, devices and processes.

From rock chalk to springs, from burning nuts to vibrating metal, he makes a novelty of playing objects and situations otherwise considered mute.

His collaborators have included Mika Vainio, Jennifer Walshe, Samo Kutin, Vanessa Rossetto, David Toop, Rhodri Davies and John Butcher, Greg Pope, Benedict Drew, Luke Fowler, Lucio Capece, Rie Nakajima, Angharad Davies, Keith Rowe, John Tilbury, Xavier Charles and Tetsuya Umeda.

He is a member of Common Objects and the franco-english trio, FANT^MS.

Based in Prestwich, Manchester, uk., he works internationally and has featured on UK TV, BBC Radios 3, 4 and 6, Resonance FM and on radio stations worldwide.

Bandcamp

photo credit: Natasa Serec

Sarah Belle Reid is a performer-composer who plays trumpet, modular synthesizer, and an ever-growing collection of handcrafted electronic instruments. Her unique musical voice explores the intersections between contemporary classical music, experimental and interactive electronics, visual arts, noise music, and improvisation. Reid's sonic palette has been described as ranging from "graceful" and "danceable" all the way to "silk-falling-through-space," and "pit-full-of-centipedes" (San Francisco Classical Voice). Her debut album for trumpet and interactive electronics, "Underneath and Sonder," was released on pfMENTUM in October, 2019.

The blinking lights and colorful wires attached to her horn are part of an electronic sensor-based interface she co-designed in 2015, called MIGSI. “Reid has greatly extended the possibilities of the humble trumpet into new territory by the application of innovative sensing technology and sound processing.” (Sequenza 21). She frequently performs, leads workshops, and lectures at notable festivals, institutions, and conferences around the world, such as Moogfest, Stanford University, and the International Conference of New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME).

While studying at CalArts, Reid studied with Wadada Leo Smith and played in Charlie Haden's band. She has collaborated with experimental electronic musician David Rosenboom and thereminist Carolina Eyck. Reid recorded trumpet and electronics on Julia Holter's 2019 record Aviary, and toured with Holter. Reid's compositions have been premiered and performed by a number of renowned musicians, like Vicki Ray and Nate Wooley, receiving support and recognition from the Association of Canadian Women Composers and SOCAN. Her composition “Flux” for amplified percussion quartet won the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet’s Next Wave Composer Initiative.

She holds a DMA and a MFA from California Institute of the Arts and a Bachelor of Music in trumpet performance from McGill University. Reid is on faculty at Chapman University (Orange, CA) teaching music technology, as well as Temple University (Philadelphia, PA), where she teaches Physical Computing and Electronic Instrument Design.

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photo credit: Scott Groller

Bashi Rose is a theater artist, musician, and filmmaker. He is a co-founder of the evocative and experimental Konjur Collective. He wields his artistry as a force of community good, having helped to establish DRAMA, a program designed to bring theater to prisons and to help engender communication and empathy. As a musician Bashi uses the drum-kit as a creative tool for mental/spiritual healing and as a bridge between the spirit and physical worlds. He looks forward to participating in High Zero.

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Olaf Rupp (*1963) plays Improvised Music on the acoustic and electric guitar. The organic flow of his music is guided neither by chance nor by dominant, willful decisions. To him the same level of focus and attentive energy should be present in loud and fast music as well as in softer, more subdued kind of playing. In all his music he explores how motion-clusters can be perceived as one agglomerated sound in motion. This means that every note is a dot in a higher matrix and its color is more important than the position of that note in any hierarchic classification system. So a sequence of notes creates a moving sound, not a melody. And the intrinsic color of every note is more important than the melodic or harmonic burden which the listener may or may not put on it.

Besides many cooperations five solo albums are published so far on the labels FMP, RELATIVE PITCH, GROB and GLIGG. Olaf Rupp has been touring in many countries and performed with extraordinary musicians such as Paul Lovens, Tristan Honsinger, Peter Brötzmann, Butch Morris, Lol Coxhill, John Zorn und Tony Buck. He is an outstanding solo performer both on electric and acoustic guitar. Important groups are among others XENOFOX, his duo with Rudi Fischerlehner, a Duo with cello player Ulrike Brand, and WEIRD WEAPONS with Tony Buck and Joe Williamson.

Victoria Shen is an experimental music performer, sound artist, and instrument-maker based in San Francisco. Though analog synthesizers are the backbone of Shen’s music, while performing live, she also plays self-made electronics, invented instruments, and acoustic objects such as a bullwhip. Shen's most recent invention is the Needle Nails, a wearable instrument that allows her to play up to five tracks of a vinyl record at once with her fingernails. Vacillating between moments of restraint and swells of frenetic and confrontational movement, Shen's sound is dynamic with a sensitivity to texture and structure throughout.

id m theft able performs within and without the realms of noise, avant-improvisation, sound poetry, performance, et c. et c. et c. using voice, found objects, electronics, and whatever else is available......

He has given over a thousand performances across 4 continents, in 40 countries in settings ranging from the scummiest of squats to the fanciest of festivals.

Marshall Trammell (b. 1972; Oceanside, CA) is a self-stylized Music Research Strategist performing political education in the post-Max Roach continuum from behind the drum set, in participatory research workshops, through public art installations, electroacoustic sound design, community-base archives, ethical, Intellectual property entrepreneurship and movie-making curricula as critical pedagogy. Based in Oakland, CA, Trammell's current project’s include The Moon Is Down, a commissioned score and conduction for Borealis Festival (Norway), Indexical Moment/um - For Friends, a sound design and performance residency at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and Ebonics Native Land Acknowledgement (ENLA) an electroacoustic site-tuning and ongoing performance and collaboration series. Trammell is known for such collaborations In Defense of Memory, White People KIlled Them, Black Spirituals, Mutual Aid Project; many collaborations with Improvising musicians; and, his film Eleven Postures (for Burn the Temples/Break Up the Bells). He has received support from Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Intercultural Leadership Institute, Prelinger Library & Pro Arts COMMONS.

Ken Vandermark (USA 1964) is an improvising musician and composer who plays tenor and baritone saxophone, Bb and bass clarinet. He moved to Chicago from Boston in 1989, and has worked from the early 1990s onward, both as a performer and organizer in North America and Europe, recording in an array of contexts with many internationally renowned musicians (such as Fred Anderson, Ab Baars, Peter Brötzmann, Sylvie Courvoisier, Tim Daisy, Kris Davis, Hamid Drake, Terrie Ex, Mats Gustafsson, Elisabeth Harnik, Steve Heather, Didi Kern, Kent Kessler, Christof Kurzmann, Paul Lytton, Joe McPhee, Andy Moor, Jason Moran, Ikue Mori, Joe Morris, Paal Nilssen-Love, Eddie Prevóst, Mette Rasmussen, Tom Rainey, Eric Revis, Jasper Stadhouders, Chad Taylor, John Tilbury, Mars Williams, Nate Wooley).

His current group activity includes the bands Marker, Made To Break, Lean Left, Shelter, The DKV Trio, The Eric Revis Quartet, VWCR, DEK, his large ensemble Entr'acte, the ongoing Momentum projects; duos with Terrie Ex, Paal Nilssen-Love, Mars Williams, and Nate Wooley; and work as a solo performer. Ken co-founded Catalytic Sound in 2012, an organization dedicated to the economic sustainability of creative improvising musicians, and since then has been its director. In 2014 he began Audiographic Records, an independent music label. Since June of 2015 Ken has been co-curator of Option, a weekly music and interview series held at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. Half of each year is spent touring in Europe, North America, Latin America, and Japan; his concerts and numerous recordings have been critically acclaimed at home and abroad. Ken's activity as a writer includes liner notes for a variety of recordings; and contributions to the eighth edition of John Zorn's Arcana: musicians on music, the Spanish language journal, "El Esatdo Mental," and "Catalytic Quarterly." In 1999 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in music.

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Rupert Wondolowski is a musician and author with ancient & hungry roots in Baltimore and its rich arcane soil. He is still a beginning student of its teachings, but keeps his ear to it and runs his hands through its treasures, which puts off all within view.

He is part of the spectral absurdo-miserablist chamber folk group Mole Suit Choir, whose name derives from his book The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit. It includes master warbler and seer Liz Downing and Greg Hatem. They’re currently working on their fourth album. Up until instrument creator and improviser Neil Feather fled to New Zealand he and Rupert performed as Wondofeather – Neil playing his “former guitars” and Rupert doing extended improvised vocals and hyper mimicry. A few tracks of Neil and Rupert’s improvisational duets will be appearing on Neil’s upcoming double lp on the Ehse label. Parts of their live performances may end up in Skizz Cyzyk’s upcoming documentary about Neil.

Some of Rupert’s other books include Dreams Are My Social Life, Mattress In An Alley, Raft Upon the Sea, and The Whispering of Ice Cubes. He co-owns and runs Normals Books & Records which has some connection to the Red Room.

Rupert’s vocal mimicry and elastic dreaming of throat and tongue tissue began with desolate suburban childhood timeholes. “If you want to be an opera singer,” his sister told him once long ago, “you must practice every day and study.” He did not. But he mastered cricket sounds vibrating his lips which put his grandmother in various hospitals.

He’s been collecting field recordings of late and may produce a violin if he gets a hairball. High Zero fashion plate Martin Schmidt said no size bribe will get Rupert’s guitar on stage.