2023 concerts

sunday january 8, 2023 7p sfsound: toshi ichiyanagi & wendy reid / heglin+louchard+perkis
january 13-15, 2023 san francisco tape music festival 2023 @ victoria theatre sf
sunday january 22, 2023 7p chris brown piano recital / mosswood improv group: r murray schafer
sunday january 29, 2023 7p frances-marie uitti & luciano chessa
sunday february 5, 2023 4p angela edwards (sharkiface) / xopher davidson (antimatter)
sunday february 19, 2023 7p ahern+allen+benedict+casini+duff / ueno+mezzacappa+cooper+bruckmann++
sunday february 26, 2023 7p thomas dimuzio / moe staiano guided ensemble
sunday march 19, 2023 7p william lang + anne rainwater / social stutter
sunday march 26, 2023 7p dan flanagan's the bow and the brush
sunday april 9, 2023 7p 4mación / jordan glenn + josé f. solares + mitch stahlmann
sunday april 23, 2023 7p eda er / sink head trio (goldberg + glenn + davis)
sunday april 30, 2023 7p sf tape music collective's "microfestival"
sunday may 7, 2023 7p duo b / david slusser + safa shokrai
sunday may 14, 2023 7p lachenmann & sciarrino solo clarinet / oakland reductionist orchestra
sunday may 21, 2023 7p bernal hill players / hadley mccarroll plays matthew welch
sunday may 28, 2023 7p heglin + louchard / graves + er / michalak + looney + dimuzio
sunday june 11, 2023 7pm echo's bones / low bleeds
sunday june 18, 2023 7pm brett carson / john schott + mantra plonsey + dan plonsey
sunday june 25, 2023 7pm nathan clevenger group / usufruct
sunday july 2, 2023 4pm erika oba + roopa mahavedan / gordon fung
sunday july 16, 2023 7pm circleCircleCircleSquare / sfSoundGroup
sunday july 23, 2023 7pm all vocal night! benedict + buschman + córdova + rivero + wong + others
sunday july 30, 2023 7pm gregory hagan / leila abdul-rauf
sunday aug 20, 2023 7pm aaron bennett trio / david israel katz + jordan glenn
sunday aug 27, 2023 7pm keyscapes: m. honda + t. luo + b. carson + e. oba + a. jamieson
monday sep 4, 2023 1pm-9pm LABOR DAY SKRONKATHON
sunday sep 10, 2023 7pm cheryl e leonard + wobbly / agnes szelag + norman conquest + tolby west
sunday sep 17, 2023 7pm myra melford + goldberg + glenn + davis / nishi-smith + heule

:: view entire concert history here ::




 SUNDAY JANUARY 8 2023  7pm  $10-$25

SFSOUND: TOSHI ICHIYANAGI & WENDY REID
RON HEGLIN + RIC LOUCHARD + TIM PERKIS





RON HEGLIN (low brass and voice) RIC LOUCHARD (piano) and TIM PERKIS (electronics) perform trio improvisations.

SFSOUND members and friends perform WENDY REID'S ambient bird - mosswood (2022). Avant-garde composer TOSHI ICHIYANAGI is remembered with performances of his graphic scores Sapporo (1962) and Music For Electric Metronomes (1960). Pianist HADLEY MCCARROLL performs Ichiyaagi's Music for Piano No. 2 (1959) and In memory of John Cage (1993).

M U S I C I A N S
Lulu, african grey parrot
Wendy Reid, violin
Krys Bobrowski, glisglas
Ron Heglin. tuba
Brenda Hutchinson, long tube
Aurora Josephson, voice
David Samas, percussion
Sam Weiser, violin
Monica Scott, cello
Kanoko Nishi-Smith, koto
Lisa Mezzacappa, bass
Hadley McCarroll, piano
Brendan Lai-Tong, trombone
John Ingle, saxophone
Matt Ingalls, clarinet
Diane Grubbe, flute
Tom Djll, trumpet


WENDY REID'S site-specific work ambient bird - mosswood is an interspecies sonic landscape which reflects a philosophy of connecting with all living creatures and the environment. The structure of this work can be described as a musical process which attempts to reflect nature’s manner of operations: sonic fragments of an African grey parrot become the cells of a spatially notated score to be interpreted and performed by the musicians within the ambient environment. Contextual in nature, the work allows performers to act according to unpredictable conditions and variables which arise within the musical continuity. In performance, an attempt is made at a spontaneous unforced growing of sound and silence in which emphasis is placed on formation rather than pre-established form, as in the building and shaping of cell-like units in living processes. The first incantation of ambient bird entitled ambient bird 433, pays homage to John Cage’s composition 4’33” (1952).

Wendy Reid (Los Angeles, 1952) received degrees from Mills College (M.A.), the University of Southern California, School of Performing Arts (B.M.), and attended Stanford University, Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Between 1975-77, she was a private pupil of Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Les Écoles D'Art Americaines at Fontainbleau. She also studied with Terry Riley, Robert Ashley, Halsey Stevens, James Hopkins and film composer David Raksin. Reid is producer of the new music series NEW MUSIC WITH BIRDS, FROGS AND OTHER CREATURES sponsored by the Natural Sciences Department of the Oakland Museum and the San Francisco Art Institute, and currently teaches music composition at Mills College and violin/ensemble/composition at Holy Names University PMD.

TOSHI ICHIYANAGI (1933 – 2022) was a Japanese avant-garde composer and pianist. One of the leading composers in Japan during the postwar era, Ichiyanagi worked in a range of genres, composing Western-style operas and orchestral and chamber works, as well as compositions using traditional Japanese instruments. Ichiyanagi is known for incorporating avant-garde techniques into his works, such as chance music, extended technique, and nontraditional scoring. A former protégé of John Cage who was once married to Yoko Ono, he was part of a lively experimental music scene in New York and became a leading modern composer in Japan.

sfSound's pianist HADLEY MCCARROLL is a well-known San Francisco Bay Area-based collaborative and solo pianist. She has performed in the United States, and internationally with, among others: Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet in Paris and New York, the Festival del Sole in the Napa Valley, Composer’s Inc., Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and most recently in recital with KRONOS Quartet violist Hank Dutt in San Francisco. For the past fifteen years she has performed as the pianist of the cello/piano duo martha & monica. Hadley has also worked at the Royal Danish Opera, San Francisco Opera, San Diego Opera, West Edge Opera and as accompanist for the James Toland Vocal Arts International Competition for the past 6 years. Equally at home as a soloist, Hadley has given wide-ranging performances, including the Sonatas and Interludes by John Cage at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and programs featuring Carter, Beethoven, Ligeti, Liszt and Schumann. She frequently premieres new piano works. Ms. McCarroll received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in piano performance from the University of Texas at Austin.

RON HEGLIN is a trombonist and vocalist working with extended technique on the trombone and with spoken and sung imaginary languages as a vocalist. His vocal music has been influenced by his study of North Indian vocal music. He works both compositionally and in an improvisational mode and is a member of the Bay Area music context as well as performing internationally. He is a founding member of the groups MUSIC FOR ALL OCCASIONS, ROTODOTI, and BRASSIOSAURUS, and has performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Leo Smith, Henry Brant, Logos Duo, Tim Perkis, John Bischoff, Tom Djll, and Toyoji Tomita.

RIC LOUCHARD grew up in Palo Alto, California. From 1972 to 1976, Ric went to the University of Northern Colorado to study piano and composition. Ric ran out of money for school in 1976 so he returned to the Bay Area teaching piano and attending San Jose State University to study baroque performance on piano and harpsichord with Fernando Valenti and composition with Allen Strange. In the 1990s he released five CDs on the Music For Little People record label. The first, "G'Night Wolfgang, Classical Piano Solos for Bedtime" was a finalist for the "Indie" award for best classical release of 1990. He went on to record solo piano recordings "G'Morning Johann", "Hey Ludwig", "Ragtime Romp" (which won Oppenheim Toy Portfolio's 2002 Platinum Award for children's audio), and, playing harpsichord with recorder player David Barnett, "Winter Light". Ric has been performing house concerts around the bay area lately and just finished a CD of one of the programs he likes to perform: "Slouching Towards Individuation".

TIM PERKIS is a well-known figure in the worlds of improvised and electronic music. He is also a founding member of several electronic music ensembles, including Fuzzy Bunny, Splendor Generator and the pioneering computer network band The Hub. Recordings of his music are available on the Artifact, Tzadik, New World and EMANEM labels, among others. His documentary film NOISY PEOPLE (2007) and NOISY PEOPLE podcast (2015) are available at noisy people.net and perkis.com.






 SUNDAY JANUARY 13/14/15 2023

THE SAN FRANCISCO TAPE MUSIC FESTIVAL 2023




Victoria Theatre
2961 16th Street
San Francisco

click here for more info






 SUNDAY JANUARY 22 2023  7pm  $10-$25

CHRIS BROWN
THE MOSSWOOD IMPROVISERS GROUP




CHRIS BROWN performs a set of 20th Century Solo Piano Pieces
Arnold Schönberg - Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke, op.19 (1911, 5 minutes)
Morton Feldman — Last Pieces (1959, 10 minutes)
Thelonious Monk - Monk’s Mood (1947, 4 minutes)
Henry Cowell - The Hero Sun (1912, 4 minutes)
Ruth Crawford Seeger — Piano Study in Mixed Accents (1930, 1.5 minutes)
Chris Brown - Sparks (1976, 8 minutes)
This piano set of short acoustic piano pieces asserts sonic connections between 20th century composers whose music is not normally associated with each other’s. Rather than emphasizing their differences in compositional style, it proposes links based on the intention of listening to the sound of the piano just for itself. I’m especially drawn to the opportunity to play this music on a Bösendorfer piano, since 20th century music was never permitted to be played on the Bösendorfer at UC Santa Cruz where I got my B.A., and it was strictly reserved for repertoire classical repertoire through the Romantic era. But Bösendorfer was always Cecil Taylor’s piano of choice, so it will be interesting to see how it responds to Feldman, Cowell, Crawford Seeger, and Brown! --C.B.

THE MOSSWOOD IMPROVISERS GROUP performs R MURRAY SCHAFER'S graphic score, minimusic (1968) and a group improvisation.

M U S I C I A N S
Tim Perkis, electronics
Eric Glick Rieman, keyboards
Kjell Nordeson, percussion
Matt Ingalls, clarinets
Sarah Grace Graves, voice
Tom Djll, trumpet
Ben Davis, cello
Kevin CK Lo, violin


CHRIS BROWN, pianist, began his piano studies in 1958 in Manila, Philippines with Jan Deats, then studied in the early 1960s in Chicago with Claire Oppenheim, and from 1965-8 with Robert McDowell at the Chicago Musical College. In 1969-70 he received a scholarship for piano studies at the Hochschule für Music in Berlin. He attended the University of California/Santa Cruz from 1970 where he studied piano with Sylvia Jenkins and won the Santa Cruz County Young Artist Award that culminated in a performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto with the Santa Cruz Symphony.

On the side, he got interested in music of the New York School, performing music by Cage, Feldman, and Wolff, and he was introduced byGordon Mumma to electroacoustic music in performing Cage’s multiple-piano, open form piece Winter Music. After finding Henry Cowell’s tone-cluster scores in the UCSC library he began performing Cowell’s music leading to a performance in 1974 at the Menlo Park Bicentennial Celebration of their native son Cowell’s intensely dissonant Tiger, which SF Chronicle music critic Alfred Frankenstein described as “Chris Brown made the typical Cowell thunder reverberate, with rolling motion from elbow to wrist over the keyboard.” At the same time he began exploring improvised music and jazz under the influence ofCecil Taylor’s pianism. His performances of Cowell’s most radical tone-cluster works at Hertz Hall in 1997 appeared on the CD New Music: Piano Compositions by Henry Cowell, New Albion Records . As a composer his own music became increasingly concerned with electronic and computer music, and his compositions and performances for piano solo and electronics between 1990 and 2020 are recorded on the double-CD Retrospectacles (f’oc’sle Records). His solo suite for piano in just intonation Six Primes (2014) is also available on New World records.






 SUNDAY JANUARY 29 2023  7pm  $10-$25

FRANCES-MARIE UITTI
LUCIANO CHESSA




The world-renowned cellist FRANCES-MARIE UITTI permieres PIOMBO, a new composition for solo 2Bows Cello by LUCIANO CHESSA.

Uitti and Chessa also perform QUEST[O] / Una meditazione (2022) for cello, piano and voices.


FRANCES-MARIE UITTI composer/performer, pioneered a revolutionary dimension to the cello by transforming it for the first time into a polyphonic instrument capable of sustained chordal (two, three, and four-part) and intricate multivoiced writing. Using two bows in one hand, this invention permits contemporaneous cross accents, multiple timbres, contrasting 4-voiced dynamics, simultaneous legato vs articulated playing. György Kurtág, Luigi Nono, Giacinto Scelsi, Jonathan Harvey, Richard Barrett, Horatio Radulescu, Lisa Bielawa are among many who have used this technique in their works dedicated to her.

LUCIANO CHESSA is a composer, conductor, audiovisual and performance artist, and music historian. His performance of "intensely visual scores" in a concert he curated for NYC's Roulette last December, has been named "gripping" by The New York Times' chief classical music critic Anthony Tommasini. Chessa's compositions include Cromlech, a large organ piece he premiered in Melbourne’s Town Hall in May 2018 as part of a solo organ recital that received over 2,200 ticket bookings; the opera Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago—a work merging experimental theater with reality TV which required from the cast over 55 hours of fasting—and A Heavenly Act, an opera commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with original video by Kalup Linzy. Chessa has been commissioned multiple times by the Performa Biennial, and in 2014 he presented three events at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of the exhibition Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe.






 SUNDAY FEBRUARY 5 2022  4pm  $10-$25

ANGELA EDWARDS (SHARKIFACE)
XOPHER DAVIDSON (ANTIMATTER)




ANGELA EDWARDS presents Invoke: Parte 2, an aleatory score in the form of a card game. The deck consists of 30 text and 10 visual cards. In this case, the conductor chooses cards for the players and determines the length of time each card is played. The specifics of the card and the order is left to fate. Players include: ALEXANDRA BUSCHMAN-ROMÁN, voice; MATT INGALLS, clarinets; KANOKO NISHI-SMITH, koto; BRAN(…)POS, electronics; and MITCH STAHLMANN, flute. Edwards also performs her electro-acoustic solo project, SHARKIFACE.

XOPHER DAVIDSON performs a solo set of sound.


ANGELA EDWARDS (SHARKIFACE) is a sampling siren and static-witch from Texas, who has been weaving incantations through experimental sound since 1999. Relocated from Austin, she's played in many Bay Area noise, experimental and electro-acoustic musical projects over the last 20+ years and founded LCM, Life Changing Ministry, a former noise venue housed in an old church in West Oakland. Sharkiface has toured the US, Europe and Japan and played festivals in many countries.

XOPHER DAVIDSON’S work (ANTIMATTER) is an ongoing exploration into the material of sound. Exploring a multiverse of of sound worlds from subatomic drift to subharmonic long waves. He has performed as a member of Circular Firing Squad, Citizen Band, and 45/102. Collaborating with Zbigniew Karkowski he released the albums Function Generator, Khz, Divide by Zero, and Processor. He has released the solo albums: Transfixion, Antimatter vs. Antimatter, Our Lady of the Skies, Reset, and Lux Perpetua.






 SUNDAY FEBRUARY 19 2022  7pm  $10-$25

ALLEN + DUFF + BENEDICT + AHERN + CASINI
UENO + MEZZACAPPA + COOPER + BRUCKMANN + INGALLS




Two vocal improv quintets making their public debut:

The ALLEN-DUFF-BENEDICT-AHERN-CASINI Quintet is a collection of musicians engaging in free improvisation. The nucleus of the band is the long-standing collaboration between saxophonist Josh Allen and bassist Tim Duff. Allen, Duff, and Lorin Benedict have engaged in regular practice over the past several years and has performed in public within the Bay Area since 2020. With Steve Ahern and Dave Casini joining the trio, this particular quintet has benefited from regular playing sessions over the last many months.

The unique grouping of bay area stalwarts KEN UENO, LISA MEZZACAPPA, CHRIS COOPER , KYLE BRUCKMANN, and MATT INGALLS has been arranged for this concert and will be the first time these musicians have performed together in this configuration.


M U S I C I A N S

KEN UENO - voice
A recipient of the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, KEN UENO is a composer/vocalist/sound artist who is currently a Professor at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Jerry and Evelyn Hemmings Chambers Distinguished Professor Chair in Music. Ensembles and performers who have played Ken’s music include Kim Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, Mayumi Miyata, Teodoro Anzellotti, Aki Takahashi, Wendy Richman, Greg Oakes, BMOP, Alarm Will Sound, Steve Schick and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Nieuw Ensemble, and Frances-Marie Uitti. His music has been performed at such venues as Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MusikTriennale Köln Festival, the Muziekgebouw, Ars Musica, Warsaw Autumn, Other Minds, the Hopkins Center, Spoleto USA, Steim, and at the Norfolk Music Festival. Ken’s piece for the Hilliard Ensemble, Shiroi Ishi, was featured in their repertoire for over ten years, with performances at such venues as Queen Elizabeth Hall in England, the Vienna Konzerthaus, and was aired on Italian national radio, RAI 3. Another work, Pharmakon, was performed dozens of times nationally by Eighth Blackbird during their 2001-2003 seasons. A portrait concert of Ken’s was featured on MaerzMusik in Berlin in 2011. In 2012, he was a featured artist on Other Minds 17. In 2014, Frances-Mairie Uitti and the Boston Modern Orchestra premiered his concerto for two-bow cello and orchestra, and Guerilla Opera premiered a run of his chamber opera, Gallo, to critical acclaim. He has performed as soloist in his vocal concerto with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in New York and Boston, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Lithuanian National Symphony, the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, and with orchestras in North Carolina, Pittsburgh, and California. Ken holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. A monograph CD of three orchestral concertos was released on the Bmop/sound label. His bio appears in The Grove Dictionary of American Music.

LISA MEZZACAPPA - bass
Berkeley, CA-based composer and bassist LISA MEZZACAPPA has been part of California’s vibrant music community for nearly 20 years. Her activities as a composer and ensemble leader include ethereal chamber music, electro-acoustic works, avant-garde jazz, music for groups from duo to large ensemble, and collaborations with film, dance, and visual art. Recent projects include Cosmicomics, a suite for electro-acoustic jazz sextet based on Italo’s Calvino’s stories about the cosmos; Organelle, a chamber work for improvisers grounded in scientific processes; Glorious Ravage, a song cycle for large ensemble and films drawn from the writings of Victorian lady adventurers; and Touch Bass, a collaboration with choreographer Risa Jaroslow for three dancers and three bassists. She also co-leads the community improvisation ensemble, the duo B. Experimental Band, with drummer Jason Levis, and is creating the serial audio opera The Electronic Lover in collaboration with writer Beth Lisick.

MATT INGALLS - clarinets
Reviled for his "shapeless sonic tinkering" by the Los Angeles Times, Oakland musician MATT INGALLS is a composer, clarinetist, concert producer, and computer music programmer. Often incorporating elements of improvisation, his music is heavily influenced by his long involvement in computer music. His composerly solo improvisations explore extended clarinet techniques that interact with the acoustic space, often as combination tones. Matt is the founder and co-director of sfSound, a new music series, ensemble, and internet radio station devoted to new ideas and traditions of experimental music, performance art, live electronic music, Bay Area composition, and the various facets of contemporary improvisation.

TIM DUFF - double bass
TIM DUFF has a double bass. He is well known by a small number of people to produce acceptable sounds from that instrument when appropriate.

CHRIS COOPER - electronics
CHRIS COOPER often performs under the moniker ANGST HASE PFEFFER NASE, with frequent help from others. Live performances typically use prepared guitar and electronics as a portable lab to explore electroacoustic crevices with cartoon-like precision. Freed from the constraints of real time, recordings - released since the early 90s on labels such as Menlo Park, Ultra Eczema, and Senufo Editions - follow a more home-made musique concrete aesthetic. AHPN's “Slugwater” was one of only 571 pieces to be selected for inclusion in the exhibition Audiosfera, organized by Francisco Lopez at the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, Spain. As a member of Bhob Rainey's improvising octet The BSC (also including Greg Kelley and Howie Stelzer), Cooper has collaborated with Pauline Oliveros, Andrea Neumann, and Axel Dorner. And let's not forget skewed rock-ish band Fat Worm of Error, fritzy-electronic trio White Limo, a nameless duo with Bill Nace, or the long-running Massachusetts-based improv trio Barn Owl (with Matt Weston).

DAVE CASINI - vibraphone
DAVE CASINI has been playing jazz in the Bay Area for 50 years. He released two albums of his compositions in 2019, is on CDs with Tribu, Octobop, as well as 9 videos at the Cadillac Hotel. While the pandemic has limited gigging, Dave is the vibist with Primavera Latin Jazz, Joel Dorham’s Latin Jazz Octet, Orion’s Joy of Jazz and drummer with the Bob Roden Quintet. Dave has played multiple performances at the SF Jazz Festival, the San Jose Jazz Festival, Yoshi’s and the Fillmore.

KYLE BRUCKMANN - oboe
Oboist KYLE BRUCKMANN tramples genre boundaries in widely ranging work as a composer/performer, educator and New Music specialist. His creative output – extending from conservatory-trained foundations into gray areas encompassing free jazz, post-punk rock, and the noise underground – can be heard on more than 100 recordings. Current ensemble affiliations include Splinter Reeds, SFCMP, Eco Ensemble, Quinteto Latino, and the Stockton Symphony; significant projects he has led or collaboratively founded include Degradient, EKG, Lozenge, and Wrack. He is Assistant Professor of Practice in Oboe and Contemporary Music at University of the Pacific.

LORIN BENEDICT - voice
LORIN BENEDICT is an improvising vocalist (scat singer, essentially) living in Emeryville, California. He has co-led small groups (duos, trios) in which the roles of the musicians are somewhat mutable even in contexts where highly structured forms are being played. Examples include Bleeding Vector with guitarist Eric Vogler, and another duo project with east bay saxophonist Kasey Knudsen. Together, these three musicians jointly lead the trio project, The Holly Martins. He has also co-led duo projects with drummer Sam Ospovat, vocalist Ron Heglin, and bassist Logan Kane.

JOSH ALLEN - tenor saxophone
JOSH ALLEN has created his own personal language on the tenor saxophone, with an emphasis on polytonal and asymmetrical phrasing, as well as extending the range and sonic ability of the instrument. He was born in Berkeley, California in 1972. Like many of today’s prominent musicians, Mr. Allen was a product of the Berkeley public school system, studying saxophone starting at the age of nine under Phil Hardymon. He went on to study with such prominent Bay Area musicians as Bill Aron, Joe Henderson, and Rory Snyder. With his focus squarely on jazz composition and performance, Mr. Allen moved to Southern California in the early nineties to study with Rick Helzer at San Diego State. He became active in the Latin Jazz community, and worked with various musicians such as Dennis Chambers, and Eddie Palmieri. Mr. Allen’s return to the Bay Area in the mid 90s to finish his Bachelors degree at Sonoma State. His association with saxophonist Marco Eneidi led to working relationships with musicians such as Glen Spearmann, Matthew Goodheart, Damon Smith, and eventually Cecil Taylor.

STEVE AHERN - guitar
STEVE AHERN has played the guitar for four decades. His earliest experiences with the instrument were in Texas, his state of origin. Upon moving to the Bay Area, he studied formally at Diablo Valley College before playing in a wide range of settings that led ultimately to a long-standing association with jazz tenor saxophone great, Vince Wallace. Most recently, he has explored open improvisation with saxophonist Josh Allen, bassist Tim Duff, and a host of other participants at the monthly Doors That Only Open in Silence session at the Temescal Arts Center.






 SUNDAY FEBRUARY 26 2023  7pm  $10-$25

THOMAS DIMUZIO
MOE STAIANO GUIDED ENSEMBLE




THOMAS DIMUZIO presents a solo performance of electronic sounds.

MOE STAIANO guides an ensemble of musicians in a composition written specially to be performed at Mosswood Chapel. Musicians will be distributed among its hallways and rooms surrounding the main performance space. The seated audience will experience the work acoustically "mixed and mastered" in real-time as the instrumentalists roam throughout the building. This will be the second performance of this composition.

MOE STAIANO GUIDED ENSEMBLE
Robin Walsh - Guitar
Melne Murphy - Guitar
Drew Wheeler - Guitar
Jeff Hobbs - Cello
Tim Duff - Upright Bass
Naomi Johnson - Piano
Jordan Glenn - Xylophone
Moe Staiano - Percussion



THOMAS DIMUZIO is a musician, composer, improviser, sound designer, mastering engineer, label proprietor, and music technologist residing in San Francisco, California. Dimuzio's music is like a sonic excursion transporting the listener to other worldly aural realms. “His work has a narrative, filmic tug that will draw you into its dark corners, ears alert… brilliant and rarely less than entertaining.” (Peter Marsh, BBC).

His recordings have been released internationally by ReR Megacorp, Asphodel, RRRecords, No Fun Productions, Sonoris, Drone Records, Record Label Records, Odd Size, Seeland, and other independent labels. Among his collaborators are Chris Cutler, Dan Burke, Joseph Hammer, Alan Courtis, Nick Didkovsky, Due Process, Voice of Eye, Fred Frith, David Lee Myers, Alaric, ISIS, 5uu's, Scot Jenerik, Matmos, Wobbly and Negativland. Prepandemic performances include AngelicA Festival Internazionale di Musica, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, CCRMA at Stanford, Recombinant Media Labs Buchla Memorial, and Ende Tymes Festival of Experimental Art and Liberation. Dimuzio hosted and produced Frequency Modulation Radio featuring live on-air performances of sonic practitioners exploring the fringes of music and broadcast on KPFA-FM Berkeley.


MOE STAIANO is a musician and composer of new music works and angular rock music. Since 1995, he has been at the forefront of the Bay Area improvisation scene, playing drums and percussion through innovative solo shows that can feature prepared drum kit, found objects, audio looping and the inventive use of a "percussion guitar." All this is woven in with a performance art aspect that gets the audience involved and wondering what might happen next. He will play (or smash into pieces) just about anything he can get his hands on, and somehow make a compelling musical statement out of it. Moe's compositional work has included music for large ensembles, a piece for two bass clarinets, and a work for percussion quartet. He has also conducted aleatoric improvisatory ensembles, using a glossary of handcues as well as composed sections cued in the moment. As conductor and composer for the Moe Staiano Ensemble, (formerly Moekestra!), he has composed pieces that can include over 30 musicians playing instruments ranging from violins, clarinets and cellos to drum kits, wine glasses, sirens, oscillators and electric guitars. Moe Staiano Ensemble performances are high-energy, electrifying experiences that create unique and intriguing soundscapes.

Moe is currently the leader and frontman for Surplus 1980, a post-punk band that continually evolves its percussive, no-wave progressive musical exploration. Surplus 1980 features Moe's bracing guitar and wry wordplay and a wide palette of timbres from the multi-instrumentalist members of the group. They have released three albums, 2011's "Relapse In Response," 2014's mini-album "Arterial Ends Here," and 2019's "Pigeon Obstacle Course." Additionally, Surplus 1980 appears on one side of the shared 7" record, "International Static Split," with Dutch band King Champion Sounds. They have a forthcoming album in the works for 2022 and a single with G.W. Sok. In 2018, a collaboration with vocalist G.W. Sok (Formerly with The Ex) led to the creation of a 14-piece expanded version of the band--the Surplus 1980 Collectiv Ensembl. This unique group recorded "Forget All This," an album featuring Sok's poetry set to Moe's music, which was released in 2019. Later that year, the group, including Sok, brought this album to the stage in full for a pair of shows in the San Francisco Bay Area. From 1999-2004, Moe was a percussionist for metal progsters Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (and appeared occasionally for live guest performances afterward). He appears on their albums "Grand Opening And Closing," and "Of Natural History," as well as the "Live" album. He played and recorded with San Jose collective Vacuum Tree Head (also doing percussion first, then as drummer) from 1996 to the early 2000's. In 2006 he formed Mute Socialite, an angular no-wavish punk band, in which Moe played drums (and occasional guitar), along with second drummer Shayna Dunkelman, and guitarist Ava Mendoza. They released one album, "More Popular Than Presidents And Generals."

Over the years, Moe has worked with a veritable who's-who of the Bay Area creative music scene, including Gabby Fluke-Mogul, Fred Frith, Ron Anderson (the Molecules, RonRuins, PAK), Tom Nunn, Vacuum Tree Head, Thollem McDonas, Z'ev, Amy X Neuburg, Ava Mendoza, Nurse With Wound, David Slusser, Karen Stackpole, Ches Smith, Michael Evans (God Is My Co-Pilot), Caroline Kraabel & John Edwards (Shock Exchange), Gino Robair, William Hooker, Tom Dimuzio and has performed with all these plus Henry Kaiser, Mark Growden's Electric Pinata, Amy Denio, Jordan Glenn, Telepathic Birds, Feona Lee Jones, Jon Raskin (ROVA), Cheer-Accident and has performed in the sfSoundGroup, Rova::Orkestrova, Terrie Hessels (the Ex), Rhys Chatham (A Secret Rose for 100 guitars) among others.






 SUNDAY MARCH 19 2023  7pm  $10-$25

WILLIAM LANG + ANNE RAINWATER
SOCIAL STUTTER




WILLIAM LANG and ANNE RAINWATER perform two recently-commissioned works: local composer Anne Hege's boom boom terror, boom boom bliss, and Brooklyn-based composer Scott Wollschleger's between breath, premiered last spring. In addition, they will present compositions by Arvo Pärt, Jeremy Howard Beck, and others.

SOCIAL STUTTER, a saxophone quartet led by composer/altoist BETH SCHENCK, blurs the line between strictly written chamber music and soaring free jazz. Solos emerge from the natural order of intricately written lines that, although begin simply in structure, twist and distort themselves into surprisingly complex shapes and forms. Unlike traditional saxophone quartets, some of the pieces are composed for two altos and two tenors, which leads itself to denser harmonic territory and a uniquely homogenous sound. Masters of texture and nuance, the quartet has a keen awareness of how to support and push one another's creative boundaries. Social Stutter is comprised of some of the Bay Area's most unique voices: KASEY KNUDSEN, PHILLIP GREENLIEF, CORY WRIGHT and BETH SCHENCK.


The LANG/RAINWATER PROJECT is a duo partnership established over ten years ago while both members were studying at Manhattan School of Music’s groundbreaking Contemporary Performance Program. While both trombonist William Lang and pianist Anne Rainwater specialize in contemporary music, they also perform a wide range of classical literature, from Bach and Schumann to young composers such as Alex Temple and Quinn Mason. The Lang/Rainwater Project’s mission is to expand the trombone-piano repertoire by working with diverse and distinct voices of contemporary music. In addition to canonical trombone and piano works and transcriptions of classics, the Lang/Rainwater Project maintains an active commissioning portfolio dedicated to championing traditionally underrepresented composers. They regularly promote these composers’ new works in concerts at universities and conservatories and encourage students and teachers to perform them as well. The Lang/Rainwater Project has performed across the United States, from tours of the South to performances on both coasts to residencies in the Northeast, with an upcoming, 4-university residency and commissioning project in the Philadelphia area later this March.

ANNE RAINWATER has released 2 solo albums – J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations (2018) and Anywhere But Here (2020), featuring electronic keyboard works by Jude Traxler. She is a 2019 recipient of an InterMusic SF Grant. Anne is working on her first book, which explores the internal and external ecosystems that contribute to the understanding, practicing, and performing of music. When not at the piano or writing, she is running long distances, reading, or obsessively watching baseball.

WILLIAM LANG has recorded for projects such as his groundbreaking ensemble loadbang to international acts such as David Bryne and St. Vincent, as well as for Philip Glass. He is an active champion of the art of solo trombone, and works he has commissioned have been warmly reviewed by the The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and several European publications. When not practicing the trombone, he can be found rock climbing, spending time with his family, or obsessively watching basketball.






 SUNDAY MARCH 26 2023  7pm  $10-$25

DAN FLANAGAN The Bow and the Brush





The Bow and the Brush

Created by violinist/composer DAN FLANAGAN, The Bow and the Brush integrates the visual arts with new music. Dan is joined by cellist VICKY EHRLICH, trombonist BRUCE CRISP, and violinist GABRIELLE WUNSCH to perform new works by Libby Larsen, Nathaniel Stookey, Linda Marcel Marcel, Shinji Eshima, Jacques Desjardins, Cindy Cox, Maija Hynninen, Jose Gonzalez Granero, Edmund Campion, Emily Onderdonk, Peter Josheff, Evan Price, Michael Panther and Dan Flanagan. All compositions will be Oakland premieres and will be performed with projected images of the paintings and sculptures that inspire them. Violinists TAMMIE DYER and JULIE KIM will join Flanagan in a premiere of a new trio by Eric Schwartz.


DAN FLANAGAN has built a multifaceted career as a soloist and orchestral musician, performing concertos with orchestras in California and recitals throughout the United States and Europe. Flanagan currently serves as Concertmaster of the Sacramento Philharmonic and Opera, Concertmaster of West Edge Opera, and Instructor of Violin at University of California, Berkeley. Described as “an excellent violinist” (New York Concert Reviews), the 2022-23 season includes solo recitals in New York City, San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Sacramento, Houston, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Rome, Perugia, London, Bordeaux, and Paris. His program, The Bow and the Brush, includes 23 newly composed solo violin pieces inspired by paintings and sculptures. Several of these compositions can be seen on his Youtube channel (recommended by KDFC, The Strad, and SF Classical Voice) and heard on his album, The Bow and the Brush, which will be released by MSR Classics in early 2023. He will perform the program at Carnegie Hall in the 2023-24 season. A dedicated orchestral player, Flanagan has performed as concertmaster with the Oakland Symphony, Santa Rosa Symphony, California Symphony, California Musical Theater, Festival Opera of Walnut Creek, Symphony San Jose, Modesto Symphony, Opera Parallèle, Merced Symphony and Symphony Napa Valley. He performs regularly with the San Francisco Opera and Ballet and records film, video game, and television soundtracks with the Skywalker Symphony Orchestra.

Active in the Bay Area since 1989, BRUCE CRISP is presently principal trombone of the Santa Rosa Symphony, Marin Symphony, Vallejo Symphony, Oakland Symphony, Sacramento Philharmonic and Opera, Carmel Bach Festival, and Fresno Philharmonic orchestras, and is a member of the Opera San Jose orchestra. Additionally, Chrisp performs regularly with the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Ballet, San Francisco Opera, and the San Diego Symphony. He is in demand as a recording artist and records frequently at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County. A founding member of the San Francisco Brass Company, a brass quintet based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Chrisp also enjoys performing renaissance and baroque works on a replica of an instrument made in Nuremberg in 1595.

Violinist TAMMIE DYER holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from Stony Brook University, an M.M. from Rice University, and a B.M. From the University of Utah. She has studied with many of the great artists of our time, including Philip Setzer, Dorothy DeLay, Pamela Frank, Soovin Kim, Kathleen Winkler, members of the Cleveland String Quartet, and the Emerson String Quartet. She has also attended the Tanglewood, Aspen, Sarasota, Eastern, and Marrowstone music festivals. Tammie enjoys playing a variety of musical styles, and is passionate about sharing the transformative experience of live music. An active chamber musician, Tammie performs regularly throughout the Bay Area, with such groups as the Hidden Valley String Orchestra in Carmel, on the Opus Series in Mendocino, and the Bellarosa String Quartet. She is a member of the Sacramento Philharmonic and Opera, Principal Second of the Mendocino Music Festival Orchestra, and performs with Santa Rosa Symphony and San Francisco Opera.

VICKY EHRLICH (cello) studied at Southern Methodist University, the Academia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her teachers included Robert Marsh, Bernard Greenhouse, and Robert Gardner. Prior to joining the San Francisco Opera Orchestra in 1984, she played with the Santa Fe Opera, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and was principal cellist with the Symphonies of Omaha, Richmond and Phoenix. Ms. Ehrlich has performed with the San Francisco Ballet, San Francisco Symphony, the New Century Chamber Orchestra, Composers Inc., Berkeley Symphony, the Russian Chamber Orchestra, and Lamplighters. She is also an active chamber musician, performing regularly with the Ariel Quartet, resident ensemble of the Sacramento Chamber Music Society; the Bridge Players, who specialize in music by Jewish and Holocaust composers; the Picasso Ensemble, who present concerts in the historic Senon House in Aptos; the International Orange Piano Quartet; and the Fath Chamber Players, a fixture in Mill Valley.

JULIE KIM started playing the violin at the age of 6 and received her Bachelor of Music at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She began her string quartet career with the acclaimed Franciscan String Quartet in 1982. The quartet was awarded the Wardwell Fellowship at Yale University to study with the Tokyo String Quartet and won First Prize at the prestigious Banff International String Quartet competition. They were also awarded the Press Prize and the City of Evian Prize at the Evian International String Quartet competition. The quartet went on to become the Resident String Quartet at Dartmouth College and toured throughout Europe, Canada and the United States. She has participated in the Aspen, Norfolk and Banff Music Festivals and pursued chamber music studies with the Tokyo, Julliard, Cleveland, Emerson and Vermeer String Quartets. Ms. Kim performs extensively with the San Francisco Opera, Ballet, Opera Center and San Francisco Chamber Orchestra.

GABRIELLE WUNSCH enjoys a varied and active performance schedule in the United States and in Europe. A Carmel Bach Festival musician since 2004, she has performed chamber and solo programs at the Utrecht, Barcelona, and Göttingen festivals, and was a prize winner in the 2010 Premio Bonporti International Baroque Violin Competition held in Rovereto, Italy. She plays regularly with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, which toured this spring through North America, playing at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, Place des Arts in Montreal, and the Walt Disney Hall, among others. She is a member of Voices of Music, and can be found on many of its videos online. In Europe she continues to play with B’Rock and Nieuwe Philharmonie Utrecht, and has been a member of the Festival Orchestra at Göttingen Händel-Festspiele for ten years. On her modern violin she regularly performs with the Santa Rosa, Marin, Fresno, and Monterey Symphonies. Gabrielle holds performance degrees from Eastman School of Music (BM) and SUNY Stony Brook (MM), as well as in baroque violin from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague (BM and MM). Major teachers include Pamela Frank and Mitchell Stern for modern violin; Enrico Gatti, Lucy van Dael, Elizabeth Wallfisch, and Manfredo Kraemer for baroque violin.






 SUNDAY APRIL 9 2023  7pm  $10-$25

4MACIÓN
JORDAN GLENN + JOSÉ F. SOLARES + MITCH STAHLMANN




4MACIÓN debuts a new computer music composition for solo laptop, “Monzogranite,” arranged for the Mosswood Chapel. The work is a variation on a computer-generated melody which disrupts and plays in harmony with multiple digital feedback systems.

JORDAN GLENN, JOSÉ F. SOLARES, and MITCH STAHLMANN perform a new trio of winds and percussion.


4MACIÓN (KRISTIAN DAHLBOM) is a Los Angeles-based composer and performer of computer music. Through laptop performance and the use of various electronic sensors, 4mación explores the relationship between human and computer in live music settings and aims to create dynamic, audible topographies as a product of this collaboration. Using live synthesis, sound processing, and feedback loops, they attempt to negotiate the divinity of nature with the bleakness of the computer. The results are often sounds that possess an uncanny aliveness.

JOSÉ F. SOLARES (saxophone/flute) is a Mexican improviser, saxophonist, composer and sound artist, born in Ensenada, Baja California. Jose has a BA in Classical Saxophone Performance from the Autonomous University of Baja California (UABC). Although his academic formation was in classical music, Jose has developed his musicianship in many other music genres like ska, rock, reggae, jazz, contemporary music, free improvisation, among others. He has performed in many orchestras and ensembles such as UABC Symphony, UABC Chamber Orchestra, La Covacha Big Band, Wilfrido Terrazas Sea Quintet, Bucefalo, Burnt Sugar Arkestra Chamber, etc. Jose has also participated in many festivals as Vértice 2018, Ensenada’s New Music Festival (Neofonia FMNE) 2019/2021, International Improv’s Week (SIDIMPRO) 2013- 2019, La Covacha’s International Jazz Week ( SIJAZZ) 2014-2019, Festival Of New Trumpet Music West 2020 (FONT West),and the Afrofuturism Festival at Carnegie Hall 2022. Jose has had the opportunity to work and learn from amazing artists like, Stephanie Richards, Tomeka Reid, Wilfrido Terrazas, Nathan Hubbard and Ivan Trujillo. With more than twenty world premiere pieces performed, one of his greatest interests in music is to explore the sonic possibilities through new music and free improvisation. Jose is nowadays studying an MFA in Performance and Literature, with an emphasis in Improvisation at Mills College, in Oakland CA.

MITCH STAHLMANN (flute/winds) is a Minneapolis-born and Oakland-based multimedia artist, improvisor and composer focusing on flutes and electronics. His work has been presented in collaboration with and alongside Kronos Quartet, Meredith Monk, Zeena Parkins, Briana Marela, and Bang on a Can. His personal practice is dedicated to revealing the unearthed tones and uncharacteristic behaviors of the flute. An archive can be heard of this work through the recently premiered solo album Into the Wish, released through Mondoj of Warsaw, Poland. Mitch actively works with fellow bandmates Lynn Avery and Cole Pulice in LCM (Orange Milk Records) as well as various other improvisatory and impulsive acts of sound across the globe. Mitch completed his MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media with a Elizabeth B. Mills award for Composition at Mills College in 2020.

JORDAN GLENN (drums/percussion) has worked closely with Fred Frith (FF Trio, Gravity Band), William Winant, Zeena Parkins (The Adorables), Roscoe Mitchell, Ben Goldberg, Todd Sickafoose, John Schott, Lisa Mezzacappa, Kyle Bruckmann, Michael Coleman, Matthew Welch and bands Jack O' The Clock, Secret Chiefs 3, The Rova Sax Quartet, tUnE-yArDs and the collective Sifter with Rob Ewing, Beth Schenck and Lisa Mezzacappa. As a leader he led the trio Wiener Kids, Mindless Thing (a collaboration with poet Jim Ryan) and the percussion heavy large ensemble BEAK. Since 2019 he has co-run with Lisa Mezzacappa, the DO-OVER Music Series, a composition/improvisation lab held monthly at the Temescal Art Center in Oakland. He also has been commissioned to create scores for evening-length dance pieces by Sharp & Fine and Liss Fain Dance.






 SUNDAY APRIL 23 2023  7pm  $10-$25

EDA ER
SINK HEAD TRIO ( BEN GOLDBERG + JORDAN GLENN + BEN DAVIS)




SINK HEAD TRIO
BEN GOLDBERG - clarinet   JORDAN GLENN - drums   BEN DAVIS - cello

Pseudomellifluous quasisoliloquy with bent eardrum hammerhead wrapped in a 1960’s chewing gum commercial stuck to the bottom of your shoe. Dedicated to the memory. Foursquare and seven and possibly even more. Way more.


EDA ER presents a new work, I belong to nothing; I belong to everything for vocals and electronics:
This piece focuses on sense of belonging, displacement, migration, and security that have always been questions that I’ve been seeking answers for myself. In I belong to nothing; I belong to everything, I will challenge myself, as a performer with my personal struggle, and let it speak and transform through the sound. I use electronics and my vocals, both of which I will relate to the concept, embracing them and deconstructing them simultaneously, under this title to free myself from the lexicons that I’m used to have and to find a way to find sense of belonging inside the sound. I will be structuring the performance around the poems that I wrote by deconstructing them using my vocals alongside electronics. I will try to play around the boundaries by using improvisatory approach in abstract and poetic form of a structure. -- E.E.

EDA ER, a native of Istanbul, is a composer, sound artist and singer currently based in San Francisco Bay Area. She primarily explores the potential of expressivity and narrativity in her music. Eda’s music evolved around exploring the possibilities of singing, composing, combining analogue and digital electronics, video, theatricality, and storytelling. She is interested in building augmented experiences centered on music by using multimedia tools. ​ ​She has had the pleasure of working as a composer with notable groups, musicians, organizations, and ensembles, including Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Multilarérale, Kugoni Trio, Hermes Ensemble, Hezarfen Ensemble, Atlas Ensemble, Vertixe Sonora, Ensemble Suono Giallo, Nordic Trombone Quartet, Eco Ensemble, Nicolas Isherwood, Christine Cornwell, Tom Collier, IKSV International Theater Festival, Gaudeamus Festival, Festival Mixtur, Ikincikat, Mamut Art Project, Clout Theater, A corner in the world and Berika Collective. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the klank.ist, and besides composing and producing, she performs electronics, vocal and visuals. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Music Composition with a Designated Emphasis on New Media at the University of California, Berkeley in the Music Department, CNMAT (Center for New Music and Audio Technologies) and BCNM (Berkeley Center for New Media).







 SUNDAY APRIL 30 2023  7pm  $10-$25

A MICRO-FESTIVAL OF TAPE MUSIC



THE SAN FRANCISCO TAPE MUSIC COLLECTIVE presents a "micro-festival" of fixed media works projected live over a multichannel sound system.

Bookending the history of tape music in the Bay Area, the program features recent works by members of the collective alongside two classics from the 1960's realized at the San Francisco Tape Music Center: PAULINE OLIVEROS'S Bye Bye Butterfly and STEVE REICH'S It's Gonna Rain. The collective will be diffusing the Oliveros piece from stereo and performing their multi-channel realization of the Reich.

P R O G R A M
STEVE REICH - It's Gonna Rain (1965)
MAGGI PAYNE - Through Space and Time (2022)
PAULINE OLIVEROS - Bye Bye Butterfly (1965)
KRISTIN MILTNER - Meditation on a Rainy Afternoon in January (2023)
MATT INGALLS - poem number two (2023)
CLIFF CARUTHERS - Chorale for Ola and Tomek (2016)
THOM BLUM - Reset (tabula rasa) (2018)






 SUNDAY MAY 7 2023  7pm  $10-$25

duo B.
DAVID SLUSSER + SAFA SHOKRAI




DAVID SLUSSER and SAFA SHOKRAI present Cinema, a game-piece score for improvisation.

duo B. (LISA MEZZACAPPA, bass + JASON LEVIS, drums) preview/premiere Incomplete, Open (2023), a new work for improvising duo with network-based scoring system designed & programmed by TIM PERKIS.

ABOUT INCOMPLETE, OPEN
Today we are pleased to present a Bay Area preview of a new work we are premiering at TENOR (International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation) in Boston next week, of a new composition and digital scoring system created in collaboration with electronic musician Tim Perkis. More than a few years ago, we discovered visual artist Sol LeWitt’s series of drawings and sculptures, Incomplete Open Cubes (1974/1982), where he explored the 122 ways of "not making a cube, all the ways of the cube not being complete." We were transfixed by the obsessive, iterative quality of the work, and by the vast array of quirky symbols that LeWitt’s serial process generated. It seemed to us that these symbols—each unfinished cube, whether perceived as a line drawing in two dimensions or a sculpture in three—could give rise to a system of musical notation.

While LeWitt’s process involved setting up a scenario and letting it run its course through serial operations, we decided to engage with the unsolved cubes more poetically, letting our compositional ideas flow from the character and personality of individual shapes. We organized the cubes into related “series” or “genealogies,” composed musical material (vocabulary) both for series and for individual cubes, and also created processes (syntax) for how pre-composed material can interact and be manipulated, transformed and developed through improvisation in the course of performance. As we were creating this work and formulating its rules of engagement, we realized that we were developing a real-time collaborative compositional tool based on our own proclivities and interests as improvising composers—one that offers us options for musical content, form and procedure which may not emerge organically from a completely improvised performance.

The network-based digital score Tim programmed allows us to choose a “set” of a grid of cubes for any given performance ahead of time, and then select individual cubes or series of cubes in real time via an iPad control panel as we are playing. These cubes direct us towards composed musical material or rules for processing it—with listeners able to follow our decisions on the overhead screen as areas of the grid of cubes are selected and deselected throughout the performance. Our hope is that our musical decisions will be more transparent to audiences through this ability to watch the grid as we manipulate it over the course of our set, to help guide listeners in understanding the trajectory of our performance and our evolving relationship to the sounds and structures encoded in the cube symbols.

ABOUT CINEMA
Accelerating the Narrative Score for Improvisation using Film Language.

(DISCLAIMER: This is NOT a performance reacting to projected images.)

Narrative has been a part of music since earliest times. It may be what the whales were singing about before humans came on the scene. Improvising artists use it overtly or subconsciously to guide their work. While it seems oxymoronic to write a score for improvised music, “Improv” needs all the help it can get. This score takes the narrative map one step further, using the shorthand of film language, which took leaps over literary narrative in real time.

When people began to edit motion pictures to tell larger stories, about 120 years ago, audiences were initially confused about the juxtapositions of images across time and space. Within a decade, though, the understanding of this linear collage had spread worldwide. It was heralded as a brand new art form.

Though not engaged mechanically, music was part of the presentation almost from the start, in all but the most threadbare nickelodeons. A whole sublanguage of music for cinema was established before the advent of sound-on-film roughly 90 years ago. In its subservient capacity, film music developed its own subtle codes; tracking emotional development, setting tonal ambience (literally and figuratively), and underscoring physical and psychological action. If you weren’t sure how the images made you feel, the music would tell you what the filmmakers wanted you to feel.

This score for improvisation is a type of game piece. The performers follow a set of prompts drawn from references to film archetypes, conventions, clichés, and memes, not exclusive to musical score per se. The structure is film’s typical three acts, each containing a series of scenes. We will pause after each act and reveal some of the scene prompts. Performances of this piece can be linear or random, depending how the scenes are shuffled. In no way are we meant to all be seeing the same movie in our heads. What is meant to come through is the dramatic scaffolding and emotional arcs.

Now, more than ever, we are living in a screen culture.



duo B., the San Francisco Bay Area improvising and composing ensemble of percussionist JASON LEVIS and bassist LISA MEZZACAPPA, is a musical think tank of grand schemes and impossible scenarios. For more than a dozen years, the ensemble has developed and refined its singular approach to improvisation and composition, through cross-disciplinary projects with film and video, collaborations with improvising instrumentalists at home and abroad, study of repertoire by like-minded composer-improvisers, and immersion in the improvised-composed musical worlds of masters Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Henry Threadgill, and others. Mezzacappa and Levis also co-lead the duo B. Experimental Band (dBxB), an unwieldy expansion of the duo into a large ensemble with flexible instrumentation and evolving personnel that performs in the Bay Area and when necessary, online.

SAFA SHOKRAI is inspired by solid objects and abstract concepts. He strives to create the soundtrack for the film we all live in. Based in the Bay Area, Safa Shokrai has performed in many bands as both a freelancer and band leader in his 25 years as a professional musician. He has had the opportunity to study with jazz legend Ray Brown, the late great Jeff Chambers, and local stalwart Marcus Shelby. Safa has had the opportunity to travel around the world making music and brings all the music styles he has absorbed into his practice, from Tuareg to South Indian to European Romani. Currently he is working on composing new music for several bands he is involved with, including The Lost Shapes and Levitator, and is looking forward to recording some albums this year.

DAVID SLUSSER started his career in cinema as a member of a PBS film crew in Cleveland in 1975. He has been performing improvised music in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1977. He started on the ground floor of Lucasfilm’s sound division in 1984, prior to the construction of Skywalker Ranch. David has worked for George Lucas, Francis Coppola, David Lynch and the early Pixar Directors. In 1993 he received an Emmy award for editing in the Young Indiana Jones television series. Staying active musically, David developed a lasting relationship with composer John Zorn, produced CDs of his material in a group with homeboy Ralph Carney in the band Rubber City, played in trio with drummer Han Bennink and vocalist Mike Patton at the 1996 Saafelden Jazz Festival in Austria, received two prizes in the 1999 Julius Hemphill Composition Awards, including first prize for jazz orchestra, played again with Patton in his large ensemble at the 2010 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, and was an electronics sideman in trumpeter Dave Douglas’s “found film” performance at Stanford in 2014. More recent work has been creating a book of arrangements for the five horned Stray Horns ensemble.






 SUNDAY MAY 14 2023  7pm  $10-$25

OAKLAND REDUCTIONIST ORCHESTRA
MATT INGALLS: LACHENMANN + SCIARRINO





a concert of sound

Clarinetist MATT INGALLS performs two iconic solo Musique Concrète Instrumentale compositions:

SALVATORE SCIARRINO - Let Me Die Before I Wake (1982)
HELMUT LACHENMANN - Dal niente (Intérieur III) (1970)

The concert also features the OAKLAND REDUCTIONIST ORCHESTRA, a supergroup of local musicians with a predilection for lowercase/fricative/reductionist acoustic improvisation that often sounds more electronic than acoustic. This ensemble grows out of a rich tradition of "American reductionist" music that emerged (re-emerged?) in the late 1990's and early 2000's. Previous projects like Tom Djll's Grosse Abfahrt and The Jack Wright Large Ensemble Eight By Nine document the Bay Area's contribution to the genre.


PERFORMERS
Danishta Rivero, voice
Cody Putman, bassoon
Kanoko Nishi-Smith, koto
Joshua Marshall, saxophone
Brendan Lai-Tong, trombone
Matt Ingalls, clarinets
Jacob Felix Heule, percussion
Phillip Greenlief, saxophone
Sarah Grace Graves, voice
Kevin CK Lo, violin/flute









 SUNDAY MAY 21 2023  7pm  $10-$25

BERNAL HILL PLAYERS
HADLEY MCCARROLL: MATTHEW WELCH




Pianist HADLEY MCCARROLL performs several selections from MATTHEW WELCH'S piano music, including many West Coast premieres from his 12 Etudes for Piano (2015). Concluding is Orion (1998), an early piece of Matthew’s in response to Morton Feldman‘s style.

San Francisco’s beloved women’s chamber music ensemble BERNAL HILL PLAYERS performs “Forces of Nature”, a wildly varied program referencing Italian volcanoes, Brazilian rainforests, Japanese seas, English forests, and Californian canyons. The program features three newly composed pieces by Bay Area composers Davide Verotta, Jennifer Peringer, and Sarah Stiles, and also includes nature-themed pieces by Pauline Oliveros, Sally Davies and Toru Takemitsu.

P R O G R A M
Toru Takemitsu: Moby Dick and The Night from Toward the Sea
Jennifer Peringer and the Bernal Hill Players: The Canyon Wakes Up
Davide Verotta: Sulle Aridi Pendici
Pauline Oliveros: Environmental Dialogue
Sarah Stiles: A Dança da Sobrevivencia
Sally Davies: Restore the Earth



sfSound's pianist HADLEY MCCARROLL is a well-known San Francisco Bay Area-based collaborative and solo pianist. She has performed in the United States, and internationally with, among others: Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet in Paris and New York, the Festival del Sole in the Napa Valley, Composer’s Inc., Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and most recently in recital with KRONOS Quartet violist Hank Dutt in San Francisco. For the past fifteen years she has performed as the pianist of the cello/piano duo martha & monica. Hadley has also worked at the Royal Danish Opera, San Francisco Opera, San Diego Opera, West Edge Opera and as accompanist for the James Toland Vocal Arts International Competition for the past 6 years. Equally at home as a soloist, Hadley has given wide-ranging performances, including the Sonatas and Interludes by John Cage at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and programs featuring Carter, Beethoven, Ligeti, Liszt and Schumann. She frequently premieres new piano works. Ms. McCarroll received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in piano performance from the University of Texas at Austin.

The BERNAL HILL PLAYERS is a mixed instrument ensemble formed in 2009 that performs classical, contemporary, and experimental chamber music from around the world, with a particular focus on Bay Area and women composers. They love performing in intimate neighborhood venues, where they can enjoy chatting with the audience, experimenting with new creative ventures, and celebrating the joy of playing music together. Performers: MARTHA RODRÍGUEZ-SALAZAR, flutes; ANNELISE ZAMULA, saxophones and flute; LEAH DI TULLIO , clarinets; SHARON WAYNE, guitar; and JENNIFER PERINGER, piano.

Singer, flutist, conductor and producer MARTHA RODRÍGUEZ-SALAZAR  has been bringing Latin American folk, classical and contemporary music to the Bay Area for more than 15 years. For her outstanding leadership in promoting and developing Mexican music and culture in the Bay Area Martha was recognized as a "Luminary" in 2011 by the Mexican Consulate in SF and as "Excelencia Latina" by LAM and Mundo Fox in 2013. A native of Mexico City, Martha was classically-trained in both Mexico and Mills College as a concert flutist and opera singer. She has been a faculty member of the Community Music Center since 2000, where she teaches voice, flute, Coro de Cámara, Latin Vocal Workshop, conducts several older adult choirs, and is part of the San Francisco Unified School District Mariachi Program. She currently performs with the Bernal Hill Players and the Ave Fénix Duo, as well as curating the “Día de los Muertos” event at the San Francisco Symphony.

JENNIFER PERINGER is a pianist and arranger who has played throughout Europe, Mexico and California, with salsa bands in smoky nightclubs, with music hall troupes in riverside pubs, with protest bands in city streets and circus tents, with wild free-improvisation ensembles in artist lofts, with actors in theaters large and small, and with classical chamber music ensembles in churches and concert halls. Jennifer has taught at the Community Music Center in San Francisco since 2000. She earned a Master of Music degree from San Francisco State University, following an undergraduate music degree from the University of London. She currently performs with the Bernal Hill Players and the Magnolia Piano Duo.

ANNELISE ZAMULA was educated at Berklee College of Music, Boston, and Indiana University, Bloomington. She studied flute with Wallace Mann (then-principal flutist of the National Symphony) and Matt Marvuglio. She has toured the US, Europe and Canada with the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet, and appeared at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. with the Montclair Women’s Big Band. Annelise performs locally with the Noertker’s Moxie, Big Lou’s Polka Casserole, and the Bernal Hill Players. She has played in rock, pop, and blues bands in addition to jazz, swing, and classical ensembles.

LEAH DI TULLIO began her clarinet odyssey in 4th grade in the Oakland Public Schools, studying with Rudy Tapiro and eventually joining the Oakland Youth Orchestra. She studied painting at U.C. Berkeley while taking lessons with Rosario Mazzeo and performing in the UC Chorus and Orchestra. She continues to paint, and plays with numerous orchestral and chamber groups including Bay Area Classical Harmonies, Marin Baroque, Bay Area Rainbow Symphony, Mozart to Mendellsohn Orchestra, Classical Revolution, Bernal Hill Players and her wind quintet, Sfiato. She studied for many years with Kalmen Opperman, and currently studies with Jerry Simas. She works in the Oakland and San Francisco Public Libraries where she is happy to be surrounded by many scores and recordings.

Classical guitarist SHARON WAYNE has received critical acclaim for her performances throughout the US and in Japan. Sharon is passionate about bringing new pieces to audiences, and has premiered works by Frank Wallace, Dusan Bogdanovic, Carlo Domeniconi, and Scott August. In Spring of 2023, she will premier two new duets written for Ave Fénix Duo by Bay Area composers Erik Pearson and Davide Verotta. Ms. Wayne has served as Artistic Director of both the Boston and the San Francisco Guitar Society, and was a founding member of the San Francisco Guitar Quartet. She has recorded seven CDs, including both solo and chamber music, and is currently on the Guitar Faculty of San Francisco Community Music Center.






 SUNDAY MAY 28 2023  7pm  $10-$25

RON HEGLIN + RIC LOUCHARD
SARAH GRACE GRAVES + EDA ER
CRACKING THE SURFACE
(DAVID MICHALAK + SCOTT LOONEY + THOMAS DIMUZIO)






CRACKING THE SURFACE fuses Skatch, piano and live electronics while morphing, reversing and re-imagining music from electro-acoustic and noise to classical, dark ambient, drone and beyond. Skatchboxes, Skatchplates and Skatchplatters share timbres from the inside and outside of the piano as they’re electronically sampled, processed and reconstituted. Skatch flags flying high with love and respect for the legacy of inventor and CRACKING THE SURFACE co-founder, Tom Nunn.

Vocalists SARAH GRACE GRAVES and EDA ER build a narrative, aesthetic, and technical habitat for stories only they can tell.

RON HEGLIN and RIC LOUCHARD improvise delicate, emotive chamber music, filled with open spaces and some dense clusters. Ron speaks and sings in imagined languages, and Ric plays chromatic structures spaced widely to leave space for Ron’s voice. The music is liminal, intimate and generous.


THOMAS DIMUZIO (buchla synthesizer, live sampling) is a composer, musician, mastering engineer and label proprietor based in San Francisco. Long regarded as a musical pioneer for his innovative use of live sampling and studio techniques to create consistently compelling works, Dimuzio has earned a deserved reputation worldwide as an avant-garde sound artist in touch with the aesthetic pulse of time and technology. Effortlessly moving through various genres, Dimuzio's eclecticism bespeaks a career equally informed by profound dedication to his craft and collaborations with friends, artists and technologists alike. Among his collaborations include work with Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, Matmos, Wobbly, DJ Qbert, Dan Burke, Paul Haslinger, Due Process, 5uu's and many others.

EDA ER, a native of Istanbul, is a composer, sound artist and singer currently based in San Francisco Bay Area. She primarily explores the potential of expressivity and narrativity in her music. Eda’s music evolved around exploring the possibilities of singing, composing, combining analogue and digital electronics, video, theatricality, and storytelling. She is interested in building augmented experiences centered on music by using multimedia tools. ​ ​She has had the pleasure of working as a composer with notable groups, musicians, organizations, and ensembles, including Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Multilarérale, Kugoni Trio, Hermes Ensemble, Hezarfen Ensemble, Atlas Ensemble, Vertixe Sonora, Ensemble Suono Giallo, Nordic Trombone Quartet, Eco Ensemble, Nicolas Isherwood, Christine Cornwell, Tom Collier, IKSV International Theater Festival, Gaudeamus Festival, Festival Mixtur, Ikincikat, Mamut Art Project, Clout Theater, A corner in the world and Berika Collective. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the klank.ist, and besides composing and producing, she performs electronics, vocal and visuals. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Music Composition with a Designated Emphasis on New Media at the University of California, Berkeley in the Music Department, CNMAT (Center for New Music and Audio Technologies) and BCNM (Berkeley Center for New Media).

Bay Area composer/vocalist SARAH GRACE GRAVES is a singer, composer, and improviser connecting the physical and emotional landscape of the performer with the inner life of the listener through intimate and rare uses of the voice. A composer by formation, she has spent the past several years building an experimental vocal practice mining layers of unstable vocal sounds and now works as a freelance composer- performer, drawing upon both pools of knowledge to compose music that is body-centered, person-centered, and site-specific.

RON HEGLIN is a Trombonist and vocalist exploring extended techniques on Trombone and Tuba and as a vocalist composing in real time spoken and sung imaginary sound language compositions in solo and ensemble (a kind of asemic composing). Among other studies he has studied North Indian classical music at the Ali Akbar Khan School,The Center For World Music,and with Pandit Pran Nath and is a long time participant in Bay Area music performances as well as performing internationally.

SCOTT LOONEY (piano, hyperpiano, electronics) has always been interested in the creation and performance of compelling sounds across a broad spectrum of contemporary, improvised, and experimental music. He has forged a signature style using the inside and outside of the piano, plucking strings, using metal implements and other quick preparations, in combination to playing the piano normally. He has also developed a flexible, expressive voice with electronics using Max/MSP which is as effective as his many piano textures. He has studied composition and improvisation with Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, David Rosenboom, Frederic Rzewski and Morton Subotnick.

RIC LOUCHARD is a composer, pianist and improvisor. He made four CDs of classical piano solos for children. He is proudest of a fan letter from a nurse at a preemie ward at a hospital in the Midwest telling him that his first CD, G’Night Wolfgang, was regularly being played for the babies there in their incubators. Ric’s improvisations tend to be very chromatic and range from spontaneous motivic compositions to waves of noise. Ric often tells true and surprisingly personal stories in his performances. Ric has been lucky to perform with local greats like Tim Perkis, Lisa Mezzacappa, Joshua Marshall, Roberto Gonzales, Monica Scott, John Worley, Diane Grubbe, Sarah Grace Graves and Jordan Glenn. Ric has been performing house concerts around the bay area lately and just finished a CD of one of the programs he likes to perform: "Slouching Towards Individuation".

DAVID MICHALAK (skatch, lap steel, phantom harp) is a filmmaker/photographer, musician and recording/mixing engineer living in San Francisco. Since 1978 he has operated "Earwax" selling rare records to support his 16mm production company "Eye-Full Films". Since 1995 Michalak has played and performed in various music ensembles including; Reel Change, Doctor Bob, Ghost In The House and T.D. Skatchit. Michalak's 16mm films have been shown at The No Nothing, The Victoria Thearter, The Castro, at Cannes and other unlikely venues. He received "The Best Skatchbox Player in the World Award" as part of the weekend long Skatch-Off Festival held in June, 2022.






 SUNDAY JUNE 11 2023  7pm  $10-$25

ECHO'S BONES
(SHELDON BROWN + AMBER LAMPRECHT + JOSEPH NOBLE)
LOW BLEEDS
(JAY KORBER + RANDYLEE SUTHERLAND)





Pushing a duo of tenor saxophone & drums through the lineage of shearing notes / loud banging which produces a sonic contrast that teeters on the breaking point, LOW BLEEDS (JAY KORBER, tenor saxophone RANDYLEE SUTHERLAND, drums) chew upon the rigid boundaries of music and explore the total uninhibited free form. No deviation from raw direct performance.

ECHO'S BONES (SHELDON BROWN - Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, Alto Flute, Bass Flute; AMBER LAMPRECHT - Oboe, English Horn, Alto Flute; JOSEPH NOBLE - Flute, Alto Flute, Bass Flute) woodwind trio plays improvised music that has been described as “avant pastoralism in a chamber music mode”. Our music develops from the combined timbres of three different acoustic woodwind instruments blending, diverging and conversing, incorporating numerous musical traditions in free improvisational performances.

During the lockdown, a pattern started that has continued to this day: three musicians gathered regularly in a room filled with curly plants to play music together with zero plans, guiding points or directions. With such open parameters in place, they experimented with the sounds of our instruments and played with color, line and texture through free improvisation. The result was ECHO's BONES. Lately, they’ve come out of our living room and have been performing in book-adjacent venues around the Bay Area. They are honored to bring our complimentary flavors, counterpoints, splashes, grunts, squeaks, trills, haunting melodies, and fog horn blasts to Mosswood Chapel.


AMBER LAMPRECHT, oboe, English horn, flutes. Besides Echo’s Bones, Amber is a member of The Red Room Orchestra, Marc and the Casuals, The Awesome Orchestra Collective, and does session work. She's performed with Sixto Rodriguez, Tony Danza, Jello Biafra, Bart Davenport, Noertker's Moxie, Mark Eitzel, The Vocal Arts Ensemble, The San Luis Obispo Symphony Orchestra, The Shotgun Players, Ted Brinkley’s big band ensembles, and many other groups. Recordings of her music have been used for films, radio, and samples for hip-hop.

SHELDON BROWN, clarinet and bass clarinet, alto and bass flutes, has been active on the Bay Area creative music scene for over 30 years. In 2014, he premiered his commissioned extended work, Blood of the Air, at SFJAZZ’s 32nd Annual San Francisco Jazz Festival, the studio recording being released in 2018. In 2019 he performed a set of his original big-band music at the Tabuleiro Jazz Festival in Minas Gerais, Brazil. He formed Sheldon Brown Group in 1996 to perform his original music. Sheldon Brown Group has performed at Yoshi’s, SFJazz and many other Bay Area venues. As a member Club Foot Orchestra he has composed and performed music for Club Foot’s scores for Pandora’s Box, Sherlock Jr. and others. He also performs or has performed with Omar Sosa, Anthony Braxton, Electric Squeezebox Orchestra, Clarinet Thing, Ted Brinkley’s big band ensembles, Ben Golderg, and the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra.

JOSEPH NOBLE, flute, alto flute, bass flute. In addition to Echo’s Bones, Joseph also plays or has played in Ouroboros, Cloud Shepherd, Chamber Cloud, and Ornithos Loom at venues including The Center for New Music, Luggage Store, SIMM Series, Bird and Beckett, Oakland Freedom Jazz Society, and Sonoma Musica Viva: The Music of Edgar Varese and Friends. He has also published three books of poetry.






 SUNDAY JUNE 18 2023  7pm  $10-$25

BRETT CARSON
JOHN SCHOTT + MANTRA PLONSEY + DAN PLONSEY




Local guitarist/composer/teacher/human JOHN SCHOTT performs improvised music with DAN PLONSEY (reeds) performs new compositions with MANTRA PLONSEY and DAN PLONSEY.

Pianist and composer BRETT CARSON plays a set of piano music spanning the 1920’s to the present. The program begins with two of the most significant compositions of Anton Webern: the short and sweet Kinderstück (1924), which is the first work he composed using the twelve-tone method, and the Variations for piano, Op. 27 (1936) a piece that had a significant impact on the composers of the Darmstadt school in the 50s. Also featured is Nicole Mitchell’s Interdimensional Interplay (2016) for live piano with prerecorded flute and with video, which presents a kind of virtual duet between the soloist and Mitchell’s flute. Finally, there are two premieres: Bay Area composer and drummer Jason Levis’s composition portrait of explanations, or not (2023 Revision) is presented in a new revision for improvising pianist, and Brett Carson presents a new piece for piano and Gameboy.

P R O G R A M
Anton Webern – Kinderstück (1924)
Anton Webern – Variations for piano, Op. 27 (1936)
   I. Sehr mäßig
   II. Sehr schnell
   III. Ruhig fließend
Jason Levis – portrait of explanations, or not, for improvising pianist (2023) [Premiere]
Nicole Mitchell – Interdimensional Interplay, for solo piano and prerecorded flute (2016)
Brett Carson – New piece in two movements, for piano and Gameboy (2023) [Premiere]


BRETT CARSON is a composer, pianist, improviser, poet, and theater artist based in Oakland. His compositional work, which has been described as "fascinatingly intense" (Stephen Smoliar, SF Classical Voice), explores the juxtaposition of a gleefully chaotic plurality of musical approaches. This is combined with a penchant for surreal world-building and an exploration of the bizarre and uncanny, along with a commitment to writing for the voice and the stage. Notable compositional projects include his song cycle “Mysterious Descent”, a one-act play “Mary's Dilemma, or That Sinking Feeling”, and an experimental chamber opera “Just Visiting (X-Ray Vision)”. His latest song cycle, “The Secret Life of the Paramecium”, premiered in the Bay Area as part of the Dresher Ensemble Artist Residency to sold out audiences in September, 2022. In addition to his compositional work, he is active as a pianist, keyboardist, and synthesist, performing internationally in the realms of free improvisation, contemporary classical music, jazz, and rock. Performance venues and festivals include the Chicago Jazz Festival, Sons d'hiver, Roulette, the Barbican, the Kennedy Center, the Broad (LA), the Yerba Buena Arts Center, Auditorium Parco della Musica (Rome), and SESC Pompeia (São Paulo). He has worked closely with a wide variety of composers/performers including Bill Baird, Brian Baumbusch, Nicolas Collins, George Lewis, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell, Bill Noertker, Zeena Parkins, Rent Romus, and William Winant. From 2019-20, he performed as the pianist for the Art Ensemble of Chicago.






 SUNDAY JUNE 25 2023  7pm  $10-$25

NATHAN CLEVENGER TRIO++
NATHAN CLEVENGER + JORDAN GLENN + KASEY KNUDSEN + SAFA SHOKRAI + CORY WRIGHT
USUFRUCT
POLLY MOLLER SPRINGHORN + TIM WALTERS




USUFRUCT (YOO-zoo-fruckt) is the right of the people to harvest the fruits of common property. The duo Usufruct, consisting of flutist, composer, vocalist/improviser POLLY MOLLER SPRINGHORN and computer musician TIM WALTERS, deconstructs, lovingly reassembles, and improvises around found texts and musical materials in the public domain. Both of us are veterans of the Transbay creative music scene and equally at home in contemporary classical, rock, and freely improvised musics. In founding Usufruct we set out to bring sounds from our free-improvisation vocabularies into a more compositional framework, and set up a creative process where both our minds can wander and come together sonically over sounds and words embedded in Western consciousness. We find them ripe for slicing, dicing, tenderizing, pickling, caramelization, maceration, marinading, and presentation with special sauces.

NATHAN CLEVENGER TRIO (Oakland musicians Nathan Clevenger, JORDAN GLENN, and CORY WRIGHT) share a long and entwined history of collaboration across various projects, including Wiener Kids, Ashen Cleric, and Fellow Hominids. Formed in 2021, the trio has released 2 albums -- Late Arcade and Sunken Reliquary, and recently initiated a series of collaborations with guests, including KASEY KNUDSEN, Crystal Pascucci, and SAFA SHOKRAI. Working from, between, and against Clevenger’s compositional frames and utilizing the multi-instrumental flexibility of each player, the trio (and guests) weaves between non-idiomatic improvisation and often gnomic composed material, with focus on spaciousness and timbral detail.


NATHAN CLEVENGER is an Oakland born composer and multi-instrumentalist, working on the margins of modern composition, jazz, and improvisation. In 2022, Clevenger released ‘i had a dream about amnesia’, an album compiling 2 suites for solo, duo, and trio configurations, composed and recorded during the Covid-19 lockdown. The eight-piece Nathan Clevenger Group has released three albums, including ‘Stateless’ (2019, Slow & Steady Records). Current projects include a trio with Jordan Glenn & Cory Wright and the improvising chamber ensemble, Ashen Cleric. Notable recent performances include the premieres of extended compositions at the SF Contemporary Jewish Museum (‘for david berman’, performed by Ashen Cleric) and the Exploratorium (‘Ice Hours’, a multimedia collaboration with violinist/composer Kristina Dutton and artist Kim Miskowicz).

JORDAN GLENN spent his formative years in Oregon and in 2006 relocated to the Bay Area where he received an MFA from Mills College. Since then he has been most closely associated with Fred Frith (FF Trio, Gravity Band), William Winant, Zeena Parkins (The Adorables), Roscoe Mitchell, Ben Goldberg, Todd Sickafoose, John Schott, Lisa Mezzacappa (avantNOIR, Glorious Ravage, Lisa Mezzacappa Six), Motoko Honda, Dominique Leone, Michael Coleman and the bands Jack O’ The Clock, Kyle Bruckmann’s Degradient, tUnE-yArDs, and the Oakland Active Orchestra. He has also worked with Rhys Chatham, Secret Chiefs 3, The Rova Sax Quartet, composer/bagpiper Matthew Welch and has been commissioned to create scores for evening-length dance pieces by Sharp & Fine and Liss Fain Dance. As a leader he has composed and conducted the trio Wiener Kids, Mindless Thing (a collaboration with poet Jim Ryan) and the percussion heavy large ensemble BEAK.

Reeds player and composer CORY WRIGHT studied music at Oberlin Conservatory and the University of Southern California and has been involved in both the jazz and creative music worlds for the past 20 years, including time spent in New York, Los Angeles and his current home in the San Francisco Bay Area. His recent projects reflect his interest in blurring the distinction between composed and improvised music, and in combining the harmonious with the atonal, the grooving with the arrhythmic. Wright has performed in ensembles led by Anthony Braxton, Vinny Golia, Todd Sickafoose, Adam Rudolph and Yusef Lateef. He is currently a member of Bristle, the Nathan Clevenger Group, and Goggle (saxophone quartet) and leads his own projects Fellow Hominids and The Green Mitchell Trio.

KASEY KNUDSEN is a San Francisco-based saxophonist, composer & educator. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Jazz Composition from Berklee College of Music in 2002. She has been dubbed “one of the region’s most esteemed saxophonists” (Andrew Gilbert, San Francisco Classical Voice, 2018) and has “quietly become one of the essential voices in the Bay Area jazz scene” (Andrew Gilbert, East Bay Express, 2014). In addition to leading a number of her own projects, as a co-leader, she is involved in several groups including the Schimscheimer Family Trio, the Holly Martins, and the Klaxon Mutant Allstars. Knudsen collaborates frequently with many of the most unique musical voices in the Bay Area including multiple performances across the US and Europe with Tune-Yards, Fred Frith and the Gravity Band, the Charlie Hunter Quartet, Erik Jekabson, the Ian Carey Quintet + 1, Ben Goldberg, the Electric Squeezebox Orchestra, Beth Schenck, and many more.

SAFA SHOKRAI is inspired by solid objects and abstract concepts. He strives to create the soundtrack for the film we all live in. Based in the Bay Area, Safa Shokrai has performed in many bands as both a freelancer and band leader in his 25 years as a professional musician. He has had the opportunity to study with jazz legend Ray Brown, the late great Jeff Chambers, and local stalwart Marcus Shelby. Safa has had the opportunity to travel around the world making music and brings all the music styles he has absorbed into his practice, from Tuareg to South Indian to European Romani. Currently he is working on composing new music for several bands he is involved with, including The Lost Shapes and Levitator, and is looking forward to recording some albums this year.






 SUNDAY JULY 2 2023  4pm  $10-$25
NOTE: EARLY START TIME!!
(parking may be difficult due to another event nearby. public transportation is advised)

ERIKA OBA + ROOPA MAHAVEDAN
GORDON FUNG




ERIKA OBA (piano) and ROOPA MAHAVEDAN (voice) present an evening of exciting new music and improvisations. Drawing on their backgrounds in jazz, musical theater, experimental music, and Indian classical (Carnatic) music, they craft electrifying soundscapes full of emotional versatility, rhythmic play, and joyful presence."

GORDON FUNG intertwines both analog and digital technologies to signify the co-existence of mundane and spiritual worlds. By overloading software and hardware, he collapses the two worlds to expand the audience’s perception of reality. Deliberately misusing electronic equipment, he strives to unearth concealed potentials of obsolete equipment and to revive them to artistic life.


ERIKA OBA is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and educator based in the SF Bay Area. As a composer she has written works for jazz ensembles, chamber groups, dance and theater. She is active as a performer on both piano and flute, and performs with her own groups the Oba-Bastian-Steinkoler trio, Ends Meat’ Catastrophe Jazz Ensemble, Rice Kings, and The Sl(e)ight Ensemble. She has also performed with Meredith Monk, Frances Wong, Peter Apfelbaum, Lisa Mezzacappa and many other jazz and experimental musicians in the Bay Area. As an artist, she is interested in exploring ritual, diasporic identities, and community through performance.

Hailed a “stirring voice” by the New York Times, ROOPA MAHAVEDAN is a leading second-generation Carnatic classical and crossover vocalist in the American diaspora, known for her powerful, emotive voice, versatility, and collaborative spirit. She leads the crossover ensemble Roopa in Flux, where she works with musicians in jazz, soul/R&B, and various global traditions, directs the innovative choir Navatman Music Collective, and sings for leading Bharathanatyam and modern dancers around the world. Roopa also brings a critical commentary, humor, and authenticity to her work, often invoking her flair for dance and theater. Roopa received formative training in Carnatic vocal music under Asha Ramesh of the Bay Area, and furthered her training under Suguna Varadachari in Chennai, India through the Fulbright scholarship. Roopa has performed in prestigious venues such as Chennai's Music Academy during the December music season and Cleveland Thyagaraja Aradhana, which awarded her the title "Kala Ratna," as well as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, MET Museum, SFJazz, Millenium Stage, Joe's Pub and more. She is a soloist on Christopher Tin’s Grammy Award-winning album Calling All Dawns, was an inaugural fellow with IndianRaga, and is a coveted member of many cutting-edge ensembles, including Brooklyn Raga Massive. Roopa has participated in residencies at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity, Hedgebrook, Mass MOCA, Ryder Farm, New York Stage and Film, and Joe's Pub. She recently received the competitive Creative Work Fund grant with violinist Sruti Sarathy to create original Carnatic compositions on South Asian life in the diaspora. Previously, Roopa worked in public health policy, following degrees from Stanford University.

GORDON FUNG (b. 1988, San Francisco) is a transdisciplinary artist who primarily works with multi-/new media performances, experimental film/video, noise music, DIY electronics, installations, media archaeology, and curatorial/collaborative practices. His works highlight unconventional executions like equipment misusing, noises, lo-fi presentations, and glitches. Such aesthetics confronts the viewers’ understanding, perspective, and point of view on reality through a more philosophical, if not esoteric, investigation. Informed by his multivalent approach, he forms and directs the Chicago-based experimental arts collective //sense. By curating large-scale experimental theater performances, he fosters a collaborative common ground for time-based artists to create gesamtkunstwerk through synergy. As a new media artist, he performs with a wide range of gears: synthesizers (audio and video), analog camcorders, webcams, video projections, experimental films, CRT TVs, and Max/MSP/Jitter programming. His works have been shown in major Chicago locations like Comfort Station, Elastic Arts, Experimental Sound Studio, Gene Siskel Film Center, Links Hall, MacLean Ballroom, No Nation Art Lab, Tritriangle, and beyond. As an award-winning but runaway contemporary music composer, his compositions have been performed in Canada, China, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, and the US.






 SUNDAY JULY 16 2023  7pm  $10-$25

CircleCircleCircleSquare
KRIS TINER, trumpet; BETH SCHENCK, saxophones
LISA MEZZACAPPA, bass; NATHAN HUBBARD, percussion

sfSoundGroup
MONICA SCOTT, cello; HADLEY MCCARROLL, piano
LISA MEZZACAPPA, bass; BRENDAN LAI-TONG, trombone
JOHN INGLE, saxophone; MATT INGALLS, clarinets; DIANE GRUBBE, flutes




CircleCircleCircleSquare is a quartet of curious, restless, inventive improviser/composers from the Bay Area, Bakersfield, and San Diego who have joined forces to explore all that they can, and probably cannot, do together as an ensemble. Bakersfield trumpeter KRIS TINER is known for his deeply imaginative compositions and incredibly versatile chops as an improviser, leading and working in a wide range of creative jazz projects. San Francisco saxophonist BETH SCHENCK plays and writes music with a purity of sound and an expressive angularity that is distinctly her own. Percussionist and composer NATHAN HUBBARD, based in San Diego, is a sonic explorer who operates on multiple scales, leading enormous creative music orchestras and playing solo sets of exquisite beauty and mind-bending artistic range. Berkeley bassist LISA MEZZACAPPA combines a deep pocket and warm tone with abstract bowed textures and far-out sounds, and writes music inspired by film, literature, and science. Expect asymmetrical song structures, irregular grooves, free jazz explosions, sumptuous melodies, wide-open soundscapes, and also, definitely, surprises.

sfSoundGroup performs new compositions and improvisations, including a new work by MONICA SCOTT and a composition by MATT INGALLS inspired by and dedicated to James Tenney that explores extended low instrument ranges, including our new Bösendorfer's lowest four notes below the usual piano low A.


KRIS TINER is a California-based trumpet artist, composer, and educator. His music has been performed on five continents, his 80+ recordings with the Empty Cage Quartet, Tin/Bag, Cathlene Pineda, Psychic Temple, The Industrial Jazz Group and others have been enthusiastically reviewed in the international jazz press, and he has performance credits on MTV, NBC, PBS and Comedy Central. He is the Director of Jazz Studies at Bakersfield College, and has also taught at CalArts and CSU Bakersfield. Tiner is the founder of Epigraph Records, an independent label dedicated to new creative music recorded in Bakersfield.

BETH SCHENCK is a saxophonist, composer and educator who has worked throughout the United States and abroad. Based in San Francisco, Beth has performed frequently in the New York, Los Angeles and SF jazz and new music scenes. Her main outlet as a composer-performer is with her own bands but she has also had opportunities to perform with Henry Threadgill, Jim Black, Cory Smythe, Jenny Scheinman, Max Weinberg and many others. As a composer, Beth has written music for the Silla Festival (Korea), Sunset Jazz Festival (Japan), Women’s Work Festival (New York City), Outsound Music Summit (SF) and schools in NYC, LA and SF. In 2010, Beth released her debut record, "What Shock Heard," which has been described by critics as "frank and beautiful", with "solos full of artful logic". Beth has a new solo saxophone record, “Above and Below” out on the Innova record label.

LISA MEZZACAPPA is a San Francisco Bay Area-based composer, bassist, bandleader, and producer. Called “one of the most imaginative figures on the Bay Area creative jazz scene” by The Mercury News and “a Bay Area treasure” by KQED public radio, she has been an active part of California’s vibrant music community for nearly 20 years. Mezzacappa’s activities as a composer and bandleader include ethereal chamber music, electro-acoustic works, avant-garde jazz, music for groups from duo to large ensemble, and collaborations with film, dance and visual art.

NATHAN HUBBARD is a percussionist and educator from San Diego, CA. Hubbard also works as a composer, improvisor, and instrument builder, writing music for a wide range of ensembles and situations. Hubbard has presented his music across North America and bits of the European Union, was listed by San Diego Citybeat 2013 as one of “eight top drummers in San Diego,” and won the 2014 San Diego Music Award for “Best Jazz Album” for his five-volume Encinitas and Everything After.






 SUNDAY JULY 23 2023  7pm  $10-$25

AN EVENING OF VOCAL MUSIC
with
THERESA WONG, DANISHTA RIVERO, ROCO CÓRDOVA,
ALEXANDRA BUSCHMAN-ROMÁN, and LORIN BENEDICT





Some of our favorite local vocalists come together for an evening of solo and group improvisations and compositions. A great opportunity to hear these artists resound in the magnificent resonance of mosswood chapel!


THERESA WONG is a composer, cellist, and vocalist active at the intersection of improvisation, composition, and the synergy of multiple disciplines. Following inquisitive paths into song forms, just intonation, and visual media, her primary interest lies in finding the potential for transformation for both the artist and receiver alike. Her works include Fluency of Trees for solo cello and voice, which premiered at the Other Minds Festival in 2022, She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees, commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill, and Harbors, co-composed with Long String Instrument inventor Ellen Fullman and chosen as one of Wire’s top 50 releases of 2020. Recent commissions include works for San Francisco Girls Chorus, NakedEye Ensemble, San Francisco Conservatory of Music Clarinet Ensemble, Splinter Reeds, and Del Sol String Quartet. Wong has shared her work internationally at venues including Café Oto (London), The Stone (New York), and Fabbrica Europa (Florence), and is founder of fo’c’sle, a record label dedicated to adventurous music from the Bay Area and beyond.

DANISHTA RIVERO is an improviser, performer, and sound artist based in Oakland, California. She explores the artifacts resulting from heavy processing of the voice and their relationship to its acoustic resonance. She is a member of electro-acoustic duo Voicehandler with percussionist Jacob Felix Heule. She is also half of Las Sucias, a feminist tropical noise duo with Alexandra Buschman-Román.

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, baritone ROCO CÓRDOVA is a vocalist, composer, producer, and improviser, with a B.Mus. in Composition from the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music and an M.A. in Composition from Mills College. They have studied voice with countertenor Paul Flight, and have participated in vocal advancement workshops with Meredith Monk. Voice is at the core of Roco’s compositions, which incorporate techniques like throat singing, overtone singing, falsetto, yodeling, and vocal clicks and pops into live performances. Their music has been described as "slow-boiling, apparently timeless" with "an odd momentum of its own" (The Washington Post). As a touring vocalist and improviser with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Roco has performed in venues including the Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago; SESC Pompéia in São Paulo, and the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.. They have also toured internationally and published recordings with the improvising bands Monopiece and Temoleh.

LORIN BENEDICT is an improvising vocalist (scat singer, essentially) living in Emeryville, California. He has co-led small groups (duos, trios) in which the roles of the musicians are somewhat mutable even in contexts where highly structured forms are being played. Examples include Bleeding Vector with guitarist Eric Vogler, and another duo project with east bay saxophonist Kasey Knudsen. Together, these three musicians jointly lead the trio project, The Holly Martins. He has also co-led duo projects with drummer Sam Ospovat, vocalist Ron Heglin, and bassist Logan Kane.






 SUNDAY JULY 30 2023  7pm  $10-$25

GREGORY C HAGAN
LEILA ABDUL-RAUF




LEILA ABDUL-RAUF and GREGORY C HAGAN join together in a co-creation of invocations, emanations, and dark ambiences. Both multi-instrumentalists, they gather their respective sound-sources for an evening's journey through the shadow lands of the collective psyche. Leila will begin the evening with a solo set of austere compositions and droning improvisations, centered around her compelling vocals, sonorous trumpet, and looping electronic textures. Gregory will take a solo turn next, unleashing the alien voices of synthesizers to mingle with his extended-vocal expressions. To close the evening, Leila and Gregory will join together for a hypnotic, otherworldly improvisation.


Multi-instrumentalist and composer LEILA ABDUL-RAUF enters a world all of her own, weaving brass, piano and various other textures into filmic soundscapes that echo the sounds of memories faded through time. Songs are not so much composed as captured from dreams. Time and space are distilled down to the remains of distant memories and hidden emotions, melded into a symphony of ethereal melancholy.

Restlessly exploring this planet's sound worlds, GREGORY C HAGAN brings forth discrete compositions and amorphous improvisations, burning instruments both electronic and acoustic in an alchemical crucible filled with darkness and beauty. Hagan's studies of the vocal musics of Hindustani classical, eastern European polyphony, and central Asian harmonic chant, find a new home amidst synthesizer-based dissonant and alien sound environments - elegies for a burning, flooding world, still lit by flickering moments of grace.






 SUNDAY AUGUST 20 2023  7pm  $10-$25

AARON BENNETT TRIO
(AARON BENNETT + MATT MONTGOMERY + SCOTT LOONEY)
DAVID ISRAEL KATZ + JORDAN GLENN




DAVID ISRAEL KATZ and JORDAN GLENN scramble your cognition with spontaneous sound eruptions that flicker in all available colors of their respective instruments. Having shared the stage in Brett Carson's Just Visiting (X-Ray Vision) and appeared together in Lisa Mezzacappa's The Electronic Lover, they now perform as a duo with music that makes zero sense.

AARON BENNETT (sax) has performed with MATT MONTGOMERY (bass) and SCOTT LOONEY (piano) for many years in separate groups and contexts, each time thinking about how these two improvisers would sound great together. He finally gets them in the same room for their first grouping as a trio at Mosswood Chapel!


BIOS

AARON BENNETT decided to dedicate his life to music at the age of 14 after hearing John Coltrane, hoping to one day give others the feeling he felt when hearing his music. This began a long journey that he continues on today. After earning his BA in music with an emphasis on classical saxophone performance, he then earned an MFA a in Jazz performance where he studied with some of the greatest minds in Jazz including Charlie Haden, Wadada Leo Smith, Larry Koonse and Joe Labarbara. He has also studied musics from Bali, Java, Ghana, Japan and India. Since graduating, he has had a busy career, making music with a wide variety of amazing musicians and bands from many genre's including jazz, afro-beat, pop/rock, funk and many others, including working with the following; Wadada Leo Smith, Mykal Rose, Peter Kowald, John Butcher, Weasel Walter, Adam Lane, Aphrodesia, Lagos-Roots, The Rova Saxophone Quartet, William Hooker, Lisa Mezzacappa and Vijay Anderson. He has performed in clubs and festivals across the U.S. and abroad including recent appearances at the Monterey Jazz Festival, the San Francisco Jazz Festival, and the Novarra Jazz Festival in Italy.

Drummer/composer/improviser JORDAN GLENN spent his formative years in Oregon and in 2006 relocated to the Bay Area where he received an MFA from Mills College. Since then he has been most closely associated with Fred Frith, William Winant, Zeena Parkins, Roscoe Mitchell, Ben Goldberg, John Schott, Lisa Mezzacappa, Karl Evangelista, Motoko Honda, Michael Coleman and the bands Jack O' The Clock, Kyle Bruckmann’s Degradient, and tUnE-yArDs. He has also worked with Rhys Chatham, Secret Chiefs 3, The Rova Sax Quartet, composer/bagpiper Matthew Welch and has been commissioned to create scores for evening-length dance pieces by Sharp & Fine and Liss Fain Dance. As a leader he has composed and conducted the trio Wiener Kids, Mindless Thing (a collaboration with poet Jim Ryan) and the percussion heavy large ensemble BEAK.

DAVID ISRAEL KATZ squeezes spiritual ascent out of total irreverence, bending spacetime with voice, movement, text and image. His Jewish art project, foreignfire, unleashes through scored performances, improvisations, installations, sound recordings and video-art the aesthetic heat potentized in heritage ritual formulations. A versatile singer, David appears in recordings by Brett Carson (Mysterious Descent), Naomi Rincón-Gallardo (The Formaldehyde Trip), and Lisa Mezzacappa (The Electronic Lover) among others. His solo work appeared in such places as Tectonics Festival (Tel Aviv), Musrara Mix Festival (Jerusalem), and Xavier Veilhan’s Studio Venezia (Venice Biennale). David earned an MA in Composition and an MFA in Improvisation from Mills College; Ha’aretz described him as “an uber-performer,” and his art-ritual, THRESH, was praised by Jewish Currents as “an intense game you can lose yourself in.”

SCOTT R LOONEY has always been interested in the creation and performance of compelling sounds across a broad spectrum of contemporary, improvised, and experimental music. He has studied composition and improvisation with Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Morton Subotnick, David Rosenboom, and Frederic Rzewski, obtaining his MFA in Composition from California Institute of the Arts. After moving to New York, and finally to the San Francisco Bay area, he became more interested in expanding the timbral possibilities of the piano, and using pianists such as Denman Maroney as a starting point, has forged a signature style using the inside and outside of the piano, plucking strings, using metal implements and other quick preparations, in combination to playing the piano normally. He has also developed a flexible, expressive voice with electronics which is as effective as his many piano textures are.

MATT MONTGOMERY plays the bass, writes music, and sometimes plays piano/keyboards. He has worked with many accomplished musicians and toured throughout the United States and Europe. Matt has performed and/or recorded with Faye Carol, Calvin Keys, Larry Coryell, Mark Levine, Phil Ranelin, singer/songwriters Cass McCombs, Greg Ashley, Adam Stephens (of Two Gallants), Grammy-winning producer Joe Chiccarelli, and many more. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.






 SUNDAY AUGUST 27 2023  7pm  $10-$25

KEYSCAPES: An Evening of Contemporary and Experimental Piano Music
with
MOTOKO HONDA, TING LUO, BRETT CARSON,
ERIKA OBA, and ANDREW BARNES JAMIESON




Bay Area pianists MOTOKO HONDA, TING LUO, BRETT CARSON, ERIKA OBA, and ANDREW BARNES JAMIESON showcase original compositions and daring improvisations. From solos to dynamic duets and a powerful culminating quintet, these talented composer-performer-improvisers push the boundaries of traditional piano repertoire.


BIOS

MOTOKO HONDA is a critically acclaimed Japanese concert pianist, composer, and sound artist, who has created a distinctive sound through her holistic approach to music, and her exceptional sensitivity in relating to other art forms and technologies. Employing a "virtuoso technique paired with her intensely imaginative mind" (Susan Dirende, L.A. Splash Magazine), and with stylistic influences ranging from jazz, world music to contemporary prepared piano with electronics, Motoko's compositions and structured improvisations are intended to affect the skin, organs and minds of the listener rather than simple recitations of rhythmic and harmonic themes. Portrayed as a "keyboard alchemist" (Chris Barton, L.A. Times), and an "embodiment of a muse" (Greg Burk, Metaljazz), Motoko's performances transport audiences on sonic adventures that transcend the boundaries and conventions of contemporary music. At home in classical, contemporary, improvised, or electronic music, Motoko is a musical force of nature, bringing a unique and creative approach to her wide-ranging concerts and collaborations. Her appearances include major theaters, museums and jazz venues such as the Ford Amphitheater, Hammer Museum, REDCAT/MOCA, the Barnsdall Gallery Theater, Moody Center for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, the Herbst Theater, the Taube Atrium Theater, The Stone and Cathedral di Siena. As a specialist in structured improvisation, composition, extended piano techniques, interdisciplinary projects and electro-acoustic music strategy, Motoko also has been invited to give numerous lecture-performances by national and international universities and institutions. For her contribution to the world of new and creative music, Motoko Honda has earned the permanent residency as an Alien of Extraordinary Ability in Music in the U.S., and currently splits her time between U.S., Europe and Japan.

TING LUO, pianist, and director of New Arts Collaboration. She has performed and lectured in prestigious venues in China and U.S., advocating contemporary music. Ting Luo has curated a multimedia music and art project New Arts Collaboration since 2020. She actively collaborates with artists from multiple disciplines including visual artists, composers, and sound artists. Works by NAC have been featured in The San Luis Obispo Museum of Art’s Digital Shorts Film Festival, Fresh Inc Festival, New Music Gathering Conference/Festival, and are programmed in Old First Concert Series, The Center of New Music, Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium, Tokyo International Short Film Festival and Pune Shorts International Film Festival. Ting performed her original piano compositions as well as solo and ensemble works by classical composers and living composers in prestigious events including Bethany Arts Community Multidisciplinary Residency and Dragon’s Egg Presents at University Settlement in New York, Hot Air Music Festival in San Francisco, the Contemporary Art Music Project Festival - CAMPGround22 in Tampa, Music At Noon concert series in Sacramento, NowNet Arts Conference 2022 in Stanford, Mosswood Sound Series in Oakland and Westben Performer-Composer Residency in ON, Canada. Ting currently resides in Bay Area, California.

BRETT CARSON is a composer, pianist, improviser, poet, and theater artist based in Oakland CA. His compositional work, which has been described as "fascinatingly intense" (Stephen Smoliar, SF Classical Voice), explores the juxtaposition of a gleefully chaotic plurality of musical approaches and styles. This is combined with a penchant for surreal world-building and an exploration of the bizarre and uncanny, along with a commitment to writing for the voice and the stage. Major works include the mytho-dramatic song cycle "Mysterious Descent" (2016), an apocalyptic chamber opera "Just Visiting (X-Ray Vision)" (2017), and multimedia theater piece "The Secret Life of the Paramecium" (2022). As a pianist, he has performed internationally in the realms of free improvisation, new music, and jazz. He has worked with a wide variety of composers/performers including Bill Baird, Brian Baumbusch, Nicolas Collins, Vinny Golia, George Lewis, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell, Bill Noertker, Zeena Parkins, Rent Romus, and William Winant. From 2019-20, he performed as the pianist for the legendary jazz unit the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

ERIKA OBA is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and educator based in the SF Bay Area. As a composer she has written works for jazz ensembles, chamber groups, dance and theater. She is active as a performer on both piano and flute, and performs with her own groups the Oba-Bastian-Steinkoler trio, Ends Meat’ Catastrophe Jazz Ensemble, Rice Kings, and The Sl(e)ight Ensemble. She has also performed with Meredith Monk, Frances Wong, Peter Apfelbaum, Lisa Mezzacappa, Jean Fineberg, Rent Romus, and many other jazz and experimental musicians in the Bay Area. In addition to her own private teaching studio, she is a private jazz piano instructor for UC Berkeley’s Music Department. As an artist, she is interested in exploring ritual, diasporic identities, and community through performance.

ANDREW BARNES JAMIESON is a pianist, composer, and arranger, based in Oakland. He is active in faith communities and experimental music ensembles in the Bay Area, aiming to challenge white supremacy and injustice and deconstruct systems of power, in musical and faith systems, and celebrate, and remain accountable to, the Black gospel music tradition. Andrew founded the avant-gospel Trouble Ensemble, performed over almost 1100 of #1000improvisations (1111 planned daily improvisational keyboard livestreams since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic), and collaborates on duo performances with baritone, activist, and visionary Darnell Ishmel, as well as with Soyinka Rahim. He serves as music director for community worship at Pacific School of Religion, and as a keyboardist at City of Refuge United Church of Christ.






 LABOR DAY MONDAY SEPTEMBER 4 2023  1p-9p ($donation)

The Nth Annual
BAYIMPROVISER TRANSBAY SKRONKATHON





The SKRONKATHON is an all-day marathon of experimental and weird music featuring some of the Bay Area's best creative musicians. Launched back in 2001 at Tuva Space, a lamented storefront venue near the Ashby BART station, the SKRONKATHON was created to showcase the diverse community of musicians, united by a keen sense of inhabiting a fragile realm far outside mainstream music tastes.

As the best place to find out about concerts of this music (to this day!), bayimproviser.com + transbaycalendar sponsored the SKRONKATHON. After a number of dormant years, sfSound's MOSSWOOD SOUND SERIES is reviving this unique event for what we hope to become an annual event once again.

With 18 acts utilizing both rooms of the beautiful Mosswood Chapel for continuous music, this event is a great way to sample what the scene has to offer! Come to hear just a few sets, or the entire 8 hours. A suggested donation of $10-$25 (cash or venmo at the door; or online via our eventbrite page) goes towards assistance with MOSSWOOD SOUND SERIES costs (venue rental, Bösendorfer tuning and insurance).

SCHEDULE
1:00 - Mosswood All-Stars
Aine Nakamura (voice), Giacomo Fiore (guitar), David Leikam (moog), Mitch Stahlmann (flute), Matthew Welch (saxophone)

1:35 - Melon Staino Box Trio
Melne Murphy (guitar) and Moe Staiano (percussion) performing inside large boxes

1:55 - Ron Heglin Tom Djll Duo
Ron Heglin (voice) and Tom Djll (electronics)

2:15 - Ric Louchard and Silvia Matheus
Ric Louchard (piano), Silvia Matheus (electronics)

2:35 - Bruce and Amanda
Bruce Bennett (keys), Amanda Chaudhary (synths)

2:55 - Lords of Outland
Rent Romus (saxophones), Philip Everett (electronics)
Anthony Flores (drums), Eli Knowles (keyboard)

3:25 - Feral Luggage
Mika Pontecorvo (guitar), Kersti Abrams (saxophone), Jaroba (bass clarinet)
Eli Pontecorvo (bass), Mike Villarreal (drums), Colleen Kelly T (cello), Lenny Gonzalez (cello)

3:55 - Cycles of Resistance
Chelsea Hollow (soprano), Taylor Chan (piano)

4:15 - SkullKrusher
Philip Everett (electric clarinet, synths, modified electric lap harp)
Anthony Flores (percussion), Aaron Levin (percussion), another percussionist (tba)

4:45 - Quartet
Chris Brown (piano), Ben Davis (cello), Jordan Glenn (percussion), Matt Ingalls (clarinets)

5:15 - All The Names
Josh Allen (tenor sax) Clarke Robinson (electronics)
Janelle Wagner (voice), Mattias Arezmendi (guitar)

5:45 - Oakland Reductionist Orchestra
Chris Cooper (electronics), Sarah Grace Graves (voice), Phillip Greenlief (winds)
Diane Grubbe (flutes), Matt Ingalls (clarinets), Cheryl E. Leonard (objects, electronics)
Kevin CK Lo (piano, etc), Cody Putman (bassoon)

6:15 - Harjo
Brent Miller, Salvatore Barra, John Angel (guitars)

6:35 - Brett Carson/David Katz Duo
Brett Carson (piano), David Katz (voice)

6:55 - Bruckmann/Djll/Heule/Nishi-Smith/Rivero
Kyle Bruckmann (oboe), Tom Djll (trumpet, electronics)
Jacob Felix Heule (percussion), Kanoko Nishi-Smith (koto)
Danishta Rivero (voice, electronics)

7:25 - Jason Levis Trio
Jason Levis (drums), Brett Carson (piano), Cory Wright (winds)

7:50 - Larry Ochs Group
Larry Ochs (saxophones), Darren Johnston (trumpet)
Ernst Karel (analog electronics), Kyle Bruckmann (electronics)

8:30 - Ghost In The House
David Michalak (lap steel, phantom harp), Scott R. Looney (piano, hyper piano)
Polly Springhorn (bass flute), Karen Stackpole (gongs, percussion)
Kersti Abrams (alto saxophone), and special guests!






 SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 10 2023  7pm  $10-$25

DOKURO
AGNES SZELAG and THE NORMAN CONQUEST with TOLBY WEST

CHERYL E. LEONARD + WOBBLY
Multiple Park release concert



In celebration of their recent-released album, Multiple Park, CHERYL E. LEONARD and JON LEIDECKER (aka WOBBLY) will conjure a set of impossible locations while exploring the space between city life and utter wilderness. Leonard makes field recordings of natural soundscapes, and builds and plays electroacoustic instruments made out of natural materials such as bones, driftwood, shells, seaweed, feathers, and stones. Wobbly responds to her recordings and performances with synthesized animal voices driven by machine listening. Riding a line between a secret history of electronic music that aspires to birdsong, and those dedicated to the preservation of vanishing biophonies, the duo will present a visceral meditation on the sounds of “the outdoors,” and how those sounds are changed and framed by our technologically accelerating lives.

dokuro (the artistic maelstrom formed by the duo of AGNES SZELAG and THE NORMAN CONQUEST) will be performing a site-specific set that includes projected live drawing by Bay Area visual artist TOLBY WEST. The three will be improvising on the theme of pulled Tarot cards. dokuro will be using table top and modular synths, processed and acoustic voice and instruments to create pockets of sound, at times pensive and at times rambunctious. dokuro encourages their audience members to move their bodies, lay down, stretch, and get weird if so inspired.


BIOS

CHERYL E. LEONARD is a composer, performer, field recordist, and instrument builder whose works investigate natural sites and ecosystems, and human relationships to them. Her projects cultivate stones, wood, water, ice, sand, shells, feathers, and bones as musical instruments, and feature one-of-a-kind sculptural instruments and field recordings from remote locales. She uses microphones and amplification to explore subtle intricacies of sounds, and develops compositions that highlight unique voices and soundscapes while addressing environmental issues such as climate change and extinction of species. Her musical research has taken her to a wide range of wilderness areas, including Antarctica and the Arctic. Leonard’s works have been presented in concerts and art exhibitions in the Americas, Europe, Japan, and Australasia. Her recordings are available on Other Minds Records, mappa, SubPop, Gilgongo, and numerous other labels. Commissions include pieces for Kronos Quartet, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Funsch Dance. In addition to her solo projects, Leonard frequently collaborates with visual artists, choreographers, poets, scientists, and other musicians.

JON LEIDECKER (aka WOBBLY) makes music that investigates the effect of electronic music instruments on the people who choose to play (or hear) them. Currently touring & recording with both Negativland and the Thurston Moore Group, other live and studio collaborators include Dieter Moebius & Tim Story, Laetitia Sonami, Thomas Dimuzio, Matmos, People Like Us, Zeena Parkins, Fred Frith, Tania Chen, Sue C., The Freddy McGuire Show and Sagan. His lectures on electronic & collage music have been presented at Mills, Stanford, Oxford, UC Berkeley / Davis / Santa Cruz, MACBA and Peabody Conservatory. In 2015 he inherited Negativland's long-running Over The Edge radio live mix program, broadcasting from Berkeley's KPFA FM.

TOLBY WEST is a grateful descendant of the cedar whittler and tomato weigher.

AGNES SZELAG is a Polish-American sound artist, designer and performer. Agnes works with sound, light/video, movement, and fabric. She produces experimental work that challenges perception of how our bodies relate to space, phases of life, symbols and the natural world. She is interested in the intersection of composition and improvisation, immersion and performance, and the material and immaterial. She has performed and toured nationally and internationally and been a featured artist at the Electronic Music Midwest Festival, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Soundwave Festival, Audio Art Festival, Cologne Online Festival and Streaming Festival. She has performed or installed work at de Young Museum, Theater Artaud, Artists Television Access, CCA, The Stone NY, the Lab SF and many more. Agnes has received support from the Fulbright Research Grant, the Black Rock Arts Foundation, and the Subito Composers Grant. Agnes earned her B.S. from Northwestern University in Radio/TV/Film and her M.F.A in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College. In 2011 Agnes received a Fulbright grant to research performance and technology in art and music in Krakow, Poland where she was born.

THE NORMAN CONQUEST is a composer, performer, and improviser of music influenced by the art of sound recording (and vice versa). Feedback is a constant source of musical, psychological, and philosophical inspiration for TNC. TNC spent his formative years in rural Kentucky exploring 4-track recording as a vehicle for his songs and sonic experiments. He honed his recording abilities at Middle Tennessee State University, from where he received his B.S. in 2003. TNC then received his M.F.A. from Mills College in 2006 where he studied with Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith, Annie Gosfield, and Chris Brown. TNC performs as a sound manipulator, synthesist, and vocalist in Cosa Brava (with Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, Carla Kihlstedt, Matthias Bossi, & Shahzad Ismaily), Art Bears Songbook, The Atomic Bomb Audition, & dokuro (with Agnes Szelag). TNC has performed in such venerable places as: the FIMAV Festival (Victoriaville, Quebec), the Musique Action Festival (Nancy, France), KFJC (radio broadcast of a 24 Hour Drone), the Luggage Store Gallery (San Francisco, CA), the Trinity Chamber Concert Series (Berkeley, CA), Music for People & Thingamajigs, the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, & many others.






 SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 17 2023  7pm  $10-$25

MYRA MELFORD + BEN GOLDBERG + BEN DAVIS + JORDAN GLENN
JACOB FELIX HEULE + KANOKO NISHI-SMITH





MYRA MELFORD, BEN DAVIS, JORDAN GLENN, and BEN GOLDBERG have not played together before so honestly no one knows what's going to happen. But these musicians always do their absolute best with logic and other forms of magic. Songs by people in the band and an expansive horizon of possibility. Please join us!

KANOKO NISHI-SMITH (koto) and JACOB FELIX HEULE (bass drum) play freely improvised acoustic noise. Raw, brutal, textural, and often very quiet, they obsessively explore the secret sounds of their instruments. The duo has been playing together since 2007, and often collaborates with others, including albums with Kyle Bruckmann, Danishta Rivero, gabby fluke-mogul, Tom Djll, and Tony Dryer.


BIOS

KANOKO NISHI-SMITH is a performer currently based in SF/Bay Area. Though classically trained on piano, receiving a BA in Classical Music Performance from Mills College, her recent interest has primarily been in performing 20th century and contemporary musical compositions for piano as well as for koto (Japanese 13-string zither), and free-improvisation in various different contexts, with musicians, as well as dancers, poets, and visual artists.

The pianist, composer, bandleader and professor MYRA MELFORD —whom the New Yorker called “a stalwart of the new-jazz movement”— has spent the last three decades making original music that is equally challenging and engaging. Culling inspiration from a wide range of sources including the blues of her native Chicago, the poetry of Fernando Pessoa, literature by Eduardo Galeano, visual art and architecture, the pianist Cecil Taylor and the members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), yoga, and Eastern philosophy. She’s explored an array of formats, among them solo-piano recitals, deeply interactive ensembles and ambitious multidisciplinary programs. Her newest ensemble project, Fire and Water, debuted its critically acclaimed release, For the Love of Fire and Water, in April 2022 on RogueArt Records and has a second release coming in November 2023, Hear the Light Singing.

BEN GOLDBERG has been at it for a long time. His mother Judy played the clarinet and when Ben was little, he was drawn to the smell of cork grease and old wood inside the case. In fourth grade Willie Hill taught him the proper embouchure and why you have to sit up straight and know the name of the note, not just the fingering. Clarinet, like many instruments, is not easy. Music gets complicated but you can always sit up straight and keep playing your song.

Percussionist JORDAN GLENN spent his formative years in Oregon and in 2006 relocated to the Bay Area where he received an MFA from Mills College. Since then he has been most closely associated with Fred Frith (FF Trio, Gravity Band), William Winant, Zeena Parkins (The Adorables), Roscoe Mitchell, Ben Goldberg, Todd Sickafoose, John Schott, Lisa Mezzacappa (avantNOIR, Glorious Ravage, Lisa Mezzacappa Six), Myra Melford, Motoko Honda, Michael Coleman and the bands Jack O' The Clock, Kyle Bruckmann’s Degradient, and tUnE-yArDs.  He has also worked with Rhys Chatham, Secret Chiefs 3, The Rova Sax Quartet, composer/bagpiper Matthew Welch and has been commissioned to create scores for evening-length dance pieces by Sharp & Fine and Liss Fain Dance. As a leader he has composed and conducted the trio Wiener Kids, Mindless Thing (a collaboration with poet Jim Ryan) and the percussion heavy large ensemble BEAK. Recently, BEAK has teamed up with instrument builder Sudhu Tewari to present a set of new music integrating Tewari’s creations at the LAB (Sept. 29).

JACOB FELIX HEULE is an improvising percussionist with a special interest in friction techniques. His music is shaped by intuition, listening, and following where the sounds lead. He embraces limited instrumentation - like a single drum and a single cymbal - as a commitment to exploring the depth of his instruments. Heule frequently collaborates with Danishta Rivero, Guro Moe, Haavard Skaset, Kanoko Nishi-Smith, Matt Chandler, Chris Cooper, Kevin Corcoran, Kyle Bruckmann, Tom Djll, and Bill Orcutt. He also organizes the monthly Active Music Series, and facilitates a monthly improvisation workshop, Doors That Only Open in Silence. Heule's practice is informed by his work as an audio engineer. In addition to regularly doing live sound, he has worked on albums by artists such as Burmese, Las Sucias, and Black Spirituals.

Cellist BEN DAVIS has been concentrating on fusing his classical, jazz and contemporary music experiences into a raw vehicle of acoustic expression. He started improvising while playing for dancers in Earthfall Dance UK, then following gigs with Evan Parker, Louis Moholo, Vincent Courtois and Wadada Leo Smith, Ben developed a freer approach to improv which he utilized while playing and recording with Ingrid Laubrock, Simon Nabatov and Bobby McFerrin. His own group Basquiat Strings collaborated with Ellery Eskerlin in the BBC Electric Proms and was nominated for the Mercury Music Awards 2007, during which time he was a member of the London based collective 
F-IRE and subsequently collaborated individually with many of its artists. More recently Ben has been playing with Tomeka Reid, Mary Halverson, Ben Goldberg, Jim Campilongo, Chris Brown and Zeena Parkins, and was involved in the Mills College festival "In The Fault Zone" with Roscoe Mitchell and Nicole Mitchell.








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