Please note: this show will contain cuts and blood.

Initially classed as a turntablist, Lucas Abela’s work has rarely resembled anything in the field, early feats saw him stab vinyl with Kruger style stylus gloves, bound on electro acoustic trampolines, drag race the pope across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, perform deaf defying duet duels with amplified samurai swords, hospitalised by high powered turntables constructed from sewing machine motors, record chance John Peel sessions with the Flaming Lips, get pole position on Otomo Yoshihides' Ground Zero remix compilation; 'Consummation' by destroying the disc with amplified skewers rather than bothering to sampling it.

Today these turntable roots have become almost unrecognisable, evolving into his infamous glass instrument, the shards being nothing more than a giant diamond tipped stylus vibrated vocally. He has been perfecting the instrument since it's invention in 2003, performing internationally as Justice Yeldham.

After a long performance career his ideas have morphed into participatory sound installations, or more accurately large-scale instruments for musical play devised to switch roles between audience and performer in line with his philosophy that experimental music is more rewarding to play than to observe.

Gwenifer on her process for the 2020 record: 

"My new album, ‘Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain’, has eight songs in it. All were recorded in a basement flat in central Brighton, locked-down amidst a global pandemic. I recorded them myself and neither I, nor any of the songs saw said outbreak coming. Coronavirus may have dictated the circumstance under which the album was recorded but it did not otherwise inform any of the compositions that run through it; like I said, we didn’t see it coming.

Growing up in Wales was not a theme strongly present in my first record (perhaps not too surprising in an album of ‘American Primitive’), but I feel as though my memories of that time have started to insinuate themselves in the tunes here. In my opinion, landscape does a lot to shape a community’s folk music; from my childhood I recall tall, spooky trees, black against the grey sky, breath misting in cold air, and I have tried to take something of Welsh folk horror to make my own ‘Welsh Primitive’.

Whilst this isn’t the only theme present in the album, childhood memories do form the background for a couple of tracks: coal trains steaming along the foot of our garden, rattling the glasses on the kitchen table; and the titular ‘Strange Lights…’ dancing above the peak of the mountain which loomed over the house where I grew up. Dead men also feature prominently, as well as personal tragedies and the madness of touring.

It’s possible this album is leaning more into the left-field than the first – the songs are longer and more ‘compositional’ for lack of a better word, rather than deriving so heavily from the folk and blues traditions, though, they’re still there – all of those dead men are hard to shake. Some parts go fast and others go slow. Sometimes I play more aggressively than I intend to and other times I play exactly as aggressively as I intend to. I still say it’s punk music and I have no idea what key the last tune is in.

For Erik Satie, Master Wilburn Burchette, and Ruben the dog."

San Francisco-based guitarist and composer Bill Orcutt presents his latest project, an all-electric Guitar Quartet performing the music from his 2022 LP “Music for Four Guitars,” an album which Pitchfork describes as “a rigidly structured quartet that weaves tiny rhythmic phrases into expansive tapestries, drawing on the tenets of early minimalism and New York guitar groups like Glenn Branca Ensemble.” Featuring an all-star team of guitarists Orcutt, Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish, the ensemble will present the music in an expanded live format that will combine intricate composition with no holds barred improvisation.

From gossamer harmonic textures to lush orchestral washes, MIZU builds expansive soundscapes through her singular cello playing. Her signature stratiform style of composition, melding self-recorded layers of her instrument with electronic manipulation and experimental production, explores themes of transformation and the infinite possibilities within queerness. Taking on new life onstage, MIZU’s work interrogates and challenges the boundaries between concert, theater, and performance art through electrifying and cathartic stagings.

Forest Scenes, MIZU’s latest full-length, is an acknowledgment of the mystery of transcendent experiences and the thrills of self-discovery. The record charts multitudinous connections, inspired in equal parts by the vast urbanity of São Paulo, where MIZU composed the record, the queer spaces and dancefloors of New York City, and in the more abstract place of a self in transition. Forest Scenes deftly interweaves the organic and the synthetic, its wide range of sonic densities a reflection of its diverse origins.

MIZU’S debut album Distant Intervals, released in Spring 2023, distills her musical memories as a classically-trained performer and weaves classical motifs with experimental sound design and open-ended arrangements. The album received critical praise and attention from platforms such as Bandcamp Daily, New Sounds, Stereogum, I Care If You Listen, Foxy Digitalis, and Them, and landed in the Top 10 of the Billboard Classical Crossover charts.

A fervent collaborator, MIZU has worked across genre and medium with movement artists such as Lili (Luyan Li), Kennie Zhou, and Antonius-Tín Bui, directors George Miller and Dan Silver, and designer MEGHUN. She has performed extensively with guitarist and electronic producer Rachika Nayar, collaborated with techno producer and flutist Concrete Husband, and was featured on the recent album Spike Field by singer-songwriter Maria BC.

MIZU’s performance highlights include hometown shows in New York - opening for Tim Hecker at Pioneer Works, opening for Baths/Geotic at Public Records, and a performance at The Noguchi Museum. Her concert appearances have taken her to Tokyo, Japan and on a cross-country tour to Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and Washington DC. Upcoming engagements include a performance at Rewire 2024 in The Hague, Netherlands.

Chicago-based improvisers Emily Beisel (bass clarinet, electronics) and Bill Harris (drums, electronics) join forces this spring for a special midwest tour of the US and Canada. Beisel and Harris utilize electronics, amplification, and feedback to augment their acoustic sounds, creating a sonic space that can at times be aggressive, dense, and massive, as well as subtle, spacious, and sensitive.

Emily Beisel

Emily Rach Beisel is a Chicago-based improviser, composer, educator, curator and woodwind specialist. Beisel is known for visceral performances blending extended vocal and instrumental techniques with analogue electronics and rich bass clarinet tone. Their solo album Particle of Organs has been described as "Operatic, wild and dark. It showcases the raw, unadulterated power of the body and the instrument, weaving together sounds that are both corrosive and tender."

As a curator, Beisel seeks to increase the visibility and involvement of femme, trans and nonbinary artists in the creative music community. They founded the Pleiades Series at Elastic Arts, presenting monthly performances along with a community-based free improvisation jam for femme and nonbinary performers.

Beisel is a member of the contemporary ensemble Fonema Consort, touring most recently in Brazil, Mexico, Minneapolis and New York and premiering works of living composers including James Dillon, Richard Barrett and Julio Estrada. Beisel holds a Master of Music degree from Northwestern University and is a member of the American Federation of Musicians Local 10-208.

"Beisel's "Particle of Organs" is heavy stuff, sounds retrieved from the deeper places - the underworlds, the lightless subterranea, the crushing ocean trenches. Beisel pokes around in the sonic depths and brings leviathans out to play. It's a raw, abrasive, oppressive, and thrilling journey."
- Dave Foxall, A Jazz Noise

"Beisel's "Particle of Organs is an absolute trip that digs deep into flesh and bone, ripping through rhythmic spackle and distorted gauntlets like Beisel is performing ancient, uncharted rituals."
- Foxy Digitalis

Bill Harris

Bill is a Chicago-based drummer and improviser working in areas of improvisation, noise, rock, and country. His work has been presented nationally and internationally at performance series, festivals, clubs, and art installations such as Elastic Arts, Constellation, Experimental Sound Studios, The Empty Bottle, The Hideout, Evanston Space, Beat Kitchen, Spot Tavern, Lincoln Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, and The Chicago Museum Of Contemporary Art.

Some of his primary groups and projects are:
Je'raf, a psychadelic funk/free jazz/hip-hop group from the future.
KAH, an improvising trio with Jeff Kimmel and Ishmael Ali.
Hearsay, with Allen Moore and Ishmael Ali.
Joybird, with Jess McIntosh and Aaron Smith
Errata, with Ishmael Ali and Eli Namay.

Additionally, Bill focuses on solo work incorporating non-idiomatic acoustic and electronic material, using feedback and timbral manipulation. He has recorded two solo records, Blinking Glue, and ONOMAT.

Some of his most frequent collaborators include Ishmael Ali, Jake Wark, Carol Genetti, Emily Beisel, Allen Moore, Timothee Quost, Dave Rempis, Jess McIntosh, Jim Baker, PT Bell, Gerrit Hatcher, Eli Namay, Peter Maunu, Matt Piet, Brianna Tong, Wills McKenna, David Fletcher, Aaron Smith, Jeff Kimmel, Molly Jones, and Keefe Jackson.

In 2015 he started Amalgam, a 100% artist-run collective and label dedicated to showcasing works of improvised and experimental music in Chicago and elsewhere, with a bi-monthly series at Cafe Mustache. Bill is also an audio engineer working in both studio and live contexts, and operates an independent studio in Chicago with engineering, mixing, mastering, and production credits on labels such as Amalgam, Astral Spirits, No Index, 577 Records and Ears&Eyes. In 2020 he started and co-operates a recording studio called Marmalade.

"Bill Harris builds a thumping, peg-legged groove a beat at a time, and then trips up his own cadence with random cowbell offbeats."
- Bill Meyer, The Wire

"Harris...[maintains] a firm pulse while jabbing his partners with sputtering lines that suggest he could keep time even as he and his kit tumbled down a flight of stairs."
- Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader

Netochka Nezvanova

Described by The Road to Sound as making “shadowy music that prickles on your skin” and “unafraid to be anything at all”, Netochka Nezvanova is a bassoonist who exists in a world of harsh noise and drone/doom. She’s performed as both an ensemble member and soloist at small and large festivals such as the Darmstädter Internationale Ferienkurse, International Double Reed Society, Oh My Ears, and exhibited at the Osaka University of the Arts Electro-Acoustic Music Festival. More likely, you’ll find her making noises in more “unconventional” spaces, like your local dive bar.

A “Vibrating Voice to Shake the Soul”-NPR

Josephine Foster is a Colorado singer-songwriter and composer whose “music plays games with our ideas of time and space” says The Guardian. The Nashville Scene describes her work a”fusion of art song and American folk music” and the former opera student is “known to breathe new life into archaic forms, embodying the cultural archaeology of Harry Smith’s old weird America, and has lent her characteristic warbling mezzo-soprano and interpretive wit to over two decades of recordings” writes Blank Forms.

Josephine has released some twenty albums, each a sui generes song cycle drawn from her own singular songbook, performed solo or leading various ensembles (occasionally under band guises: Mendrugo, the Supposed, Born Heller.)  Peripheral but not insignificant are her unorthodox arrangements of 19th century German Lieder, the folkloric collection of Lorca, or her musical settings of Dickinson and other poets. Foster is a poet herself, as well as visual artist.

On stage or in recording she collaborates with free players from folk and avant-garde, such as Michael Hurley, Keiji Heino, Gyða Valtýsdóttir, Sonny Simmons, Paz Lenchantin, The Cherry Blossoms, Victor Herrero, Jason Ajemian, The Master Musicians of Joujouka, Daniel Blumberg, Shahzad Ismaily, Heather Trost, Chris Scruggs, Lorena Alvarez, Moon Bros, Alex Neilson, Ed Askew, Susan Alcorn, Michael Zerang, Lori Goldston, Brian Goodman, Eric Chenaux, Louis Landes Levi, David Pajo, Alasdair Roberts, Victoria Williams, Hamza el Fasiki, Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh, Les Fils du Détroit, Kath Bloom, and Zoh Amba.

A nomadic spirit living between the US and Spain Josephine performs at venues such as Cafe Oto, Zebulon, MoMA PS1, Constellation, Issue Project Room, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea, Tangier American Legation Museum, Paradiso, Tonic, Arkaoda, Chicago Cultural Center, Les Instants Chavirés, Beirut Art Center, Teatro Fondamenta Nuove, EMPAC, Trans-Pecos, Barbican, Monasterio de Santa Maria de las Cuevas, Troubadour, Andy Warhol Museum, ZDB, Palazzo Biscari, Trinosophes,ODA, Musée national Eugène Delacroix, Brown’s Diner.

Some past festival appearances include Big Ears, Le Guess Who?, London Contemporary Music Festival, Donau, ArthurFest, Liverpool Biennal, ATP, Copenhagen Jazz Festival, Etcetera, KRAAK, Million Tongues, Counterflows, Stockholm New Music Festival, Suoni per il Populi, Incubate, Green Man, Platform, Serralves, Mimi.

On her latest solo offering Domestic Sphere, Josephine performs solely with her electric guitar and then subverts the usual range of her voice to embody other frequencies and sounds beyond the surface layer of the songs .

Godmother (Fire) and Spellbinder (Takuroku) are two recent solo records that brought front and center for the first time Josephine’s own synth arrangements.  Mystery Meet and What is it that ever was? , collections of improvised song experiments released as CD-R’s in 2006, are now available in their first vinyl pressings on Feeding Tube records.

"Tekla Peterson is the new pop-oriented solo project helmed by Wisconsin's Taralie Peterson. Peterson has been a member of Spires That In the Sunset Rise since their founding in 2001. Most recently a duo with Ka Baird, Spires has a sound that began deeply rooted in underground folk music, but evolved into a much more overtly jazzoid space. We released their 2017 collaboration LP with Chicago percussionist Michael Zerang, Illinois Glossalia (FTR 285LP). But Peterson has always had solo projects going. First she had Tar Pet, an exceedingly fine exploration of so-called wyrd folk. Later there was more avant/jazz-oriented, Louise Bock, with whom we did a 2017 solo LP, Repetitives in Illocality (FTR 374LP) and 2021's All Summer Long Is Gone (FTR 382LP) -- a duo album with string wizard, Pat 'PG Six' Gubler.

More recently we have been introduced to a 'pop' persona, Tekla Peterson, who debuted with a 2022 cassette called Heart Press. Heart Press was created in reaction to the end of a long personal relationship, and is a cool, uneasy pairing of contempo-pop readymades and lyrics questioning some foundational aspects of romance. Mine to Give is Tekla's similarly-styled, though constantly evolving, sophomore effort. Assisted by Rob Jacobs on bass and beats, Peterson's vocals, keys, bass and sax are up front at all times, and do a massively fine job defining a musical/emotional space that is simultaneously pop-oriented and avant-garde. The songs and arrangements often have a surface feel akin to something you'd hear on commercial radio, but there are lots of strange experimental textures and techniques that enliven, enrich and transform the material into something that is transcendently 'other.'

Parts sound a bit like what I imagine Taylor Swift has going. Inside those walls you'll hear echoes of acid folk, avant-jazz and post-industrial compositions, but only if you pay careful attention. As with other female artists who began their journey in the sub-underground and kept going (Natalie Mering's Weyes Blood, Meg Remy's U.S. Girls), Peterson creates deeply coded music with enough surface sheen to keep slow pokes from ever perceiving what's going on in the depths. The spelunker's pay-off. Great stuff." --Byron Coley, 2024

Dorothy Carlos is an experimental cellist and electronic musician working in improvised performance and multi-channel sound in New York City and Chicago. Her work utilizes randomized electronics and extended techniques to explore fragility and imaginaries.

Recent solo performances have been presented internationally by e-flux, Experimental Sound Studio Chicago, Big Ears Festival, default, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Dorothy has been featured as an artist and collaborator in projects presented at the Swiss Institute (New York), Night Gallery (Los Angeles), Artists Space (New York), Performance Space (New York), Untitled Art Fair (Miami), Gaudeamus Festival (Utrecht, NL) and the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work has been featured in Artforum, The Wire, The Quietus, and the Chicago Reader.

Last year, Dorothy released an album on the Chicago-based label American Dreams in collaboration with artist, Brian Oakes. Other recent collaborators include Catalina Ouyang, mayfield brooks, Poncili Creacion, and Shala Miller. Dorothy holds a Bachelor’s degree from NYU where she studied classical cello and anthropology on full scholarship, and an MFA in sound from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the current Alba Artist in Residence at Experimental Sound Studio Chicago.

Daniel Wyche is a Chicago-based guitarist, composer and improviser. Working with a wide range of physical preparations, extended techniques, and pedal instruments, his solo recorded work and live performances are characterized by long-form structured improvisations. Recently, this approach has become increasingly integrated with the exploration of multi-channel performance and the spatialization of sound, including new compositions for quad- and 16-channel guitar.

Daniel's 2016 record "Our Severed Sleep" (with Ryan Packard) was called “a blowout to wake the dead” by the Wire, “reverent music,” by Decoder, and “an infinite swansong of bliss” by Tiny Mix Tapes.

Along with his solo work, Daniel is highly active in the improvised and experimental communities in Chicago and beyond, including a number of ongoing collaborations. The 2017 self-titled release by the trio of Wyche, Ben Baker Billington (Tiger Hatchery, ONO, ADT), and Mark Shippy (US Maple, Invisible Things) on Astral Spirits was referred to as "flat-out exhilarating improvised mania" by Marc Masters. Both the trio’s Astral Spirits debut and follow-up on No Index were praised by Byron Coley in the Wire. In 2020, he released a live trio record with LA-based improvisors Patrick Shiroishi and Ted Byrnes on Astral Editions, and new music with Lake Mary is forthcoming, among other projects in process.  

Daniel’s work as curator and producer with the Elastic Arts Foundation in Chicago since 2013 has been described as “crucial” by Dusted and “vital” by the Chicago Reader. In March of 2020, Daniel co-founded The Quarantine Concerts in collaboration with Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio. The series has been widely praised as a model for online/streaming live music, and has raised around $100,000 which has gone directly to artists and performers who have lost income during the pandemic. A documentary short on the series, by director Brian Ashby, can be seen online at The Wire.

US citizen and permanent Swiss-resident since 2016, Steve Fors is a composer/performer of intra-genre experimental music. He’s explored drone, noise, experimental ambient, and neo-classical genres, performing in Chicago’s and New York’s experimental underground music scene since 2004. He’s released eight solo and collaborative project albums in the past 15 years as Aeronaut, Shovels Beat The Sun, and The Golden Sores. His current project’s debut album, it’s nothing, but still—produced by Siavash Amini and released on the Swiss-based Hallow Ground imprint last year—garnered critical acclaim despite its limited physical release.

Fors continues to explore the physicality of sound through layered cello, guitar, voice, processed tape loops, field recordings, and electronics. Building on the work of such luminaries as Tim Hecker, Lawrence English, and Rafael Anton Irisarri, his approach to sonic maximalism brings with it both a wistful melancholy and raw power. Of late, he’s been exploring microtonality and multi-channel composition/performance; reinforcing his interest in a heightened sensorial approach.

Fors has a Master’s degree in Installation/Sculpture from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts in Printmaking from Grinnell College. Recent works include a 60-minute sound installation Manufactured Obsolescence, at Tokyo’s √K Contemporary gallery, and several Zürich performances. He will tour Japan in late 2023
and the US in early 2024.

“Fors...weaves in dense layers of electronic and acoustic sound that build in
intensity and complexity. Lush with both beauty and darkness, it is nuanced
and fascinating. [It] comes together as a perfectly unified piece of music...
the pairing of bleak and hopeful is perfect.”
—Creaig Dunton, Brainwashed

“Sometimes, something catches me out of nowhere like a silk thread on
a jagged edge, and the more I try to cut it loose, the more tangled it
becomes. It’s a testament to the richness and depth in Fors’ music...and the
vulnerable connective tissue holding it all together sets it apart.”
—Brad Rose, Foxy Digitalis

Haunter is k. Arthur Miller from Iowa City who creates guitar based drone/noise.

"Miller draws so many different tones and textures from his guitar. Despite the shifting sonic palettes, he keeps a consistent mood. Miller plucks around on a series of notes as guitars trade escalating and receding wails, rise and fall together, then finally soar off to nearly ear-piercing heights... new sounds drip, melt and bleed from the stratospheric wails, filling in the middle and bass registers. The rest of the piece sounds like an orchestra doing warm ups as it slowly carves a new path through a mountain range.”

-Little Village

Eli Wallace is a pianist, improviser, composer, and curator who resides in Brooklyn, NY. He works as a solo artist but also collaborates with musicians in improvised and creative music communities such as Daniel Carter, Ingrid Laubrock, Michael Foster, Sam Newsome, Billy Mintz, Jessica Ackerley, Sandy Ewen, Carlo Costa, Sean Ali, Lester St. Louis, Erika Dicker, Joe Moffett, and others. Additionally, he co-curates the music and art installation series Invocation with Drew Wesely.

In 2021 he was very fortunate to be selected as an artist in residence at Casa Wabi in Mexico, where he performed public piano concerts and developed a new system of musical notation. Additionally in 2021 he released the album Precepts, a studio recording of a graphic composition. Ken Hollings (The Wire) opined “Eli Wallace has created a work of continual reinvention.” A highlight of 2020 was his release SOLO/DUO with Beth McDonald, and Paul Acquaro (Free Jazz Blog) says it “...impresses at every obtuse juncture. Cool stuff.”

His work as a pianist displays his vast milieu of experiences from classical, jazz, and free improvisation studies, while incorporating contemporary piano performance practice and preparation to create a sound that is uniquely his own. His compositions employ notational strategies to broaden the manner in which sounds are created and the ways in which musicians interact.

He has written pieces ranging from solo piano to full studio orchestra, receiving numerous commissions. Over the past decade he has appeared on dozens of albums and has performed at such esteemed venues as The Stone, New York, NY, Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago, IL, and the Outsound New Music Summit, San Francisco, CA. His music education was granted from Lawrence University, Appleton, WI, and New England Conservatory, Boston, MA.

Grain Bin Operettas is an emerging artist of rural Iowa whose unconventional cello sound ranges from the angular, emotional spontaneity of abstract expressionism to the romantic horror of film noir. 

Chuck Johnson is a California-based composer, producer, and musician. He approaches his work with an ear towards finding faults and instabilities that might reveal latent beauty, with a focus on pedal steel guitar, experimental electronics, alternate tuning systems, and composing for film and television. Recordings of his work have been published by VDSQ, Thrill Jockey, Temporary Residence, Kompakt, Ghostly, and Three Lobed, among others.

Cole Pulice (they/them) is a saxophonist and composer living in Oakland, California. Performing primarily as a solo saxophonist, Cole’s music blends the saxophone with electroacoustic signal processing, contemplative improvisation, and playful experimentalism to create vast and surreal sonic landscapes that mutate and expand the sonic language of the saxophone. Cole’s music and artistic practice is often attuned to exploring, uncovering, and working through alternative conceptions and sensations of time, gender, dream, and memory.

Cole’s most recent solo work, a 22-minute electroacoustic piece titled If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You In the Pasture (Longform Editions, 2023), was named “Best New Music” by Pitchfork and landed at #25 of Pitchfork’s “Best 100 Songs of 2023” year-end list.

Pisse is a German punk band formed in Hoyerswerda in 2012. She is known throughout Germany within the punk scene. Although Pisse, in contrast to other bands, has little internet presence and is generally rather rare, it enjoys great popularity.

Musically, the band expresses itself through rough, characteristic vocals, fast tempo and the use of the synthesizer and the theremin. In terms of content, everyday situations are primarily taken up and placed in a humorous context, but with a tendency towards madness and depression.

Jens Uthoff from the taz reckons it to be part of the post-punk renaissance in Germany, which picks up on this genre of music from the 1980s. Together with Puff! Pisse is rated as "snottier" and "sarcastic" than other such bands and compared to the fun punk of the band Die Goldenen Lemons.

God's Hand is a pantheon of some of Iowa City's underground prime players serving up that claustrophobic dark heat post-punk. I bet Tony Wilson woulda loved them, if they got haircuts and matching outfits.

Pest Heaven is emo/grunge/indie from members of IC hardcore gadabouts, Psyop.

Sun Ra Arkestra

Sun Ra was a jazz composer, bandleader, piano and synthesizer player, poet and philosopher known for his "cosmic philosophy," musical compositions, and performances. He was one of the most important figure in 60's avante garde jazz along with artists such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Albert Ayler. "Of all the jazz musicians, Sun Ra was probably the most controversial," critic Scott Yanow said, due to Sun Ra's eclectic music and unorthodox lifestyle. Claiming that he was of the "Angel Race" and not from Earth, but from Saturn, Sun Ra developed a complex persona of "cosmic" philosophies and lyrical poetry that made him a pioneer of Afrofuturism as he preached awareness and peace above all. He abandoned his birth name and took on the name and persona of Sun Ra (Ra being the ancient Egyptian god of the sun), and used several other names throughout his career, including Le Sony'r Ra and Sonny Lee. Sun Ra denied any connection with his birth name, saying "That's an imaginary person, never existed ... Any name that I use other than Ra is a pseudonym." From the mid-1950s to when he left the planet in 1993, Sun Ra led "The Arkestra" (a deliberate re-spelling of "orchestra"), an ensemble with an ever-changing lineup and name (it was also called "The Solar Myth Arkestra", the "Cosmo Discipline Arkestra", the "Blue Universe Arkestra", the "Jet Set Omniverse Arkestra", among many other permutations. Sun Ra asserted that the ever-changing name of his ensemble reflected the ever-changing nature of his music. Sun Ra's music ranged from keyboard solos to big bands of over 30 musicians. His music touched on virtually the entire history of jazz, from ragtime to swing music, from bebop to free jazz. He was also a pioneer of electronic music, space music, and free improvisation, and was one of the first musicians, regardless of genre, to make extensive use of electronic keyboards.

After Sun Ra left the planet, the Arkestra was led by tenor saxophonist John Gilmore. Following Gilmore's death in 1995, the group has performed under the direction of alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, who celebrated his 86th birthday (or Arkestrally "Arrival Day") on stage during a Sun Ra Arkestra performances at Johnny Brenda's in Philadelphia on May 25, 2010. Marshall Allen has now given 52 years of uninterrupted dedicated service to the Sun Ra Arkestra. He continues to move the Arkestra forward not as a repertory band or a ghost band, but as a spirit band, maintaining the discipline centered on the study, research, and further development of Sun Ra's precepts. The spirit of Sun Ra is alive and well in the present day manifestation of the Sun Ra Arkestra with Marshall featuring a mix of classic Sun Ra compositions and arrangements alongside Marshall's own compositions and arrangements that are deeply rooted in the spirit of Sun Ra. Along with leading the Arkestra, Marshall plays the alto saxophone, flute, clarinet, oboe, kora, and EVI (Electronic Valve Instrument). He is internationally recognized as the premier avant-garde saxophonist on the planet.

Theon Cross

Theon Cross is one of those rare musicians whose vision has redefined their instrument. His unique approach to the tuba has expanded the instrument’s sonic possibilities in revolutionary fashion, restoring it to a long-forgotten prominence as a crucial part of the contemporary jazz ensemble. Through his combination of technical mastery, studio smarts, deep musical knowledge and expansive vision, the power and originality of Theon’s playing has reinvented the tuba’s place in modern music.

His most recent album, Intra-I (meaning ‘Within Self’) released in 2021 synthesizes the diversity of his musical art and experience to deliver an essential message to a world gripped by tribulation. Across ten sonically divergent and bass-rich tracks, Intra-I explores themes of self-reliance, origins, identity and more. Since its release he has contributed a version of Monk’s Epistrophy for Blue Note Re:Imagined II, been a core part of Miles Davis channeling collective London Brew and featured on Matthew Herbert’s single The Horse Has A Voice. He has also released his first 7” single Wings b/w a version of Aswad’s Back to Africa.

He completed his first tour of North America in October 2022 with a combination of headline shows and supports for Makaya McCraven. This year will see him play multiple live dates in solo, duo and band configurations across the UK, Europe, North and South America.

Bill Orcutt

As one of experimental music's most influential guitarists, Bill Orcutt weaves looping melodic lines and angular attack into a dense, fissured landscape of American primitivism, outsider jazz, and a stripped-down re-envisioning of the possibilities of the guitar. Whether he’s playing his decrepit Kay acoustic or gutted electric Telecaster (both stripped of two of their strings, as has been Orcutt’s custom since 1985), Orcutt’s jagged sound is utterly unique and instantly recognizable, compared with equal frequency to avant-garde composers and rural bluesmen. The New York Times has called him a "powerful musician... a go-for-broke guitar improviser," and described his sound as "articulated sprays of arpeggiated chords and dissonance."

“No one is playing acoustic guitar like Bill Orcutt right now. No one.” - Lars Gotrich writing about How The Thing Sings on npr.org

“Quite awe-inspiring, and unlike anything else I can think of.” - Byron Coley, Wire Magazine

“When Bill Orcutt starts playing the acoustic guitar, it's clear there are still so many new things to be said with it.” - The Guardian

El Khat

El Khat - a homemade junkyard band led by multi-instrumentalist Eyal El Wahab. Named for the drug used so widely chewed across the Arab Peninsula, The band brings original compositions inspired by the music of the golden age in Aden, Yemen. El Wahab plays many instruments, like the dli and the Kearat that he constructed himself. It's something he started doing several years ago, using his skills to make music from the items people discard. A child of the Yemeni diaspora who's grown up in Tel Aviv Jaffa, Israel, it's a practice that harks back to the family homeland, where even rubbish can have become an instrument. El Wahab has always been a man of invention. He talked his way into the Jerusalem Andalusian Orchestra as a cellist, self-taught from busking and unable to read music, learning the repertoire by ear as he went along, and picking up music theory. It gave him a strong foundation, but his world changed when he was given 'Qat, Coffee & Qambus: Raw 45s from Yemen' an LP of Yemeni traditional music from the 1960s. It came as an epiphany. He quit the orchestra, began building instruments and put together El Khat.

Laurel Halo has had to cancel her tour dates due to illness. It's not a decision that was reached lightly, but born out of care and consideration for Laurel and you in the audience. We of course wish her a speedy recovery and honor her until we can reschedule.

Through a flurry of late night / early morning emails, texts, panicked phone calls - at one point I was talking to someone who was on an airplane over the ocean while I was speeding down a midwestern highway (the future is crazy)- to find an artist who would not just fill the slot, but fulfill the intentionality of the original programming. And could be here in 24 hours notice.

I am thrilled to announce Canadian electroacoustic composer Kara-Lis Coverdale. I witnessed her in a single night 6 years ago hold a capacity cathedral enthralled with her organ performance and then five hours later level a rock club with her playful and abstract beat oriented electronic work. Kara-lis agreed to fly in and perform for us Friday Nov 3rd at The James (7pm doors) joined by Kalia Vandever.

This is a rare one-off, and my gratitude to her is immeasurable, and given what I've heard next year is going to be huge for her, so this may be our only chance to host.

I will of course honor all refund requests, though I hope you'll be open to giving Kara-lis your ears.

Thank you for your continued trust and patronage.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

"Kara-Lis Coverdale is one of the most exciting young composers in North America." -Ben Beaumont-Thomas, The Guardian

Driven by a patient devotion to sonic afterlife, memory, and material curiosity, Kara-Lis Coverdale’s dynamic work has been met with consistent critical acclaim. It has been described as an “arresting” “masterful work” of “uncompromisingly distinct,” “indescribable beauty.” live shows can evoke the unpredictable, chaotic, eerie, dynamic, and confrontational; all for which she has earned a steady reputation as a festival favourite (The Guardian, The New York Times, RA, The Fader) as a highly dynamic and explorative artist, resistant to categorization and stasis.

Kalia Vandever

Kalia Vandever is an American trombonist and composer living in Brooklyn, NY. Her approach to the trombone is distinctive and defined by her sonorous tone and lyrical improvisational voice. She leans into the challenges of the instrument and allows patience and melody guide her process.

 In her compositional practice, Kalia draws from her love of songs and improvisation, creating a landscape of sounds that resonate in the body and hold the listener. She released her debut ensemble album, "In Bloom" in 2019 which has been described as "the rise of an exciting voice for the music" (Seton Hawkins, Hot House Jazz Magazine). Her sophomore album, Regrowth released in May, 2022 on New Amsterdam Records and "confirms her strengths as a composer and bandleader with a distinctly contemporary point of view." (Nate Chinen, WBGO Jazz) Her debut solo album,We Fell In Turn featuring her works for trombone, voice and electronics is out now on AKP Records.  

Kalia received her Bachelor of Music degree in Jazz Studies at the Juilliard School in 2017.  She has toured and performed internationally with her quartet, performing at festivals such as the Winter Jazz Festival and BRIC Jazz Festival. She is also known for her work as a side-woman, performing with jazz artists including  Joel Ross, Immanuel Wilkins, Fay Victor, to name a few. She has also performed with popular artists including Harry Styles, Lizzo, Japanese Breakfast, Moses Sumney, Jennifer Hudson, and Demi Lovato. She has appeared on Saturday Night Live twice, as well as Samantha Bee's Full Frontal. 

Drew McDowall

Drew McDowall is a Scottish born, NYC based composer and musician. He was a member of Coil in the 90’s contributing heavily to some of their most respected and influential works.

An artist who has refused to conform in music and in life, McDowall mines the hallucinatory spaces that exist between reality and transcendental otherness. His work has been described as “sacraments to alterity”, with meditative compositions that are haunting and spiritual, melding intricate modular soundscapes with cut-up field recordings, deconstructing and reconfiguring sounds into otherworldly structures and shapes. The disorienting ambient mirages that result elicit terror, tender melancholy, and heavenly flickers of expansive beauty.

He has released four albums on Dais Records since 2015 the most recent being Agalma (2020) and is known for his diverse collaborations, working with Kali Malone, Catarina Barbieri, Robert Aki Aubrey Lowe, Hiro Kone, Varg, Puce Mary and many others and has performed at many international festivals including CTM, Berlin Atonal, Dark Mofo, Unsound, Le Guess Who, Semibreve, WOS and Ambient Church.

Lea Bertucci

Lea Bertucci is an experimental musician, composer and performer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her longstanding practice with woodwind instruments, her work incorporates spatialized speaker arrays, radical methods of free improvisation and creative misuses of audio technology. In recent years, her projects have expanded toward site-specific and spatially aware projects that initiate new access points to architecture. Her approach to music is marked by dense masses of sustained dissonance and a fascination with the sonic substance of common experience.

Her discography spans over a decade, with eight full-length solo albums and a number of collaborative projects. In 2018 and 2019, she released  solo albums Metal Aether and Resonant Field on NNA Tapes, and has since gone on to found her own label, Cibachrome Editions, with 2021’s A Visible Length of Light as the inaugural release followed by 2022’s Murmurations, a duo with Ben Vida. She has also worked with SA Recordings, Ultraviolet Light, American Dreams, and Astral Spirits records, among others.

She has performed extensively across the US and Europe with presenters such as The Museum of Modern Art New York, Blank Forms, Gagosian Gallery, Pioneer Works, The Kitchen, The Walker Museum, Tempo Reale in Florence, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, Sound of Stockholm Festival, ReWire Festival, Borderline Festival, and Unsound Festival Krakow. Artist residencies include the MacDowell Colony, ISSUE Project Room, Headlands Center for the Arts and The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Recent commissions include “You And I Are Earth, the Waves Crash Within Us” from the INA GRM, Paris; “Of Shadow and Substance” from ARS Nova Workshop, “Vertical Octet” by the Levy Gorvy Gallery, New York; and “Acoustic Shadows” by the Bruckenmusik Festival, Koln.

Presented by FilmScene

Free admission for FEaST passholders.  

Feed Me Weird Things curator Chris Wiersema will be on hand hosting a raffle for various tickets to different FEaST shows including a full pass. 

feedmeweird.com/feast

Space is the Place (1974)

Directed by John Coney

Featuring: Sun Ra

When the music stops the Earth will stop and everything upon it will die!  

See the film before you see The Sun Ra Arkestra at FEaST.  

"Space is the Place is a fast-moving arty film that can be likened to a good episode of television's Pee-Wee's Playhouse." - Josiah Howard, Blaxploitation Cinema: The Essential Reference Guide

"Sun Ra wasn’t from Alabama. He had to really be from Saturn. There’s no other way that this makes sense otherwise." - Sam Panico, B&S About Movies

"The film is as eccentric and inexplicable as Sun Ra himself. Space is the Place demands to be seen by every aficionado of bizarre cinema and equally bizarre jazz." - Alfred Eaker, 366 Weird Movies

Avant-jazz mystic Sun Ra brought his pioneering Afrofuturist vision to the screen with this film version of his concept album. It’s a wild, kaleidoscopic whirl of science fiction, sharp social commentary, goofy pseudo-blaxploitation stylistics, and thrilling concert performance, in which the pharaonic Ra and his Arkestra lead an intergalactic movement to resettle the Black race on their utopian space colony.

Plus a Something Weird short film!

claire rousay

claire rousay is based in Los Angeles. Her music zeroes in on personal emotions and the minutiae of everyday life — voicemails, haptics, environmental recordings, stopwatches, whispers and conversations — exploding their significance.

This is music for Oliveros-inspired deep listeners and for poets finding meaning among the mundane. - The Gaurdian

Listening to rousay's music often feels like experiencing the world through someone else's ears, instilled with tenderness. - NPR

What a songwriter might convey in poetry, Rousay evokes with raw audio. You could call it sound art, but it’s viscerally vulnerable. -NYT

Zoh Amba & Chris Corsano 

Zoh Amba is a young composer, saxophonist, and flutist from Tennessee. Her music blends avant-garde, noise, and devotional hymns. Before studying music at the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music, New England Conservatory and studying with David Murray in New York, she spent most of her time writing and practicing saxophone in the forest near her home. Today, her powerfully unique avant-garde music is full of folk melodies, mesmerizing refrains, and repeated incantations. Amba released two records in 2022, her debut record O, Sun which was produced by John Zorn and released on the prestigious label Tzadik. Zoh Amba’s second record, Bhakti features Micah Thomas, Tyshawn Sorey, and Matt Hollenberg. She has collaborated with a variety of high profile musicians such as Jim White (Dirty Three), legendary bassist William Parker, Brian Chase (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Frank Rosaly, Thomas Morgan, etc. Amba has also performed at well respected festivals and venues such as Roulette (NY), Ars Nova Workshop (PA), Vision Festival (NY), ReWire Festival (NL), BRDCST Festival (BE), and Angel City Jazz Festival (LA), Big Ears Festival, etc. Bhakti has become the moniker for Amba’s ongoing live and recording ensemble project with ever changing members.

Chris Corsano is the rim-batterer of choice for some of the heaviest contemporary purveyors of both “jazz” (Evan Parker, Paul Flaherty, Joe McPhee, Mette Rasmussen) and “rock” (Björk, Sir Richard Bishop, Jim O'Rourke). He's also a formidable solo performer in his own right, as heard on solo recordings like The Young Cricketer, Another Dull Dawn, and Cut. “Corsano, despite being arguably the most riotously energetic and creative drummer in contemporary free jazz, does far more than merely bash his kit into submission. Playing loud does not mean abandoning subtlety, and Corsano’s sudden shifts of texture and dynamics are a wonder to behold” - The Wire

 Memories, scenes, and split-second impressions have long filled Lattimore’s musical universe. As one of today’s preeminent instrumental storytellers, she has “the uncanny ability to pluck a string in a way that will instantly make someone remember the taste of their fifth birthday cake," writes Pitchfork's Jemima Skala. Lattimore's impulse to record life as it happens matches her drive to travel and perform, as profiled by Grayson Haver Currin for The New York Times: "Lattimore recognized that being in motion shook loose strands of inspiration, moods she wanted to express with melody. She needed, then, to remain on the go." That sense of fluidity has also made her a prolific collaborator outside of solo work. 2020's Silver Ladders, recorded with Slowdive's Neil Halstead, opened the door for Lattimore to widen the vision of her primary project as well, and its proper follow-up is the natural next scale. “All of these people I asked to contribute have deeply affected and inspired my life.”

  For the title and inspiration, Lattimore’s mind returns to the island of Hvar in Croatia, where she first saw those silver ladders at the water’s edge. “There's a big old hotel there called the Hotel Arkada, and you could tell it had been hosting holiday-goers for decades in a great way. I walked around the lobby and the empty ballrooms and it looked like a well-worn, well-loved place. My friend Stacey who lives there told me to ‘say goodbye to Hotel Arkada, it might not be here when you get back’ and I heard soon after that it was actually going to be renovated in a very crisp, modern way.” Lattimore became fixated on the ingredients that make a place special — for Hotel Arkada, the patinaed chandeliers, thepatternedbedspreads, the echoes of its intangible charm — and how when those leave this world, as they inevitably always will, it feels important to memorialize them, “to bottle it for a brief second.”

Jeremiah Chiu is Los Angeles-based artist, graphic designer, musician, educator, and community organizer. From 2008-16 he served as co-founder and principal of Plural, an award-winning and internationally recognized design studio based in Chicago. In addition to Plural, he has worked with Project Projects, IN-FO.CO, and was the Sr. Art Director at Compass.

Jeremiah’s current practice, Some All None, works at the intersection of art, music, technology, and publishing. The studio is focused on activating graphic design beyond a “traditional” commercial practice, working equally to re-imagine its role in a capital society and to implement itself as a tool for community organization, social activation, and experimental expression. In addition to Some All None, Jeremiah is a full-time Assistant Professor at Otis College of Art & Design, faculty member at Art Center College of Design, and a resident DJ at Dublab. Jeremiah’s work has been exhibited/performed at The Getty Center, LACMA, Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, amongst others.

Moments of eternity: the first plucks at the strings, a bass note cementing the drift into place a little more than a minute in. The organ drones, iterating unliveable ancient history, a chiming note of the church. Guitar strings, climbing that stairway to heaven. Gossamer-light when viewed from a distance; up close, the gears grind with a visceral physicality.

With BCMC, Cooper Crain (Bitchin Bajas, CAVE) and Bill MacKay unite to create Foreign Smokes: provocalogues, equal parts avant-garde noir and fire-and-icy jams to recall bright shades and warm stretches of infinity drawn through the buzzy overdrive of this side of life’s strange and sunny days.

Cooper’s organ and synths and Bill’s guitar draw songs from spontaneous statements and elegiac scraps, floating closer, then farther, and closer again to the sounds of the other. Starting with a melody, a set of progressions or even as little as a scale or just a key, gives room for either one of ‘em to spread out and take the lead.

The first revelation from Foreign Smokes, “The Swarm”, commences with one single moment. A moment of dawn. A simple organ voicing that inspires the guitar to sound of the high desert, alters underneath the open sky. These lines, set forth gently like first steps on a new planet, echo through time and space, inspiring the organ to sail forth with a serene lick.

As BCMC beam through the universe, their light intersects with yours, creating a new arc. Every turntable they spin upon becomes a new prismatic stream; every bud blooming in ears across the known plane, another voicing. Every resonance, every redolence — hushed and encompassing, prayerful yet omniscient, intimate and universal.

k. hangauer: piano
k. arthur miller: guitar
p. balestrieri: saxophone

(low key favorite new Iowa City project)

Nothing's bigger than life. All vastnesses -- expanding space, infinite time -- crouch inside of consciousness. On a historical scale, to say nothing of a cosmic one, the individual human life vanishes, and yet it's the only aperture any of us get into reality. It's barely there, and it's all there is.

That's the paradox Bell Witch drives at. For more than a decade, the Pacific Northwestern doom metal band has sent tides surging over the seawalls of the song form, unraveling conventional expectations about the ways music stations itself in time to absorb a listener's attention. Rather than seek catharsis, the duo's songs heave themselves through time at a glacial pace, staving off resolution in favor of a trancelike capsule eternity. Invoking both boundlessness and claustrophobia in the same charged gesture, Bell Witch cultivates a sense of time outside of time, an oasis inside an increasingly frenetic media culture.

For their new album, The Clandestine Gate, bassist Dylan Desmond and drummer Jesse Shreibman exploded Bell Witch's bounds. Like 2017's lauded Mirror Reaper, The Clandestine Gate is a single 83-minute track -- a composition that pulses and breathes on a filmic timeframe. It constitutes the first chapter in a planned triptych of longform albums, collectively called Future's Shadow.

Portland’s Spirit Possession play an authentic form of black metal that is as refreshing in its erratic nature as it is triumphant in its old-school roots. There are shades of many old masters in Spirit Possession’s sound—Darkthrone, Craft, Master’s Hammer, Aura Noir, Bathory—but the music has a genuine sense of mania to it. 

The members of Spirit Possession—guitarist/vocalist S. Peacock (Ulthar, Pandiscordin Necrogenesis) and A. Spungin (Ormus, Taurus) playing drums and homemade synths—bring a distinctive style to the band. Peacock’s vocals are shrieking and scalding, the guitars are a spiral that gets ever-more dizzying and the frantic drumming lends a sense of urgency to the chaos.

Mystic Cross is the guitarist, vocalist, and keyboardist Claire Nunez of the extreme metal band DRYAD, as well as a multifaceted songwriter and classically trained pianist/flutist. Her fantastical synthesizer compositions are brief snapshots of life through a distorted lens – moody, ruminating soundtracks to accompany her own surrealistic daydreams and immersive nightmares.

TENGGER is a traveling musical family, made up of Pan-Asian couple, itta and Marqido, who create their brand of psychedelic New-Age drone magic through the use of harmonium, voice, and toy instruments (played by itta) and analogue synths (played by Marqido). The duo originally started out with the moniker “10” but since the birth of their son RAAI (who joins them on tour and often on stage) in 2012, have called themselves TENGGER (meaning ‘unlimited expanse of sky’ in Mongolian) to mark the expansion of the family. It also means ‘huge sea’ in Hungarian. Travel, as spiritual experience in real environments, and the sound between the space and the audience have been central themes of their works. The family’s yearly pilgrimages inform every aspect of their art.

Iowa City’s birdlabs (Izaak Thompson) sonically weaves together synthesized textures and found sounds using synthesizers, drum machines, and tape loops, to create an eclectic and unpredictable aural tangle that provokes delight, movement, nostalgia, and a bittersweet reverence for the inseparable and often overlooked bond between nature and man’s inventions.

Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band are a contemporary group from Burkina Faso. Coming from Bobo-Dioulasso, the group is steeped in the Mandingue musical traditions of their ancestral legacy. The enigmatic lead singer Baba Commandant (Mamadou Sanou) is an original and eccentric character who is well respected in the Burkinabé musical community. A sort of punk Faso Dan Fani activist for traditional Mandingo music, Baba continues to redefine the boundaries between traditional and modern. In 1981, he joined the Koule Dafourou troupe as a dancer. Later, he embarked on his current musical direction as a singer first in Dounia and then in the Afromandingo Band.

His current band — when he’s not playing with the now-famous Burkinabé musician Victor Démé — is the Mandingo Band. At present, he is a practitioner of the Afrobeat style, drawing inspiration from the golden era of Nigerian music. Fela Kuti/Africa 70 and King Sunny Adé are big influences, as is the legendary Malian growler Moussa Doumbia.

Baba Commandant plays the ngoni, the instrument of the Donso (the traditional hunters in this region of Burkina Faso and Mali). His audience comprises multiple generations and strata of Burkinabé society; he accordingly adapts his repertoire to his surroundings, which range from cabaret Sundays in Bobo-Dioulasso to the sound systems of Ouagadougou. Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band are a formidable force steeped in Ouagadougou’s DIY underground musical culture. 

Bob Bucko Jr and Samuel Locke Ward are both long time home taper recording musicians from the state of Iowa.  

Bob out of Dubuque, Iowa and Sam out of Iowa City, Iowa.

Both artists have dozens upon dozens of DIY LPs, tapes and CDs out under many different band names on many different labels.  

Bob has been known to play melodic noise music and Sam has been known to play noisey pop music.  

Sometimes the term legendary is applied to both artists.  Which means they have never quit playing music or died yet.

Some people ask if Bob and Sam are brothers since they are both large, hairy, middle-aged guys.  They are not brothers; at least not by blood. 

Though both artists are multi-instrumentalists their go to instruments are the saxophone for Bob and the acoustic guitar for Samuel.  

They most recently completed a tour together to the American East Coast and back.

Technical Reserve is the trio project of Hunter Brown, Dominic Coles, and T.J. Borden. Their singular improvisational language moves freely between discrete rhythmic shards, precision oriented bombast, and floating, hazy abjection. This is music for lovers of zero gravity jazz and truck stop shenanigans.

Hunter Brown is a composer, improviser, and audio engineer based in Chicago, Illinois. His practice is focused on creating unpredictable, idiosyncratic, and unruly interactions with digital technology. In particular, he is interested in exploring the unstable material properties of digital systems though experimental machine listening techniques and by pushing the physical mechanisms of digital technology to the threshold of failure. In Chicago, he serves as the technical director for Ensemble Dal Niente and runs the computer music focused record label Party Perfect!!! alongside collaborator Dominic Coles. Currently he is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Music at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and a PhD Student at the University of Chicago.

Dominic Coles is a composer based in Queens, New York. His work investigates the interactions of place, personhood, and power as they are articulated in sound, attempting to complicate and intervene in these categories through specific acts of technologically mediated listening. His work has been presented as part of the Chance & Circumstance Festival, ChimeFest, and Indexical. 

Tyler J. Borden is a cellist working with, in, and around the constraints of the cello. Formerly from Western NY, he is now based in Brooklyn NY, where he spends much of his time finding ways to exploit the strengths and failures of himself and his instrument.

YXNG RASKAL is an experimental hardcore tarp artist. Influences include screamo, r&B, emo, and noise. The goal is to create something that is visceral and unpredictable, without becoming entirely inaccessible.

Ak’chamel, The Giver of Illness is an enigmatic duo from a border state. Fourth World Post-Colonial Cultural Cannibalists Circumcising The Foreskin of Enlightenment.Performing in homemade costumes and masks, they have played festivals in various cities around the U.S gaining international attention from Vice, The Wire, Tiny Mix Tapes, Consequence of Sound, and many more. They have amassed over 10 cassette albums and 1 VHS full length film.

"An Ak’chamel set is something you can’t prepare for, you just dive in and see where the sounds of the experimental/noise act take you. Also, as we learned by chatting with the band after its set (they’re super nice, despite the daunting costumes they perform in), most Ak’chamel gigs don’t feature a lot of the band’s pre-recorded music. Ergo, no title for the show-closer which mesmerized us at a recent Big Top show. The low hum of the tune caused an ASMR reaction for this listener, who dopily enjoyed the scalp-tingling pyrotechnics Ak’chamel set off." (Houston press)

The Shining Realm:
Iowa City's answer to Ash Ra Temple
"Ancient Spirits piloting mortal flesh suits through the holographic dimensions on our way to the Realm where all space and time converge into the Great Radiance!"
Time to break out the ergot!

Wolf Eyes is a band from Michigan. Formed in the fall of 1996 by N. Young. They are known for their bizarre and otherworldly approach to music. Creating a sound that is both disturbing and hypnotic. The band has released numerous albums and EPs on various labels. With their intense and bizarre live performances, Wolf Eyes has garnered a reputation as one of the most frightening and weird bands in the world. Wolf Eyes is currently John Olson and Nate Young. They have performed together for over 20 years.

Hayden Pedigo has lived many lives, having been homeschooled in Amarillo, Texas by his truck-stop preacher father; run for Amarillo City Council in 2019, aged 25—as documented by Jasmine Stodel’s SXSW-premiering, PBS-acquired film Kid Candidate—and struck up pen-friendships and collaborative partnerships with the likes of Terry Allen, Charles Hayward (This Heat), Werner “Zappi” Diermaier (Faust), and Tim Heidecker. A move south from Amarillo to Lubbock in 2020 put a spark to the powder keg of his creativity. “It’s even more flat, desolate, windy and dirty – like being on Mars,” Pedigo observes. “It’s pushed me to create more because there’s not really much to distract.” The move produced not only The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored and its predecessor, 2021’s Letting Go, but also an Internet presence that showcases a panoply of ever-more outlandish outfits and an effortless deadpan wit. Both the former and the latter helped parlay him into the fashion world, too, having walked the runway for Gucci and been photographed by Hedi Slimane. Mexican Summer will release The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored, Pedigo’s sixth studio album and second for the label, on June 30th, 2023.

Jordan Sellergren is a mother, songwriter, artist, and the Art Director at Little Village Magazine in Iowa City. Her second full-length album, "Sweet, Bitter Tears" was released in 2020.