School of Music

Music: Joachim Eckl will be teaching the Wintersession course, “Building a Bridge of Sound.”

Eckl was born on the edge of the Bohemian Woods in Austria and is currently living there now. He has been running the HEIM.ART®-Station, a former warehouse as an artistic working-field since 2002. Eckl regards himself as a "social engineer". "Social sculptures" are his main interest. He uses water as the basic element for human interaction in his work. Listening is an essential for him in order to develop a new organ for the arts. Music he understands as the most social form of art.

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Music: Art Lande will be here to do an Improv workshop the first week of Wintersession that will end with a performance in ROD. 

Grammy-nominated Lande is considered one of the premiere improvisational jazz pianists today. He began piano at age 4, studied at Williams College & moved to San Francisco in 1969. He has mostly carved out his own singular path throughout his career, taking the innovations of Bill Evans several steps further. In 1973 he recorded with Jan Garbarek and Ted Curson and in the mid-1970's had started his own jazz school. In 1976 he formed the quartet Rubisa Patrol which recorded for ECM and lasted until 1983. After teaching for three years in Switzerland, Lande in 1987 moved to Boulder, Colorado. He appears in many of the "Who's Who in Jazz" encyclopedias available today for his role in the development of "Chamber Jazz."

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Music: Stehney will be teaching a Wintersession class for composers and bassoonists on how to write effectively for the bassoon, covering basics of the instrument through to contemporary techniques.  

Jonathan Stehney is a bassoonist whose focus is contemporary and experimental music. Jonathan has traveled throughout the United States as well as abroad performing new works for bassoon and contrabassoon. He has had the great opportunity to work with new composers on new ways to write for the bassoon, as well as working with known composers such as Sofia Gubaidulina, Pierre Boulez, Peter Eöetvös, Olga Neuwirth, James Tenney, Mark Menzies, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and others. Jon's studies have brought him abroad several times where he studied extensively with Pascal Gallois, Paul Riveaux and the EIC.  He received his BFA in performance from Calarts in 2004, his masters and PSD from SFCM, and his DMA from SUNY Stonybrook.

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Music: David Locke will be teaching Career Design Ghanaian with Nani Agbeli and Andrew Grueschow

David Locke is the founder of the Agbekor Drum & Dance Society and a Professor of Ethnomusicology and Music Performance at Tufts University in Medford, MA. He fell in love with the music of Ghana while an undergrad at Wesleyan University in the 1970’s. As his expertise grew, he sought out other drummers and dancers who were willing to commit to learning and performing Ghanaian drumming and dance authentically, as it is done in Ghana. Locke is also an author and wrote Drum Gahu: An Introduction to African Rhythm.

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Music: Scott Colley will be teaching The Spirituality of Improvisation with Larry Koonse and David Roitstein during Wintersession.

Scott Colley’s stature as a leading bassist in the field of improvised music is well known, and easily measured. Colley’s been called “one of the leading bassists of our postbop era, and a composer-bandleader of quietly serious resolve” by The New York Times, while musical colleagues, like saxophonist Joshua Redman, praise him for being “one of the most musical bassists playing today. To me, he seems to have…this natural, intuitive, empathic sense of how to bring the most out of the other musicians and the music he’s playing.”

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Music: Eric Wubbels will be doing a lecture/demonstration on approaches to form in Wubbels's work, with specific reference to "contraposition" (portions of which will be performed by Wubbels and trombonist Weston Olencki) during Wintersession.

Eric Wubbels is a composer, pianist, and Co-Director of the Wet Ink Ensemble (NYC).  His music has been performed throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, and the U.S., by groups such as Wet Ink Ensemble, Mivos Quartet,  yarn|wire, Berlin PianoPercussion, SCENATET (DK), Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, and Talea Ensemble, and featured on festivals including Huddersfield Festival, Chicago Symphony MusicNOW, New York Philharmonic CONTACT, MATA Festival, and Zurich Tage für Neue Musik. As a performer, he has given U.S. and world premieres of works by major figures such as Peter Ablinger, Richard Barrett, Beat Furrer, George Lewis, and Mathias Spahlinger, as well as vital young artists such as Rick Burkhardt, Francesco Filidei, Erin Gee, Bryn Harrison, Clara Iannotta, Alex Mincek, Sam Pluta, Katharina Rosenberger, and Kate Soper. He has recorded for Carrier Records, hatART, Spektral (Vienna), New Focus, Albany Records, and Quiet Design and has held teaching positions at Amherst College and Oberlin Conservatory.

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Teaching the Wintersession course, “Voices in the Wilderness Improvising to exist in the world”

This course is set as a 24 hour camping experience in the Los Angeles National Forest. Arriving at 11 a.m. the participants will be exposed to basic techniques to sustain life in a natural environment, such as making a shelter for the night and building a fire, this as means to connect with the basic concepts and experiences of Survival Skills which emphasize the use of the senses, awareness of the environment, and the act of being present. The day will evolve into a series of guided and free improvisations for the voice among the participants. This course is facilitated by guest artist and survival expert, Manu Toigo in collaboration with jazz improviser, Meltem Ege, and experimental vocalist, Carmina Escobar. Manu’s interest in survival began the day she was born in far North Queensland, Australia. Her life growing up on a farm forced many encounters with dangerous wildlife, including several of the world’s top ten deadliest snakes, wild dingoes, poisonous spiders, kangaroos, wild boars, and saltwater crocodiles. This was true backcountry living from having chickens for food and growing fruits and vegetables. Life was very basic living conditions and excluded from worldly knowledge. From an early age, Manu had to adapt and improvise to the tough environment thrown at her. Manu was exposed not only to the dangers of farming activity, but also a climate of extreme heat and humidity and the seasonal Cyclones. She learned at an early age to rely on instincts and common sense. It was a hard, tough life and one you learned quickly from your mistakes. Many experiences taught her to rely upon her instincts and situational awareness. This has been a crucial asset when setting foot into the Wilderness and unknown territories.

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Mark Menzies will be a guest during Performance Forum. He has established an important, world-wide reputation as a new music violist and violinist. Menzies has been described in a Los Angeles Times review, as an 'extraordinary musician' and a 'riveting violinist.' His career as a viola and violin virtuoso, chamber musician and advocate of contemporary music, has seen performances in Great Britain, Germany, France, Austria, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, New Zealand and across the United States, including a series of appearances at New York's Carnegie Hall. Mark Menzies made his concerto debut with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra with an invitation from Mstislav Rostropovich to perform at the opening of the 1988 International Festival of the Arts, in Wellington, New Zealand. The performance, conducted by Maxim Shostakovich, received rave reviews. Mark Menzies' solo career has continued to fulfill this auspicious beginning with critically praised concerto and solo recital performances across the globe.

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Sarah Davachi (b. 1987, Calgary, Canada) holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Calgary, and a master's degree in electronic music and recording media from Mills College in Oakland, California where she studied with Maggi Payne, James Fei, and David Bernstein.  As a composer and performer of electroacoustic music, Davachi's projects are primarily concerned with disclosing the delicate psychoacoustics of intimate aural spaces, utilizing extended durations and simple harmonic structures that emphasize subtle variations in overtone complexity and natural resonances.  In addition to her recorded output, including 2017's All My Circles Run on Students of Decay and 2016's Vergers on Important Records, Davachi has toured extensively across the globe and has shared the stage with artists such as Donald Buchla, Morton Subotnick, Aki Onda, Grouper, Arnold Dreyblatt, John Bender, Alessandro Cortini, Oren Ambarchi, Aaron Dilloway, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Loren Connors, and filmmaker Paul Clipson. She is currently a doctoral student in musicology at UCLA and is based in Los Angeles, California.
  

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Jonathan Thomas Miller is a composer and multi-instrumentalist based in Los Angeles. Over the last 15 years he has composed over 7,000 pieces of music for film, TV and other media. His musical passions include combining styles and genres in bizarre and unexpected ways, sampling the world, improvisation and music as vibrational and emotional change. Jonathan's musical life has included writing string quartets, 8 channel electronic pieces, children's country songs, comedy horror film scores, high-octane rock music without guitars, and the occasional earnest and beautiful piece of music. He studied music composition at Heidelberg College and CalArts. Originally from the farmlands of Northwestern Ohio, he now resides in downtown Los Angeles.

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According to the Los Angeles Times, composer and performer Eve Beglarian “is a humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist.” She has been awarded the 2017 Herb Alpert Award in Music for her “prolific, engaging and surprising body of work.” Beglarian’s current projects include Lighten Up, a multimedia song cycle about visionary visual artists in America; the long-term undertaking A Book of Days,text/music/visuals, one for each day of the year; and Brim, the ensemble and repertoire she has created in response to her 2009 journey down the Mississippi River by kayak and bicycle.

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He is a composer, performer, and curator that lives in situ. Manfred Werder focuses on possibilities of rendering the practices regarding composition and field. His recent scores have featured either found sentences from poetry and philosophy, or found words from whatever sources. His performances, both indoors and outdoors, aim at letting appear the world’s natural abundance. Earlier works include stück 1998, a 4000 page score whose nonrecurring and intermittent performative realization has been ongoing since December 1997.

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Andrea James is a writer, director, producer, and activist. She is the creator and instructor of 'Finding Your Female Voice,' considered an essential guide to vocal feminization for transgender women. She has also done voice coaching for a number of actors, including Felicity Huffman for her role in 'Transamerica' and Kate del Castillo for her role in 'K-11.' For 20 years she has worked one-on-one with hundreds of transgender people who want to change how their voices sound, as well as with people who wish to mitigate their accents. She has spoken at campuses around the country, and she is pleased to be returning to CalArts.

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Michelle Lou is active as a performer and a composer, but not always at the same time. She plays guitar, bass, and electronics and prefers close collaboration with friends and colleagues over extended time periods. Her music has been performed in festivals such as Wien Modern, MATA, Noon Till Midnight, The Festival for American Music, Donaueschinger Musiktage, and Bludenz. Michelle received her BA and MA degrees from UC San Diego in double bass performance and composition, and her DMA from Stanford University. She spent an academic year at Harvard as a Radcliffe Fellow. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Dartmouth College.

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Jeff Beal is one of the most prolific and respected composers working in Hollywood today. He grew up studying the trumpet in the San Francisco Bay area, where he was immersed in the sounds of the 70's jazz, classical, rock & pop music scene. His prodigious talent in composition lead to many works for both big band and orchestra during his high school years. In his teens, his compositions were performed by the Oakland Youth Symphony under maestro Kent Nagano, the Monterey Jazz Festival All Star big band, and others.

Jeff's 1st prime time Emmy award came in 2001 for his season one theme song to Monk (2002). Frequently called on to score assignments that require a unique and diverse musical approach, Beal won an Emmy for Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King: Battleground (2006). Jeff's incredible sweeping and emotive orchestral score for the Ridley Scott CIA mini-series The Company (2007) also resulted in a prime time Emmy. His most recent Emmy is for the underscore to Netflix ground-breaking political drama, "House of Cards".

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Barry Schrader is an American composer specializing in electro-acoustic (primarily electronic) music. His compositions for electronics, dance, film, video, mixed media, live/electro-acoustic music combinations, and real-time computer performance have been presented throughout the world. Schrader has been acclaimed by the Los Angeles Times as "a composer born to the electronic medium", named "a seminal composer of electro-acoustic music" by Journal SEAMUS, and described by Gramophone as a composer of  "approachable electronic music with a distinctive individual voice to reward the adventurous."

Schrader began composing electronic music in 1969 while a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was also organist for Sunday high mass at Heinz Chapel.  He graduated with an MA degree in musicology and then went to the newly formed California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, where he received an MFA in composition in 1971.  He was appointed to the School of Music faculty of CalArts in 1971, and taught remained on faculty until his retirement in 2016.  He has also taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the California State University at Los Angeles, The University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and Beijing Central Conservatory.

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Jen Shyu ("Shyu" pronounced "Shoe" in English, Chinese name: 徐秋雁, Pinyin: Xúqiūyàn) is a groundbreaking, multilingual vocalist, composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, dancer, 2016 Doris Duke Artist, and was voted 2017 Downbeat Critics Poll Rising Star Female Vocalist. Born in Peoria, Illinois, to Taiwanese and East Timorese immigrant parents, Shyu is widely regarded for her virtuosic singing and riveting stage presence, carving out her own beyond-category space in the art world. She has performed with saxophonist and 2014 MacArthur Fellow Steve Coleman since 2003 and has collaborated with such musical innovators as Nicole Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Vijay Iyer, Bobby Previte, Chris Potter, Michael Formanek and David Binney. Shyu has performed her own music on prestigious world stages such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rubin Museum of Art, Ringling International Arts Festival, Asia Society, Roulette, Blue Note, Bimhuis, Salihara Theater, National Gugak Center, National Theater of Korea and at festivals worldwide.

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Born in San Jose, CA, Jacob Shea graduated from University of California with a degree in Music Composition. He has worked with several of Hollywood’s top composers, including Elliot Goldenthal, Steve Jablonsky, and Hans Zimmer. Credits include music programmer for Public Enemies, arranger for Madagascar 2 and Despicable Me, and composer of additional music for Modern Warfare 2 (VG), Transformers: The Dark of the Moon, Battleship, and Lone Survivor. In 2011, Jacob was selected as one of six fellows to attend the prestigious Sundance Composers Lab. Jacob now heads up the Bleeding Fingers Custom Music Shop as lead composer. His music can be heard on countless television shows, including the critically acclaimed Science Channel show Through the Wormhole, narrated by Morgan Freeman.

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JÜRG FREY was born in 1953 in Aarau. Following his musical education, which finished with the examen de virtuosité in the class of Thomas Friedli at the Concervatoire de Musique de Genève, he turned to a career as a clarinetist, but his activities as composer soon came to the foreground. He developed his own language as a composer and sound artist with the creation of wide, quiet sound spaces. His work is marked by an elementary non-extravagence of sound, a sensibilty for the qualities of the material, and precision of compositional approach. Sometimes his compositions bypass instrumentation and duration altogether and touch on aspects of sound art.

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Haitian electronic music composer/percussionist/turntablist, Val Jeanty evokes the musical esoteric realms of the creative subconscious. She incorporates her African Haitian Musical traditions into the present and beyond, combining acoustics with electronics and the archaic with the post-modern. Her "Afro-Electronica" installations have been showcased in New York City at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Village Vanguard and internationally at SaalFelden Music Festival in Austria, Stanser Musiktage in Switzerland, Jazz à la Villette in France, and the Biennale Di Venezia Museum in Italy.

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Jeronimo Rajchenberg is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and educator from Mexico. His work fuses traditional compositional techniques from various cultures with contemporary narratives. He is a creator of an artistic practice that includes education, composition, improvisation, skill development and social awareness through a game-based methodology. His commissions include several multidisciplinary projects involving internationally acclaimed casts. His music has been released in England, USA, Mexico and Argentina. He has collaborated with critically acclaimed musicians such as David Rosenboom, Miroslav Tadic, Nyoman Wenten, Christopher Garcia and Horacio Franco. He holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts degree in Performance and Composition from the California Institute of the Arts.

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Samantha Boshnack (Trumpeter and Composer) is the 2018 Make Jazz Fellow at the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. She is in the process of a three-month residency at the 18th Street Center working on a new extended composition and performance called “Seismic Belt", and will do a special workshop at CalArts while she is in the Los Angeles area. The workshop is open to all and will focus on Samantha's compositions ("The Nellie Bly Project"), her time with Seattle area band, Reptet, and listening and discussion.

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Chris Kallmyer is a sound artist and performer living in Los Angeles. His work explores a participatory approach to making music through touch, taste, and process using everyday objects that point to who we are and where we live. His work is best characterized by its relationship to site and architecture, inviting the listener to experience sound in situ. 

Kallmyer completed his MFA in 2009 at California Institute of the Arts while studying with Wadada Leo Smith, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Aashish Khan, and Sara Roberts. Since then, Kallmyer has worked closely with the art collective Machine Project (LA) creating over 100 projects since 2009 at institutions across the United States. As a performer, Chris plays with the modern-music-collective wild Up, who the New York Times called “…a raucous, grungy, irresistibly exuberant…fun-loving, exceptionally virtuosic family.” 

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Los Angeles-based artist Ron Athey has been working at the vanguard of performance art for 25 years. Self-taught, his work developed out of post-punk/pre-goth scenes, and begins with Premature Ejaculation (PE), an early 1980s collaboration with Rozz Williams. Their approach to performance art was informed by the club actions of Johanna Went and the formulation of Industrial Culture (the idea of psycho/neuro acoustics in sound performance). Athey's work often experiments with performing in a trance state, not unlike the Pentecostal spirit states he attained in his childhood religious experiences. In the 1990s, Athey formed a company of performers and made Torture Trilogy, a series of works that addressed the AIDS pandemic directly through memorializing and philosophical reflection. This work is characterized by the physical intensity of 1970s body-art canon (e.g. COUM Transmission, Carolee Schneeman and the Viennese Actionists). These performances toured internationally. The trilogy's final chapter, Deliverance, was an Arts Council England commission and premiered at the ICA London.

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Dan Joseph will be giving a lecture and demonstration at the Graduate Composers Forum about his current and recent work. Joseph is a composer, performer, writer and curator based in New York City. For the past fifteen years, the hammer dulcimer has been the primary vehicle for his music and he is active as a performer with his own chamber ensemble, The Dan Joseph Ensemble, as well as in various improvisational collaborations and as a soloist. He produces the monthly music and sound series Musical Ecologies in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and is a contributing writer to The Brooklyn Rail, Musicworks Magazine and NewMusicBox.org. In April 2017, the venerable New York based new music label XI Records released a 2 CD retrospective of his electroacoustic and mixed-media works titled Electroacoustic Works.

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Antoinette Perry, a pianist, was born to professional musicians and gave her first public performance at the age of four. Since then, she has appeared throughout the U.S., Europe and China as a soloist and chamber musician, collaborating with many of the world’s greatest artists, including John Perry, Leon Fleisher, and Walter Matthau to name a few. She has performed with members of the American, Chicago, Cleveland, Emerson, Juilliard, Los Angeles, Paganini, Sequoia, and Takacs String Quartets, and also with concertmasters and/or principals principals of the L.A., New York, Rotterdam and the Hague Philharmonics, the Concertgebau, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Gulbenkian and Zurich Tonhalle Orchestras, the Chicago, St. Louis, Toronto, and San Francisco Symphonies, and the L.A., Orpheus and Stuttgart Chamber Orchestras. Ms. Perry currently teaches Keyboard Studies at the USC Thornton School of Music.

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Rachel Beetz will present in the performer/composer forum on the development of The Winter Stars sound installation from inspiration through creation and reception. The Winter Stars developed from the Script/Rescript recital project which examined contrapuntal textures of solo flute works in collaboration with visual artist Nichole Speciale. This collaboration led to the process of graphic score realization that is essential to The Winter Stars creation. This presentation will cover the unexpected development of her creative practice from one that was centered on performing challenging works to one that includes composition and installations.

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Mileece is a pioneer in specialized generative music, gestural interfaces, and plant biofeedback. She has toured an array of museums, festivals, and venues (e.g. MoMA, NYC, BHIF Festival, Bhutan, Kew Gardens, London) with her hand-coded ‘aesthetic sonification’ system, interactive sculptures, hand-crafted instruments, live and composed music, and field recordings as immersive installations and performances. Her message of promoting ecology through technology and the arts has reached millions of people through prime-time features, campaigns, documentaries and presentations. As a composer and recording artist, her debut work ‘Formations’ was internationally critically acclaimed, heralded by the BBC as an “outstanding release, real musical science." Mileece is Creative and Technical Director to her collaborative zero-impact energy, network-based urban wilderness sanctuaries project, aimed to help balance our modern lives with the needs and benefits of our biosphere. 

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Peter Golub is the composer of numerous concert works, film scores, music for the theater, and ballet. Combining his interest in traditional and contemporary classical music, jazz and opera with his ongoing preoccupation with drama, Golub's primary focus in the last ten years has been on film music. He recently co-composed, with James Newton Howard, the music for The Great Debaters, directed by Denzel Washington and starring Washington and Forest Whitaker. He scored Frozen River, directed by Courtney Hunt, and winner of Jury Award for Best Film at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. The Laramie Project, directed by Moises Kaufman for HBO, features a score performed by The St. Luke's Orchestra. He composed music for the documentaries Wordplay  (starring Will Shortz, Bill Clinton and Jon Stewart) and I.O.U.S.A. both directed by Patrick Creadon and shown at the Sundance Film Festival. His score for Stolen, directed by Rebecca Dreyfus, was awarded Best Music at the 2003 Avignon Film Festival. He also scored American Gun, directed by Aric Avelino and starring Forest Whitaker, Marcia Gay Harden and Donald Sutherland and Sublime, directed by Tony Krantz, starring Thomas Cavanagh. Golub is the director of the Sundance Film Music Program and teaches film music and composition at UCLA's Herb Alpert School of Music. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

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Natacha Diels’ work combines ritual, improvisation, traditional instrumental practice, and cynical play to create worlds of curiosity and unease. Recent work includes the completion of a series of fairytales/nightmares for performers, and the construction of a Portal with her performance duo On Structure. Natacha founded the experimental music collective Ensemble Pamplemousse in 2003, and continues to be its director and flautist. In 2009 she co-founded the performance duo On Structure with Jessie Marino. Pamplemousse specializes in unique aspects of composition and new music, from complex virtuosic instrumental performance to experimental theatre to electronic and robotic performance.

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"Anabolism" for soprano saxophone and live biofeedback-driven electronics
A composition of electroacoustic biofeedback music by composer/performer Andrew Raffo Dewar for modular synthesizer-based live electronics and soprano saxophone. Developed during a residency at the EMS electronic music studios in Stockholm, the piece translates the performer’s sound and aspects of their biological functions (brainwaves and muscle movements) into control signals that affect the live electronics, such that the form of the music itself is partially generated and manipulated through biofeedback processes largely outside the performers’ control. 

Andrew Raffo Dewar (b.1975 Rosario, Argentina) is a composer, soprano saxophonist, ethnomusicologist, educator, and arts organizer. His work has been performed throughout North America, Southeast Asia and Europe, and he has studied and performed with avant-garde jazz legends Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, Bill Dixon, and experimental music composer Alvin Lucier. He has also had a long involvement with Indonesian traditional and experimental music, in particular the Minangkabau music of West Sumatra. Dr. Dewar is an Associate Professor in New College and the School of Music at the University of Alabama.

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Bruce Broughton is best known for his many motion picture scores, including Silverado, Tombstone, The Rescuers Down Under, The Presidio, Miracle on 34th Street, the Homeward Bound adventures and Harry and the Hendersons. His television themes include The Orville, JAG, Steven Spielberg's Tiny Toon Adventures and Dinosaurs. His scores for television range from mini-series like Texas Rising and The Blue and Gray to TV movies (Warm Springs, O Pioneers!) and countless episodes of television series such as Dallas, Quincy, Hawaii Five-O and How the West Was Won. With 24 nominations, Broughton has won a record 10 Emmy awards. His score to Silverado was Oscar-nominated, and his score to Young Sherlock Holmes was nominated for a Grammy. His music has accompanied many of the Disney theme park attractions throughout the world, and his score for Heart of Darkness was the first recorded orchestral score for a video game. In the spring of 2016, he arranged a commercial album of songs from motion pictures and Broadway for the multi-talented Seth MacFarlane. Broughton is currently a board member of ASCAP, a former governor of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as a past president and founding member of The Society of Composers and Lyricists. He has taught composition and orchestration at USC's Department of Screen Scoring in the Thornton School of Music, and at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. He is composer-in-residence for 2017 at the University of North Texas College of Music.

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Weston Olencki is a trombonist/composer working at the boundary of sound art, composition, and electronic noise, testing the emerging artistic and social relationships between humans and machines through intense, sustained personal collaborations. He has presented work at the Borealis Festival [Bergen], ISSUE Project Room [NYC], Transparent Sound [Budapest], REDCAT [LA], Weisslich [Manchester/London], Qubit [NYC], Constellation's Frequency Series [Chicago], FOCIarts [New Orleans], Indexical [Santa Cruz], and OPTION [Chicago], and was awarded the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis for performance from the Darmstadt Ferienkurse. He also co-curates/presents the Chance and Circumstance festival, an annual festival for experimental arts in NYC. 

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"Up in the Bronx where the people are fresh..."

Kurtis Blow has been instrumental in raising a generation of MC’s, and continues to carry the torch for hip-hop music into new arenas.

In 1979, at the age of twenty, Kurtis Blow became the first Rapper to be signed by a major label.  Mercury released “Christmas Rappin,” and it sold over 400,000 copies and it became an annual classic.  Its gold follow‑up “The Breaks” helped ignite a still‑spreading international “Rap Attack.” He released 10 Albums over 11 years -- The first entitled “Kurtis Blow”, his full length debut and his second, a Top 50 Pop Album “Deuce,” a big hit across Europe; “Party Time” which featured a pioneering fusion of Rap and Go‑Go; “Ego Trip,” which includes the hits “8 Million Stories”, “AJ”, and “Basketball” and in 1985, “America.”  “America’s video innovation received a MTV Monitor Award.  From this album, the song “If I Ruled the World” became a top 5 hit on Billboard’s R & B chart.  Columbia/Sony recording artist Nas debuted at # 1 on the Billboard’s Pop Album chart with a cover of the song in 1997.

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Sonia Wieder-Atherton constantly pushes back the boundaries, venturing with her cello into other artistic forms, with projects like From the East in Music, a show designed with footage from Chantal Akerman’s film D’Est, and two projects with celebrated actresses: Night Dances, with Charlotte Rampling, featuring works by Benjamin Britten and Sylvia Plath, and Marguerite Duras’ Navire Night with Fanny Ardant. Exile is her latest project in 2017. In 2011, she received the Bernheim Foundation Award, which each year acknowledges three creative works in the fields of the arts, literature and science. Sonia will be playing a REDCAT concert Monday evening, April 23 based on Chantal Akerman’s work.

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Juanjosé Rivas made a sound residence in Centre for Contemporary Creation Matadero in Madrid, Spain (2013); he was Fellow Program Development Cultural Projects and Joint Ventures 2013; beneficiary of the Board of Contemporary Art PAC 2012; and has twice received the grant from the Young Artists Program specializing in Multimedia, FONCA-CONACULTA 2005 and 2011. He was a member of the Council of Planning and Evaluation for the Festival of Electronic Arts and Video Transitio_MX 2010-2014. Juanjosé currently teaches at University Centro for Film, Design, and Television and is Artistic Director of VOLTA, a series of international concerts of sound art and experimental music in Mexico City.

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Traveling the spaces between new music, improvisation and performance art, Brooklyn-based trumpeter and composer Stephanie Richards examines the physical, visual and auditory interactions of live music performance. As reflected in her recently commissioned works, Rotations for twelve choreographed musicians and carousel organ and Trading Futures for six hundred choreographed found sound surfaces, Stephanie’s theatrical tendencies often result in compositional collaborations of sound, sight and movement.

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Steven Harris is Associate Professor in the History of Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.  He grew up in Vancouver, and taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and at Mount Allison University, before coming to the University of Alberta in 2001. He works on twentieth-century art in Europe and North America, and is the author of articles on surrealism, postwar abstraction and Fluxus. His book, Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics and the Psyche, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2004. His current research project, The Poetics of Disenchantment, investigates both the surrealist movement in the postwar period, and how surrealist ideas and values were taken up or challenged by postwar European collectives like Cobra, The College of 'Pataphysics, and the Situationist International. He co-edited a recent issue of Art History with Natalie Adamson, and is one of the co-editors of a forthcoming International Encyclopedia of Surrealism.

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Gamin is master a practitioner of the piri, taepyongso (double reed instruments), and saenghwang (reed mouth organ), and composer of music for both western and traditional Korean instruments. Currently, as a yisuja (designated master) of the Important Intangible Cultural Asset No. 46 for piri and Daechita, she strives to both preserve and enhance traditional Korean music. At Seoul National University and as a member and assistant principal player of the Contemporary Gugak Orchestra, Gamin has used her virtuosity to perform authentic jeongak (classical court music) and sinawi (shaman ritual music), as well as new compositions for her instruments.

Today Gamin experiments and expands her musical realm with interdisciplinary projects in collaboration with international artists. Her most recent project, "Pal-eum (Eight Tones)," transformed a museum into multi-complex concert hall to featuring fashion, video art, and synthesizers.

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Brian Walsh is a musician who is interested in sound and communication, regardless of genre. He specializes in performance on the clarinet and bass clarinet. He seeks to redefine the role of these instruments in contemporary classical music, jazz, and world music. Mr. Walsh is a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts. Mr. Walsh frequently performs with such diverse groups as Wild up Modern Music Collective, gnarwhallaby, The New Century Players, The California E.A.R. Unit and is a member of Creative Underground Los Angeles. He also leads Walsh Set Trio, a jazz ensemble focusing on the performance of his own compositions. As a member of the contemporary music ensemble gnarwhallaby, Mr. Walsh gave the premier of Nicholas Deyoe’s Lullaby 4 at Carnegie Hall. Their Carnegie Hall performance was described as “startlingly versatile” by the New York Times. Mr.Walsh was also recently a guest artist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella new music series at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Walsh has premiered pieces by Luigi Nono, Anne LeBaron, Girard Grisey, James Newton, Andrew Nathaniel McIntosh, Tom Johnson and many others. Past collaborators have included Peter Maxwell Davies, Meredith Monk, Gavin Bryars, Bobby Bradford, Nels Cline, Bright Eyes, San Fermin, James Newton, and Muhal Richard Abrams.

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Music: W.F. Umi Hsu (pronouns they/them) was born in Taipei and moved to Virginia at age 12. Hsu is a sound ethnographer and artist whose practice is driven by inquiries about sound and migratory communities. Hsu currently explores Taiwan’s street sound cultures in relation to the urban underclass experience of city development, mobility, and technology. Working to create social change through sound, Hsu leads two projects: LA Listens, a community engagement platform that reflects on LA’s changing sensory and social ecology; and mobile placemaking collective Movable Parts. Hsu also writes songs about the melancholic postcolony in ghost pop band Bitter Party. With a PhD in Critical and Comparative Studies from the University of Virginia Music Department, Hsu has received fellowships and awards from National Endowment for the Arts, American Council for Learned Society, Shuttleworth Foundation, and LA County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and is an adjunct professor at USC and Art Center College of Design.

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Music:  Nick Photinos, cellist, is a founding member and co-Artistic Director of the four-time Grammy Award-winning chamber music ensemble Eighth Blackbird. Formed in 1996, the group performs 50-60 concerts annually throughout the world and has been featured at the 2013 Grammy Awards, on CBS’s Sunday Morning, Bloomberg TV, and frequently in the New York Times. They are Musical America's Ensemble of the Year for 2017 and recipients of the inaugural Chamber Music America Visionary Award in 2016. In June 2017 Eighth Blackbird launched the annual Blackbird Creative Lab, a tuition-, room- and board- free chamber music festival. The ensemble currently holds an ongoing Ensemble-in-Residence position at the University of Richmond. As a solo artist, Nick has performed and recorded with rock stars Björk, Wilco, Autumn Defense; jazz artists including Sheila Jordan, Laurence Hobgood, Zach Brock, and Matt Ulery; and has been a member of the Canton and Columbus Symphony Orchestras and the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra. He teaches at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival every July in North Adams, MA. He has recorded for numerous labels including the Cedille, Nonesuch, Greenleaf, and Naxos labels. His debut solo album, Petits Artéfacts, was released on the New Amsterdam label in Fall 2017.

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Music: Vardan Ovsepian is an Armenia-born pianist/composer. He has performed solo, as well as, with artists such as Mick Goodrick, Peter Erskine and Jerry Bergonzi. In addition to teaching at The Musical Suite in Newburyport, MA, Ovsepian performed and taught master classes at Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival, Maine Jazz Camp Towson University, Susquehanna University, Bucknell University, Wheeler School,  Estonian Music Academy (Tallinn, Estonia), Swarnabhoomi Academy of Music (Chennai, India), and CalArts. Vardan has released 5 CDs with the “Fresh Sound New Talent” label, plus independent releases of VOCE - Vardan Ovsepian Chamber Ensemble (2006 and 2013). Recent works include a publication of a book “Mirror Exercises”, a release of Peter Erskine New Trio album “In Praise of Shadows” and a duet album "Hand in Hand" with Tatiana Parra. Presently Vardan resides in Los Angeles.

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Music: Grammy nominated saxophonist Ben Wendel was born in Vancouver, Canada and raised in Los Angeles. Currently living in Brooklyn, NY, he has enjoyed a varied career as a performer, composer and producer.  Highlights include multiple domestic and international tours with artists such as Ignacio Berroa, Tigran Hamasyan, Antonio Sanchez, Snoop Dogg and the artist formerly known as Prince. Ben is a founding member of the Grammy nominated group Kneebody, and currently signed with Motéma Music. As a composer, he has received an ASCAP Jazz Composer Award, the 2008 and 2011 Chamber Music America “New Works Grant” and most recently was awarded the Victor Lynch-Staunton award by the Canada Council For The Arts. He also co-wrote the score for John Krasinski's adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men." He currently works as an Adjunct Professor at the New School in NYC.

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Music: During this time, Aperture Duo will work with sketches of pieces being written for them by CalArts students, talk about maintaining a professional chamber ensemble, commissioning new work, and will also do a chamber coaching.  This is a great opportunity to learn from two local musicians who are doing incredible work.

Aperture Duo curates fearless programs that explore new sounds, voices, and techniques through the lens of violin and viola chamber music. Founded in 2015 by violinist Adrianne Pope and violist Linnea Powell, Aperture Duo has quickly become a mainstay of the Los Angeles new music scene. Equally at home interpreting old and new music, Aperture Duo has commissioned over thirteen new works as part of a repertoire that spans W.A. Mozart to Salvatore Sciarrino. Aperture Duo’s performance credits include Tuesdays @ Monk Space, the main stage at the Carlsbad Music Festival, Music at Boston Court, L.A. Signal Lab, Synchromy, LA Downtown Art Walk, Brooklyn's Home Audio Concert Series, UC Santa Barbara Summer Music Festival, Clockshop’s Hear Sunday, Craft in America Center’s Window Concert Series, and the Eureka! Musical Minds of California Graduate Student Conference. Aperture Duo has designed educational outreach concerts with wild Up and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and has been in residence at Avaloch Farm Music Institute."

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Music: With 6 critically acclaimed CDs and a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Vocal CD Kate McGarry has become recognized as a jazz artist who brings authenticity and vitality to every song regardless of genre. The Wall St. Journal calls her music,"Austere and elegant," New York Times pronounced it, “astute and sensitive".  She currently performs in jazz clubs, performing arts centers and festivals throughout the US and abroad. As an educator she has taught at New England Conservatory and currently serves on the faculty of Manhattan School of Music.

Keith Ganz is a guitarist, composer, arranger, and producer. He has performed with such jazz notables as Harry Connick Jr., Kurt Elling, Luciana Souza, Kate McGarry, Fred Hersch, Christian McBride, Chris Potter, Theo Bleckmann, Peter Eldridge and Gretchen Parlato, to name a few!  He has appeared on Oprah, Letterman, The View, Ellen, Australian Idol and toured the globe from Mongolia to Melbourne.

Since basing himself in NYC in 2002, originally hailing from Cos Cob, CT, jazz pianist, organist and accordionist Gary Versace has become one of the busiest and most versatile musicians on the scene, often featured in bands led by musicians such as John Scofield, John Abercrombie, Al Foster, Regina Carter, Maria Schneider, Madeleine Peyroux, Matt Wilson, Joe Magnarelli, Andy LaVerne, Adam Nussbaum, Brad Shepik, Ingrid Jensen and many others.

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Music: Miguel Villegas Ventura was born in San Miguel Cuevas- Nuu Yuku, located in the Mixteca Baja of Oaxaca, Mexico. Nuu Yuku is a Mixtec community with strong migration to the United States. He arrived in California when he was seven years-old with his mother and three older siblings. Miguel was introduced to Chicano Rap music, a genre that Mexican-Americans in California developed to speak out about their struggles. He also began writing small verses drawing from his own experiences. Gradually his exposure to different styles, contents and rappers grew. In 2010 Miguel, joined Autonomos, a Oaxacan youth group He wrote a trilingual song- Mixteco, Spanish, and English, about reclaiming identity, language and culture. His music and work demonstrates his commitment to his Mixteco community. Aside from writing music, he also practices traditional dances from Nuu Yuku- La Danza de los Diablitos and Danza de Los Chareos. His artistic name is Una Isu which means Eight Deer in Mixtec; a tribute to the legendary Mixtec leader Eight Deer Jaguar Claw. Miguel has performed in different cities such as Los Angeles, Oxnard, Santa Cruz, Oakland, New York, Mexico City and of course his hometown Fresno, California.  Through his work, volunteer work, and music he continues to influence the community in a positive way.

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Music: Richard Barrett Richard Barrett (Swansea, 1959) is internationally active as composer and performer, and also teaches at the Institute of Sonology in Den Haag and at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts at Leiden University. His work encompasses a range from free improvisation to intricately-notated scores, and from acoustic chamber music to innovative uses of digital technology. Recent compositions include "close-up" for electroacoustic sextet, written for Ensemble Studio6; "everything has changed/nothing has changed" for orchestra, given its premiere by the SWR Symphony Orchestra conducted by Peter Rundel in February 2017; and the first installment of "natural causes", a work in progress for the ensemble Musikfabrik, given its premiere in May 2017. Current projects include new works for ELISION, with whom Richard Barrett has been working regularly since 1990, and for the Los Angeles-based ensemble gnarwhallaby. Ongoing performative collaborations include with Paul Obermayer (in FURT), Evan Parker, and several other improvising ensembles such as SKEIN (with Achim Kaufmann, Frank Gratkowski, Wilbert de Joode and others) and Colophony (with Jon Rose and Meinrad Kneer). Richard Barrett’s principal composition teacher was Peter Wiegold, and he currently resides in Belgrade. His work as composer and performer is documented on over forty CDs, including seven discs devoted to his compositions and nine by FURT.

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Music: A child prodigy, born into a renowned family of musicians, Shenkar studied vocal from the age of two, violin from the age of five, and performed his first concert at the age of seven. His 1980 release, "Who's To Know", and Phil Collins' solo debut, "Face Value", introduced the unique sound of Shenkar's own invention, the 10 string stereophonic Double Violin, to listeners around the world. The Double Violin, designed by Shenkar and built by Ken Parker, covers the entire range of the orchestra's double bass, cello, viola and violin. The combination of Shenkar's mesmerizing vocals, double violin and also as a composer has brought him worldwide acclaim as a musical innovator. He is a virtuoso vocalist/violinist (with a five and a half octave vocal range), composer and record producer who has sold over 35 million on his recordings and his guest appearances throughout his career have put him in the highest esteem among his peers.

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Music: David Lopato’s music reflects an involvement with such diverse forms as modern jazz, stride piano, avant-garde classical music, blues, latin and various world musics, most notably those of Indonesia, where he has lived and studied Javanese gamelan. His love of these seemingly disparate traditions has resulted in a body of music that is both universal and personal. Although his main instrument is piano, his interest in other, more exotic timbres has led him to explore new techniques for "preparing" the piano, as well as incorporate other percussion instruments and electronics into his work. He has worked extensively with computers, MIDI, and related digital media to facilitate the creation and realization of his own music and that of other musicians. David Lopato was born in 1954 in Brooklyn, NY. His studies include a B.A. in music composition from Yale University, graduate work in African drumming at California Institute of the Arts and Javanese gamelan at Akademie Seni Krawitan Indonesia  in Surakarta, Java as a Fulbright Scholar. He has performed his own compositions throughout the world as a soloist, leader of his own trio, quintet and ten-piece ensembles.

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Music: A jazz singer and new music composer of eclectic tastes and prodigious gifts, GRAMMY® nominated Theo Bleckmann's accolades include NPR's 2012 Top 10 Jazz Albums of the Year for Hello Earth! The Songs of Kate Bush, top-five spots in the 2013, 2014 and 2015 DownBeat Critics’ Polls for Best Male Vocalist, and top-ten spots in their Readers’ Polls, as well as third place for Best Vocalist in the 2012 Rhapsody Poll of 119 critics (formerly hosted by the Village Voice), Boston Phoenix's "Best Jazz Acts" of 2012 for Hello Earth! The Songs of Kate Bush and WQXR's Operavore "Best Opera of 2012" for Out Cold by Phil Kline. In 2010, Bleckmann received the prestigious JAZZ ECHO award from the Deutsche Phono-Akademie in his native Germany.

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Screening of Set in the West: the Genesis of L.A. Hip Hop (2017), with director Wolfgang Amadeuz in attendance, and special guests Alonzo Williams, Delphine “SilkyD” Williams, and Dr. Funkenstein.

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Music: Pascale Criton was born in Paris in 1954. She studied composition with Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Gérard Grisey and Jean-Etienne Marie. She participated in the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1980/88, took electro-acoustic training at CIRM (International Centre for Musical Research, Nice) from 1980 to 1982, as well as a musical computing course for composers at IRCAM (Paris) in 1986. Moreover, she is interested in ethnomusicology and took part in activities of the Research Group on Oral Tradition in Abidjan (Ivory Coast) in 1979. She has directed various creative workshops at the University of Paris (1979-81), the Avignon Festival (1977-78) and the Pantin Conservatory (1981-82). In a different capacity, Pascale Criton was a member of the Musical Theatre Company of Les Ulis, with Michel Puig, Michaël Lonsdale, Catherine Dasté and Edith Scob, from 1975 to 1980, and would pursue her stage experience in the framework of productions with Transcenic: dance, theatre, music and audiovisual, with, in particular, Ecrans noirs, first performed in 1982. 

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Music: Musician Michael Cain’s name is not well known by the general listening public, but he surely should be. When not making his impression on the next generation of musicians as an educator at The Eastman School of Music in Rochester, the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston or his present faculty position at Brandon University in Brandon, Manitoba Canada, the keyboardist has been working with some notable jazz artists including Ravi Coltrane, Greg Osby, MeShell Ndege Ocello, Robin Eubanks and most notably a nine year stretch with drummer Jack DeJohnette. Mr. Cain’s latest offering is the celestial sounds of Sola where he assembles two distinctively different bands playing from two geographical locations, Las Vegas and New York, to make an album that captivates the listener with deep grooves, inherent musicality and a palpable sense of equanimity.

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Music: Poovalur Srjii is a prolific composer, performer, educator, a 'A' top grade artist recognized by All India Radio who studied South Indian Classical music from his father P.A. Venkataraman. For over three decades Poovalur has performed with the leading artist from both South and North Indian Classical traditions. Since his move to the United States Poovalur has performed and recorded with artists such as Sir Yehudi Menuhin, Bela Fleck, Mark O’ Connor, John Bergamo, Glen Velez to name a few. Poovalur has composed several pieces portraying the South Indian idioms. Poovalur has received several awards from leading institutions, and the album Tabula Rasa, where he has composed and performed with Bela Fleck, V. M. Bhatt and J.P. Chen was nominated for a Grammy. He is the founding member of the group 'Brahmah'. He found and directs the 'SNEW' and the 'South Indian Cross Cultural Ensemble'. He is currently a faculty at the University of North Texas. He has taught at CalArts and San Diego State University.

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Music: Alessandra Belloni is the Artistic Director, Founder and Lead Performer of "I GIULLARI DI PIAZZA", an Italian Music, Theatre and Dance Ensemble who is Artists-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.  She is also the designer of a line of signature series Italian tambourines made by Remo. She is the only woman in the U.S. and in Italy who specializes in traditional Southern Italian folk dances and percussion combined with singing that she learned in Southern Italy.  An award winning tambourine virtuoso, singer, dancer and actress, Ms. Belloni was born in Rome, Italy and is committed to preserving the strong and rich traditions of her culture. For the last 16 years she has been holding her special dance & drumming workshop in Tuscany RHYTHM IS THE CURE, with students that come from all over the world.
 

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Wolfgang Amadeuz is a producer, hip hop historian, technophile and writer. A member of Universal Hip Hop, a docent for the California African American Museum, and Compton’s 125 Historical Society. Born and raised in Los Angeles, CA and graduated from Compton High School and Los Angeles Southwest College, Wolfgnag Amadeuz directed and produced the documentary Set in the West: the Genesis of L.A. Hip Hop (2017) and Luv For Keeps: The Story of Madonna’s Stalker. He has been featured in the documentary Beyond Gangster Blackface (dir. Lenon Honor, 2017) 

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Music: Trey Spruance is best known for his ground-breaking composition and production work in his ensemble Secret Chiefs 3 and the avant-rock band Mr. Bungle. Raised in Eureka, California, Spruance relocated to the Bay Area in 1990, and has toured extensively around the world, performing over 500 concerts in over 50 countries in the past decade. In addition to touring and recording ad infinitum, he also orchestrates his music for various hybrid concert ensembles ranging in diversity from the New Music Works to a 61-piece Russian Traditional Orchestra of Krasnoyarsk. Spruance’s music weaves together a diverse and challenging array of pedagogically conflicting disciplines: early 20th century neoclassical music, Iranian Dastgah, Pythagorean mathematics, Italian horror film music aesthetics (1970s), 19th Century French Occult Musical Theory, Black Metal, and the Bollywood sound.

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Music: Three-time Grammy nominee Donny McCaslin is the leading saxophonist, composer, and soloist with 12 albums to his name. McCaslin is best known for his collaboration and friendship with David Bowie, who tasked McCaslin to work hand-in-hand on his final album, Blackstar. Raised in Santa Cruz, California, McCaslin attended Berklee College of Music, where he would go on to join the iconic NEA Jazz Master, Gary Burton’s Quintet. He has received numerous awards including being named the winner of the DownBeat Critics Poll “Rising Star” category in 2008 & 2009. Named “one of the hottest jazz tickets in the world” by AARP in 2017, recent awards include Best International Jazz Artist at the 2017 Jazz FMA Awards in London, where he shared the stage with The Rolling Stones. He was later honored with the prestigious Paul Ackett Award from the 2017 North Sea Jazz Festival. The Donny McCaslin Group has performed 80 shows on 5 continents throughout the 2016-2017 season alone supporting Beyond Now, an album comprised of two Bowie songs, covers of Deadmau5, MUTEMATH,the Chainsmokers, and origianls. The next evolution of Donny McCaslin will be documented on a new recording for Motéma Music in 2018. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

In 1999, Florian Weber won a scholarship to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston but instead decided to study mathematics, physics and biology. Years later, Florian began to study with John Taylor, JoAnne Brackeen, Paul Bley and Richie Beirach and Lee Konitz. In 2001, Florian won the Steinway & Sons prize at the Montreaux Jazz Festival Solo Piano Competition, the Gotrian Steinweg prize of Weimar and the first prize at the Jazz competition Monaco. With his group Minsarah and other projects, Florian has toured in America, Europe, Asia, South America, Paris and more. Today, Florian lives in Cologne, Germany and part of the year in New York which lead to his latest project “Biosphere” which was released September 2012 on Enja records. In 2013 Florian received the Echo Jazz as best national instrumentalist piano/keyboard. In January 2014 Florian was awarded the WDR Jazz Prize for Jazz Improvisation.

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Music: Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard will give a talk about "Music for the Inner Ear" and the SOUND X SOUND series - a series of works where Løkkegaard multiplies instruments and thereby creates sound that will let the instruments transcend their inherent sonic norms and reappear as new, untouched sound. His method is multiplication of sound as a way to make the instruments transcend themselves. The sound of the individual instrument dissolves and reappears as untouched unheard sound. A landscape of sound open to everybody.

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Music:  Sun Ra once spoke a future where the mere thought of a place would take somebody there. In the past future of today, Ras G explores space and time through his ancient/futuristic music. Dusty, ethereal and bugged out, the Crate Creator's beats bring the past to the future. Back On The Planet, _G's first Brainfeeder release in years, finds the blunted master of the beat guiding his Afrikan Space Program further out than ever. Since his arrival on the planet, Ras G has called Los Angeles his base. Growing up in South Central, _G was tapping into his innate knowledge while having the earthly experience of living in the "ghetto." Gravitating towards the turntables early, _G spent formative years DJing spots like Project Blowed and Five On The Black Hand Side in Leimert Park until his cousin Wolverine introduced him to the SP-1200 and thoughts of production became realities. Equally informed by the looped-up dust of classic boom-bap and the avant-garde esotericism of free jazz, _G began paving his own path in the beats. He cut his teeth in the early days of Low End Theory and in precursor nights like JuJu and Sketchbook. Day long hangouts at record spots like Aaron's (RIP) and Poo Bah's laid the foundation for projects, live experimentations and new experiences. A key pillar in the Los Angeles community, _G is the power-forward of the Brainfeeder crew, down since day one. 

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Music: Christopher Garcia’s background includes performances in a wide variety of musical settings including; Jazz, Rock, World Music, avant garde, symphonic music, chamber music, indigenous and traditional music of Mexico Zappa music, percussion ensemble, soundtracks, and cartoon music. He attributes his musical growth to his studies with Pandit Taranath Rao, Leonice Shinemann, John Bergamo, and Swapan Chaudhuri where he studied tabla, while attending California Institute of the Arts. He continues to be in demand with a career making music as a performer/composer with drumset, ​marimba, percussion instruments of North and South India along with indigenous percussion instruments of various regions in Mexico employing extended techniques using fingers, hands and stickings in a variety of jazz, rock and world music settings.

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Music: Adam Benjamin is a Grammy-nominated and critically acclaimed pianist, keyboardist, composer and educator based in Reno, NV. Recognized as a “Rising Star in Jazz” in DownBeat magazine’s critic’s and reader’s polls for eight years running, his unmistakable sound crosses stylistic boundaries and challenges traditional notions of jazz. Adam maintains a humble and humorous approach that connects him with his audiences worldwide. Adam is a founding member of Kneebody, an electric quintet widely recognized as one of the most unique ensembles in jazz today. Storm Nilson has been performing, recording, and educating throughout the United States and Canada for the past 13 years. His musical inspiration has been nurtured by opportunities to play with some of the world’s top jazz musicians such as Wynton Marsalis, Charlie Haden, Steve Cardenas, and his long time friend and mentor, Bruce Forman. As an educator, Storm has taught as a guest artist and traveling clinician for the Monterey Jazz Festival and JazzMaster’s Workshops. He was also featured at the 2007 50th Anniversary of the Monterey Jazz Festival and has performed extensively in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Montreal.

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Music: Davy Sumner will be presenting recent works at the ESP Forum. He is an ESP MFA graduate 2016 and is an installation artist, experimental musician, percussionist, and maker in Los Angeles. His creative works are spawned out of noise, physics, biology, and society, often utilizing sound spatialization, feedback-based systems, auditory illusions, chaos, and original electronics as key elements. He specializes in imagining and fabricating custom technologies and homemade devices that become animated, unstable, and unpredictable when introduced to the physical world. 

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Music:  Erik Griswold is a composer and pianist working in contemporary classical, improvised, and experimental forms. Particular interests include prepared piano, percussion, environmental music, and music of Sichuan province. Originally from San Diego, and now residing in Brisbane, he composes for adventurous musicians, performs as a soloist and in Clocked Out, and collaborates with musicians, artists, dancers, and poets. Griswold’s music has been performed in Carnegie Hall, Sydney Opera House, Cafe Oto, Chengdu Arts Centre, Melbourne Festival, OzAsia Festival, and Brisbane Festival, among others. He is a recipient of an Australia Council Fellowship in Music, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, and numerous individual grants. He has collaborated with musicians Steven Schick, Margaret Leng Tan, Lisa Moore, the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, the Australian Art Orchestra, Decibel Ensemble, Zephyr String Quartet, Ensemble Offspring, and many others. His music can be heard on Cold Blue, Immediata, Room40, Innova, Sonoluminus, Mode Records, Tall Poppies, Move, and Clocked Out.

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Music: Alex Chechile is an artist and composer whose work develops in parallel with research in neuroscience, psychoacoustics, and the biomechanics of hearing.  His electroacoustic compositions and installations bring transparency to otherwise invisible processes in biology and technology. His work has been shown across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Chechile is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. 

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Music: Rich and powerful musical language and a strong sense of drama have made Scottish-American composer Thea Musgrave one of the most respected and exciting contemporary composers in the Western world. Her works are performed in major concert halls, festivals, and radio stations on both sides of the Atlantic. Known for the clarity of her invention, the skill of her orchestrations, and the power of her musical communication, Musgrave has consistently explored new means of projecting essentially dramatic situations in her music, frequently altering and extending the conventional boundaries of instrumental performance by physicalizing their musical and dramatic impact: both without programmatic content. With such a large and varied career and catalogue, Thea Musgrave is frequently interviewed and questioned about being a "woman" composer, to which she has replied; "Yes, I am a woman; and I am a composer. But rarely at the same time."

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