ARTISTS
Michael Bailey
Michael Bailey is a self-taught musician who uses homemade instruments and electronics.
Fahad Baseer
Fahad Baseer, an experimental musician from Corona, CA, has dedicated the past decade to his primary project, Hexpressionist. This venture merges harsh noise wall, electro-acoustic improvisation, dark ambient, and microtonal drone, all rooted in the principles of Expressionism. Every Hexpressionist performance is a raw, unfiltered outpouring of emotion, improvised and ephemeral, capturing the essence of artistic spontaneity. The project’s sonic palette is ever-evolving, driven by Baseer’s relentless pursuit of experimentation. Currently, this palette includes modular synthesizers, contact microphones, effects pedals, and various iPad applications. Both live performances and recordings are largely improvisational, ensuring that each is a unique, transient experience. Hexpressionist stands as a testament to the power of improvisation and the boundless potential of experimental sound, offering an unmediated exploration of emotion through avant-garde artistry.
Jennifer Bewerse
Jennifer Bewerse (b.1985) is a multimedia artist working in composition, performance, and film. Her compositions are collages built from sounds she wants to hear using simple mechanics that yield complex results. Often, her pieces invite the performer to thoughtfully engage in activities that are important to them—recording sounds from their life, playing their instrument in a new way, or remembering stories. These compositions aim to spark reflection, offering the delight of discovering connections, appreciation for the overlooked, or the warmth of feeling seen.
Blanket Forts
blanket forts is Mike Esposito, a Los Angeles based experimental electronic musician. His music attempts to blur the lines between “dance” and “listening” music, with the hope of providing the listener the opportunity to do both or neither when experiencing it. To this end, he uses a variety of hardware and software, including but not limited to virtual modular synths, samplers, and DAWs. The main blanket forts credo can be summed up as “make up the rules and follow them” — in much the same way as one would construct a blanket fort of their own.
Emily Call
Emily Call (she/her) is a violinist based in Los Angeles, CA. As a founding member of the Grammy-nominated Isaura String Quartet, she has commissioned and premiered works by artists including Kitty Brazelton, Gloria Coates, Carmina Escobar, and Ulrich Krieger. Emily also performs with ensembles including the Dog Star Orchestra, Wild Up, and Wordless Music, and has appeared in performances at LACMA, Heidi Duckler Dance Company’s Ebb & Flow Festival, Sound/Image Festival (UK), and the Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium. Outside of the classical and new/experimental music world, Emily has recorded and performed for artists such as Angel Olsen, Baths, Geotic, Michael Bublé, Demi Lovato, Man Man, Sigur Rós, and more. She holds degrees from the California Institute of the Arts and Bennington College.
Eric KM Clark
Accomplished violinist, composer and artist Eric Kenneth Malcolm Clark is a specialist in new and experimental music. Based in Los Angeles, Eric currently enjoys teaching his private studio on violin, viola and composition, as well as curating concerts and planning for a new music future with the nonprofit he co-founded and co-directs, Southland Ensemble.
Previous professional experience includes being a faculty member of the Kadima Conservatory of Music for 13 years, holding the position of Strings Director and First Violinist in its resident string quartet. Eric was a member of the genre-setting ensemble The California E.A.R. Unit for 6 years (2006-2012, which gave important performances and masterclasses on contemporary music and technique around the world. In 2008, Eric co-founded the wulf., an experimental performance venue located in downtown Los Angeles that provides free experimental concerts and other artistic events to the general public, serving as co-director until 2013.
Eric has worked with many of the world’s most innovative artists and ensembles, including the late James Tenney, Jurg Frey, Michael Gordon, Richard Foreman, Guy Maddin, Christian Kesten, Michael Pisaro, Morton Subotnick and Han Bennink. His playing has been released on the labels Innova, New World, Tonehole Music, Sundialtech and Tzadik, and his compositions have been released on Henceforth Records and CQB. His visual art has been exhibited at the Torrance Art Museum and the wulf., while his sound installations have been presented at MOCA (during their Sunday Studio) in Los Angeles and the Inglewood Library. Eric has attended residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Banff Arts Centre and received his MFA in performance and composition from the California Institute of the Arts in 2006.
Duo Cataclysma (Jeff Kaiser & Seth Andrew Davis)
Jeff Kaiser and Seth Davis are Kansas City Missouri area based improvisors.
John Eagle
John Eagle (he/him) is a composer and musician active in a variety of performance, installation, and interdisciplinary contexts whose work often operates within ecological frameworks involving extended instrumental systems. Eagle has performed and presented work throughout the US and internationally including EMPAC’s Reembodied Sound 2024, the Sound/Image Festival in London, Int-Act Festival in Bangkok, Heidi Duckler Dance’s Ebb & Flow festival, UC Irvine’s The Art of Performance, Hear Now Music Festival, Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium, Göteborg Art Sounds, Co-Incidence Festival, Live Arts Exchange, and the Dog Star Orchestra festival. Sound House, a performance installation developed with Janie Geiser and Cassia Streb, features a sixteen-channel wireless sound instrument he designed (first versions with Eric Heep). He has worked with Charles Gaines on several projects as music director and/or arranger including Manifestos 4 and 6 with recordings and performances at Times Square, MoMA, and REDCAT. A recording of Eagle’s 2023 concert-length solo work for pianist Jack Yarbrough, erosion and growth, is available on Sawyer Editions. Eagle holds degrees from Bennington College (BA), California Institute of the Arts (MFA), and Cornell University (DMA). He currently teaches at Cornell University as a postdoctoral Teaching Associate and Studio Manager (Cornell Electroacoustic Music Center).
Ryan Gan
Insufficient Despair is Ryan Gan (b. 1976 Chicago, Illinois), a noise/experimental music artist based in Torrance, California. Centered in no-input mixing, storytelling, and voice, Gan is influenced by feedback innovators Nakamura Toshimaru and David Tudor as well as the Los Angeles Noise scene. He has organized and performed group exhibitions at Coaxial Arts and Torrance Art Museum. He has performed at soundpedro, The Handbag Factory, Santa Ana Noise Fest, Club Blob Tub, The Beatnik Lounge, and Suspirum Art Space. Insufficient Despair will also be performing at this year’s 2024 High Desert Soundings.
Ulrich Krieger
Ulrich Krieger is a composer and saxophone player in the worlds of rock, noise, contemporary composition, and free improvised music, and a composer of chamber music and electronic music. He has been active in pushing the boundaries of saxophone playing in general and the function of the saxophone in rock and noise in particular, collaborating with Lou Reed (Metal Machine Trio, Lou Reed Band), Lee Ranaldo (Text of Light), Faust, and Merzbow, in addition to leading his own death-doom-noise-metal band Blood Oath. His original compositions vacillate between just intonation, silent music, noise, and instrumental electronic, often asking for elaborate amplification, and exist in the abysses of experimental rock culture, refusing to accept stylistic boundaries. In his distinct style of amplified saxophone playing, Krieger processes refined acoustic and quasi-electronic sounds by amplifying his instrument in various ways. He gets down to the grains of the sounds, changing their identities and structures from within. No saxophone player has ever dared to explore these uncharted outer realms of woodwind expression. He teaches composition, experimental sound practices, and rock music at CalArts.
Gabe Le Neveu
Gabe Le Neveu is a California based composer whose work centers around just intonation, timbrelism, experimental synthesis and audio processing, and field recording. She holds a BFA in Composition and Experimental Sound Practices from California Institute of the Arts, where they studied under Wolfgang Von Schweinitz. Her first album, Sonder, features solo pipe organ music tuned in various systems of just intonation. Her pieces explore the profound consonance of whole number frequency ratios, however their most recent work deals with noise and inharmonicity– probing new textures and performance practices for acoustic instruments. Growing up in Seattle, Washington, the sounds of wildlife, foliage, and weather make their way into Gabe’s work; both literally by field recording and sentimentally with harmony and textural choices. Gabe has studied and met with composers Ellen Arkbro, Kali Malone, Catherine Lamb, Andrew McIntosh, Marc Sabat, and Thomas Nicholson.
Devin Maxwell
Devin Maxwell, PhD, is a composer, percussionist, and music technology entrepreneur. His chamber music has been described as “amiably strident…clusters hammered insistently” by the New York Times and orchestral works “a beautiful puzzle, … fitting between plucks and pedals that build pyramid melodies” by the American Record Guide. Awards for composition include the Nief-Norf Composition Prize, the Leroy Robertson Prize, “Best Experimental Film” New York Independent Film Festival, New Music USA/Commissioning Music USA and an Honorable Mention at the American Composer’s Orchestra 2013 Underwood Readings. Maxwell has collaborated with choreographer Jessica Gaynor Dance (NYC), filmmaker Rollin Hunt (Los Angeles), graphic designer Phillip Niemeyer (Austin), photographer Svavar Jónatansson (Iceland), and violist/songwriter Anni Rossi (NYC). His recent release “Timebending” on the Brooklyn-based Infrequent Seams label has been described as music that “may be screwing with the whole space-time continuum.” He is currently the Director of Music Composition and Technology at Westminster University in Salt Lake City.
Christina Masha Milinusic
Christina Milinusic is an audiovisual technician, sound mixer, and artist whose practice involves creating immersive sound art using field recordings and synthesizers to explore and deepen listeners’ connection to the sonic world. By mixing and arranging auditory elements, Christina creates compositions that enhance awareness of the aural environment. Her work, influenced by acoustic ecology and the sounds of daily life, fosters a deeper engagement with our soundscape.
Mason Moy
Mason Moy is a tubist, bass trombonist, and composer currently in Los Angeles, CA. He frequently makes music using extended just intonation, and free improvisation, though he is not very picky. As a composer, Mason has worked with Matt LeVeque, theBABAOrchestra, and the James Madison University Wind Ensemble. Mason has collaborated with composers such as Ellen Arkbro, Sarah Davachi, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, and Wilfredo Terrazas. He has commissioned pieces for solo tuba by Wolfgang von Schweinitz and Jack Herscowitz. Mason performs in Diapason, a brass quartet dedicated to extremely new and extremely old music.
Mystic Elevator
Abigail Whitman (she/they) is an LA-based performer-composer, improviser and Alexander Technique teacher, with a specialization in operatic and experimental vocal techniques. Their artistic practice centers around the voice as a whole body instrument. They strive to bring an updated approach to classical repertoire by modernizing staging and acting to transcend the stereotypes of these beloved older works. Beyond traditional repertoire, they work with living composers to premiere new vocal works that utilize non-traditional vocal styles. As a composer, Abigail writes pieces that explore collaborative storytelling by using improvisatory notation that allows space for performer agency.
Jack Herscowitz (he/him) is a Los Angeles based composer, improviser, and sound artist whose work engages impossibility, autobiographical sampling, performance-as-commitment, horror, unstable loops, and the extremities of noise to recognize music as a multi-sensory social art form: bringing attention to the situations in which we experience and create sound, rather than just sound itself. His work runs the wide gamut of participatory sound installations, noisy electroacoustic improvisations, theatrical performance, process-based chamber music, deconstructed remixes, and communal spaces for sound making.
Phil Niblock
Phill Niblock was a New York-based minimalist composer and multi-media musician and director of Experimental Intermedia. He has been a maverick presence on the fringes of the avant garde ever since. In the history books Niblock is the forgotten Minimalist.
His influence has had more impact on younger composers such as Susan Stenger, Lois V Vierk, David First, and Glenn Branca. He’s even worked with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo on “Guitar two, for four” which is actually for five guitarists. This is Minimalism in the classic sense of the word, if that makes sense. Movement is slow, geologically slow. Changes are almost imperceptible, and his music has a tendency of creeping up on you. He says: “What I am doing with my music is to produce something without rhythm or melody, by using many microtones that cause movements very, very slowly.”
Niblock was making films which are painstaking studies of manual labour, giving a poetic dignity to sheer gruelling slog of fishermen at work, rice-planters, log-splitters, water-hole dredgers and other back-breaking toilers. Since 1968 Phill has also put on over 1000 concerts in his loft space, including Ryoji Ikeda, Zbigniew Karkowski, Jim O’Rourke.
“No harmony. No melody. No rhythm. No bullshit.” (Phill Niblock)
Geo Skews
Geo Skews is a project by Los Angeles musician Brian JZ Griffith that explores the natural world through sample manipulation.
Davy Sumner
Davy Sumner is an installation artist, improviser, instrument builder, and sound designer based in Los Angeles. His original works are spawned out of physics, biology, and sensory perception, often utilizing electromechanics, vintage recording hardware, and feedback-based systems as key elements. He specializes in devising processes that are animated, unpredictable, and often stand to incite interpersonal interaction between audience and performer.
Christine Tavolacci
Christine Tavolacci is a Los Angeles based flutist, composer and educator specializing in contemporary and experimental music. Christine is active as a soloist, improviser, curator and chamber musician both in California and internationally. She is co-founder and co-director of Southland Ensemble, as well as a member of the Dog Star Orchestra and Gurrisonic. In 2006, Christine received her BFA in flute performance from California Institute of the Arts. Christine completed her Doctorate (DMA) in Contemporary Music Performance at the University of California San Diego in the spring of 2017.
Greg Thomas
Nihilanon is Greg Thomas (b. 1963, Amboy, CA), a harsh noise performer based in Los Angeles. Greg is heavily influenced by current LA harsh noise acts centered around Coaxial Arts, wringing out chaotic noise from the mangling of common, popular and found sounds. He has organized and performed group exhibitions at Trystero Coffee, FKA Church of Fun, and Lucky Cat Labs. And he has performed at Coaxial, Wonder Valley Experimental, The Handbag Factory, Santa Ana Noise Fest, The Beatnik Lounge, Bici Libre, and Primetime Pub. Nihlanon will also be performing with Insufficient Despair at Torrance Art Museum in November.
Clementine Wink
Hen of the Woods is the noise project of Los Angeles-based musician Clementine Wink. Raised in Berwyn and inoculated with a DIY work ethic in the Chicago punk scene(s) of the 2010s, she draws inspiration from sources as disparate as musique concrète, surrealism, disco, Catholicism, hip hop, psychiatry, and the Youth International Party. Since 2017, Hen of the Woods (named for the edible mushroom Grifola frondosa) has utilized an ever-growing variety of sounds including guitar, no-input mixing board, cello, and audio samples. Listeners are encouraged to think about the nature(s) of sound as a physical, social, and potentially spiritual occurrence.
Berk Yagli
Berk Yağlı (born 1999) is a Cypriot guitarist, composer, and producer. His mission with his music has been to talk about social, political, and philosophical matters interestingly to invite the listeners into reflecting on the topics. He has been active in the UK since 2017. He studied Music and Sound Technology (University of Portsmouth), Masters in Composition (University of Sheffield), and is currently at the University of the Arts London working under Adam Stanovic for his Ph.D. topic hybridity between metal and electroacoustic music. His works have been presented internationally including Argentina (Salta), UK (Leicester, Plymouth, Sheffield, London, Staffordshire), US (New York City, Indianapolis, Georgia, Utah, Kansas City, Missouri), Taiwan (Taipei), South Korea (Seoul), Poland (Krakow), Switzerland (Zurich), Ireland (Limerick), Italy (Padova), Mexico (Morelia), Austria (Linz), Australia (Sydney), China (Shenzhen) and more. He is regularly invited to compose in studios including VICC (Visby, Sweden), CMMAS (Morelia, Mexico), ACA-Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida, USA), EMS (Stockholm, Sweden), NOVARS Research Center (Manchester United Kingdom), Mediawave International Film Festival (Gyor, Hungary) and Studio Kura (Fukuoka, Japan). He won numerous awards for his compositions in international music competitions including Musica Nova (Prague, Czech Republic), IYMC (Atlanta, US), ULJUS (Smederevo, Serbia), and more.
