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Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
$27 advance / $29 door / free or discounted for members
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Natural Information Society (NIS) is a band led by composer & multi-instrumentalist Joshua Abrams. The group’s music is grounded in Abrams’ hypnotic & interwoven writing. Performing with Lisa Alvarado’s free hanging paintings as mobile sets, NIS creates environments at once meditative & propulsive. NIS navigates forms that emphasize simultaneous differences, rhythm & collective listening. The group has released seven records, including recent descension (Out of Our Constrictions) 2021 and 2023 Since Time is Gravity for eremite records.
NIS tours as a quartet with Abrams on guimbri, Alvarado on harmonium, Mikel Patrick Avery on drums & Jason Stein on bass clarinet, occasionally appearing in larger formations & with guests.
Outside of NIS Abrams has played & recorded with a broad range of artists including Fred Anderson, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Nicole Mitchell & The Roots. He has composed scores to ten feature films including the Oscar nominated Abacus: Small Enough to Jail. Abrams was a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts 2018 Grants to Artists award.
The Togetherness Ensemble is convened on occasion by Zekarias Musele Thompson to hold space for communal resonance through collective improvisation. Prompted by the historical and contemporary creative sensibilities of African, and African diasporic peoples, and the possibilities of emergent composition as the scaffolding for recognizing ourselves as free.
The Togetherness Ensemble made its debut interpreting James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” during the closing performance of Possible Dialogues: Vol 1 in July 2023, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. For this third iteration at The Lab, the ensemble will make the second performance of Between You and Me, a collaboratively made graphic score of oil on canvas.
For the evening of May 29th, the Togetherness Ensemble is comprised of:
Miles Lassi
Phillip Laurent
Benjamin Rodgers
Zekarias Musele Thompson
Joshua Wismans