8pm: Doors
8:30pm: Zeena Parkins and William Winant
9:30pm: Wadada Leo Smith with Ikue Mori, Anthony Davis, Hardedge
$20 General / $15 Members

PLEASE NOTE: Tickets are sold out, but we will release unclaimed seats at the door at 8:25pm on a first come, first serve basis. $10 floor seats will be available starting at 8pm at the door – bring your own cushion!

Closing out the three-part Abstract Languages event series, Wadada Leo Smith performs his piece Four Symphonies. He plays the trumpet, and has invited others to join him. Ikue Mori performs on electronics, Anthony Davis plays the piano, and Hardedge does the sound design. Zeena Parkins and William Winant perform an improvised duo for harp and percussion.

Location: The Wattis Institute, 360 Kansas St, San Francisco, CA 94103
7:15 pm: Zeena Parkins introduction and Butch Morris screening
Free

A screening of rare archival footage of a "conduction" by the late composer Lawrence "Butch" Morris (1947-2013), introduced by Zeena Parkins.

Location: Kadist, 3295 20th St, San Francisco, CA 94110
6–7pm: Reception
7-8pm: Wadada Leo Smith in conversation with Hamza Walker
Free

An opening reception for Ankhrasmation: The Language Scores, an exhibition by Wadada Leo Smith, and a conversation between the artist and LAXART Director Hamza Walker.

FREE
Copies of Bruce Conner: The Afternoon Interviews will be available for sale
Facebook RSVP

From the late ’70s to 2005, V. Vale interviewed Bruce Conner by telephone and in person mostly in the afternoons. Spontaneous yet insightful in his conversation, Conner is revealed as an innovative improvisatory artist whose goal in life seemed to be freedom and the transcendence of hidebound careerist conformity in all its bureaucratic manifestations. 

8pm Doors / 8:30pm Sound
$15 General / Free for members
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Chris Brown, piano and computer
Theresa Wong, cello, voice, and amplification
Kyle Bruckmann, oboe and analog electronics

7:30-8:00 The Drinks
8:00-9:15 The Performance
9:15 Back to The Drinks
9:30-11:00 The Dancing  
$15 General / Free for members
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The Zizi Show is a project by the Rocca Family. This talk show-performance-playground comes back with its latest edition entitled Jinjin Fear with Zizi. Zizi will use her charms and cast her spells, surrender to Zizi and fearless you shall be. 

Stranded presents: Rhys Chatham / Bill Orcutt
8pm Doors / 9pm Music
$15 General - Buy tickets here
$10 - Members of The Lab (member tickets available at the door – email thelabsf@thelab.org to be put on the list)

Rhys Chatham is a composer/performer from NY currently living in Paris. Having played in the groups of Tony Conrad and La Monte Young during the early seventies, his current projects include his orchestras of 100-200 electric guitars as well as his smaller Guitar Trio configuration. 

Talk starts at 7pm
FREE

Join Peter Eleey, Curator and Associate Director of Exhibitions and Programs at MoMA PS1, for a free public program at The Lab. Eleey will visit San Francisco for three days to participate in Art & Dialogue. During his stay, he will visit with eight Artadia Awardees.

8pm Doors / 8:30pm Performance
$15 General / Free for members
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Facebook Invite

Phillip Greenlief (saxophone), Fred Frith (guitar), and Rashaun Mitchell (dance) will create an embodied sound score. These improvisations will be recorded live and internationally distributed as a DVD on Relative Pitch Records, NYC.

FREE, copies of Before Pictures will be available for sale

Art historian and critic Douglas Crimp discusses his new memoir, Before Pictures, with writer Claudia La Rocco.

Douglas Crimp is the rare art critic whose work profoundly influenced a generation of artists. He is best known for his work with the “Pictures Generation.” But while his influence is widely recognized, we know little about Crimp’s own formative experiences. Before Pictures tells the story of Crimp’s life as a young gay man and art critic in New York City from the late 1960s through the ’70s. The details of his professional and personal life are interwoven with the particularly rich history of New York City, producing a vivid portrait of both the critic and his adopted city. At the same time, it offers a deeply personal and engaging point of entry into important issues in contemporary art. In Crimp’s words: “Through the book, I weave together stories of the two cultures that were most important in my life at the time—gay liberation and the art that came to be called post-modernist.”

7-9pm, readings start promptly at 7:30pm
$8 entry (no one turned away for lack of funds), free for members
Reserve seats here

Facebook invite

Anna Moschovakis is the author, most recently, of They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This (Coffee House Press) and the translator of Bresson on Bresson (New York Review Books Classics). She edits and designs book with Ugly Duckling Presse and teaches in the MFA programs at Pratt Institute and Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. 

Poet and translator Michael Palmer has lived in San Francisco since 1969. He has worked with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for over forty years and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists. His most recent collections are Active Boundaries (Selected Essays and Talks), (New Directions, 2008), Madman With Broom (selected poems with Chinese translations by Yunte Huang, Oxford University Press, 2011), and Thread, (New Directions, 2011). His new book of poems, The Laughter of the Sphinx, was published by New Directions in June of 2016.

7pm Doors / 7:30pm Bruce Baillie Introduction and Films
$10 General / Free for members
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Filmmaker Bruce Baillie will present the premiere of Spring (2016) for Jefferson Sunflower along with a selection of video works completed over the past 26 years.

The program to include:
Les Memoires d’un ange
Spring (2016) for Jefferson Sunflower
P 38 Pilot
I Wish I Knew
The Cardinal’s Return
Study Reel (The Baillies, '02) By Sami Van Ingen (Finland)
Dr. Bish’s Birthday by Tung
Roy Eldridge   
—and a few more surprises

Born in South Dakota in 1931, Bruce Baillie served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War and studied filmmaking for a year at the London School of Film Technique. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s and within a few years became a guiding light of the New American Cinema. Simultaneous to his earliest personal experiments in 16mm, Baillie launched Canyon Cinema in the redwoods over Oakland in 1961. As he recounted to interviewer Scott MacDonald, "Immediately I realized that making films and showing films must go hand in hand, so I got a job at Safeway, took out a loan and bought a projector." 

7-9pm, readings start promptly at 7:30pm $8 entry (no one turned away for lack of funds), free for members
Reserve seats here

Kimberly Lyons is the author of books of poetry including Approximately Near (Metambesendotorg, 2016), Calcinatio (Faux Press, 2014) and Rouge (Instance Press, 2012). Her essays on the poetry of Bernadette Mayer and Joseph Ceravolo appeared in Aufgabe and Jacket 2.  She has given talks on the poetry of Alice Notley, Pierre Joris, Barbara Guest and the Poetry Project in the 1980s. She is the publisher of Lunar Chandelier Press and has recently organized events at Anthology Film Archives in NYC. She lives in Chicago.

Vyt Bakaitis, a native of Lithuania, has been living in New York City since 1968. A book of his poems City Country appeared in 1991 (Black Thistle Press, NYC), and con/structs, his book of visual poems and photographs, came out in a limited edition in 2001 (Arunas K. Photo+Graphics, NYC). His reviews of poetry have appeared in World Literature Today and The Poetry Project Newsletter. Vyt Bakaitis has also published translations of poetry from several languages, including the anthology of 20th Century Lithuanian poetry he edited, Breathing Free (Lithuanian Writers Union, 2001). His versions of the classic Romantics Hölderlin and Mickiewicz are included in World Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1998). His translations of the poems of Jonas Mekas were published as There Is No Ithaca (Black Thistle Press), with a foreword by Czeslaw Milosz, and as Daybooks (Portable Press at YoYo Labs). Deliberate Proof, a new collection of poems, was brought out by Lunar Chandelier Press in 2010. Recent poems have appeared in Vanitas, The Brooklyn Rail, Talisman and the online journal, Eoagh (eoagh.com).

Kit Schluter’s writing can be found in the False Starts pamphlet, and elsewhere. Among his forthcoming and published translations are books by Amandine André, Anne Kawala, Clamanç Llansana, Jaime Saenz, Marcel Schwob, and Michel Surya. He is a 2016 NEA translation fellow, and makes books in good company under the name of O’clock Press.

8pm Doors / 8:30pm Performance
$15 General / Free for members
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Marielle V Jakobsons
Phil Manley / Andy Puls
Maggi Payne

An evening of audiovisual immersion celebrating the release of Marielle’s new new Thrill Jockey Records album “Star Core.”  Maggi Payne will be screening her exquisite and delicate videos and tone miester from Trans Am Phil Manley will be collaborating for the first time with video synth wizard Andy Puls.

8pm Doors / 8:30 Sound
$15 General / Free for members
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This program explores an iconoclastic strain of Americana that merges experimentalism with folk forms – a style often connected to John Fahey's Takoma Records catalog of the 1960s and 70s – and the artists who are expanding and challenging the boundaries solo guitar-based practice in their own way. With Bill Orcutt, Chuck Johnson, Itasca, and Sarah Louise.

Event 7:30pm
$10 General / Free for Members
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A co-production by Kadist and The Lab, Clair-audience is a performative listening session developed by artist Hong-Kai Wang in collaboration with artists Dohee Lee and Marshall Trammell. The session comes out of a recent conversation among local thinkers and practitioners gathering to speculate about the unrecorded movements of “black ghosts” across the Pacific Ocean–from Taiwan to California­– listened to and facilitated by Lee and Trammell.  

Pronounced as “oo-kui" in Taiwanese, “black ghosts” leave very few perceivable traces of their whereabouts in colonial Taiwan. Taiwanese sugarcane workers lament “black ghosts” as slaves in a protest song in 1925; 17th-century Dutch painters depict them as Indonesian servants; a Spanish missionary’s diary in 1632 mention them as Filipino forced laborers and mercenaries who sought refuge from Native Taiwanese communities; and ornaments of Taoist temples in southern Taiwan immortalize them as mythical creatures. Existing between the limits and possibilities of archives, the representation of “black ghosts” rigorously questions parameters of knowledge and understanding of bodies. 

The performative listening session consists of Lee and Trammell’s unorchestrated conjuring of the spaces of forgetting and the bodies of the forgotten that transpire during and beyond the prior group conversation. Audiences are invited to actively hear and listen for the voices beyond times and places, while the performers call forth these spaces and bodies through rhythms, beats, words, and movements. All temporalities are considered.  

7-9pm, readings start promptly at 7:30pm
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Mark Wallace is the author and editor of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Most recently he has published a book-length prose poem, Notes from the Center on Public Policy. His novelCrab is forthcoming in 2017. He lives in San Diego and teaches at California State University, San Marcos. 

Lindsey Boldt is the author of Overboard (Publication Studio) and the chapbooks, Titties for Lindsey (OMG), Overboard: Rampage (Berkeley Neo Baroque), Oh My, Hell Yes (Summer BF Press) and a forthcoming chapbook from Couch Press with an unpronounceable title (sorry, not sorry). She lives in Oakland, CA.

Rodney Koeneke’s most recent book of poems is Etruria (Wave Books, 2014). Earlier collections include Rouge State and Musee Mechanique. A new chapbook, Seven for Boetticher and Other Poems, was published last year by Oakland’s Hooke Press. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches history at Portland State.

Superior Viaduct presents: Laraaji & Sun Araw (record release show)
8pm Doors / 9pm Music
$15 General / $10 for Members of The Lab (member tickets available at the door – email thelabsf@thelab.org to be put on the list)

Tickets available at the door. If you already purchased tickets, there is going to be a Will Call list at the door. Thanks.

Please join us for a rare performance by ambient icon Laraaji and LA experimentalists Sun Araw, two colossal forces in contemporary electronic music.

Laraaji’s musical radiance has continued to shine brightly over four decades, starting with 1980’s Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (third in Brian Eno’s classic ambient series). Sun Araw emerged in 2008 with transformative recordings that combine classic dub and reggae effects with elements of noise, drone and psychedelia.

This first-time live collaboration in the US celebrates the release of Professional Sunflow – the inaugural record on Superior Viaduct’s W.25TH imprint – featuring Laraaji’s soulful vocals and signature instrument, zither, along with Sun Araw’s Cameron Stallones (guitar/keyboards) and Alex Gray (computer synthesis).

7:30pm Doors / 8pm Sound
$15 General Admission / Free for Members of The Lab
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Phillip Greenlief (reeds) & Claudia La Rocco (text, voice) created Animals & Giraffes as a way to explore how improvisation on and off the page can create a larger conversation between sound and text.  Collaboration is central to Animals & Giraffes; for this concert Greenlief and La Rocco are joined by electronic musician John Bischoff and percussionist Karen Stackpole (who is one of many Bay Area improvisers featured on the duo’s debut album, JULY, forthcoming from Relative Pitch Records).

7:30pm Doors / 8pm Music
$15 General Admission / Free for Members of The Lab
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Laura Naukkarinen, (born 1980) is a singer-songwriter and musician from Helsinki. She is also a member of free improv and psych folk bands Kiila, Päivänsäde, the Anaksimandros, Avarus, Maailma, and the trio Hertta Lussu Ässä formed by fellow acid folk singer-songwriters Islaja and Kuupuu. Her sound has been likened to the cooing of doves. She's credited as playing anything from "colorful juice glasses" and "witch laugh megaphone" to "beer cans". This will be Lau Nau's first San Francisco show in 6 years - she will be joined onstage by members of Dire Wolves who will also open the show. Both sets will feature live film work from Paul Clipson.

Event is FREE for those who backed our Kickstarter and FREE for members
$20 general admission

The Lab has invited Kembra Pfahler to transform its space into a surreal “Manual of Action” through her core tenets of Availabism, Beautalism, and Antinaturalism. The madness will culminate with a performance event on May 28th hosted by Kembra and her brother Adam Pfahler's (formerly of Jawbreaker) band California. In the words of Nick Zedd/Orion Jeriko this event promises “blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed!”

Kembra Pfahler is an artist and rock musician, best known as the painted lead singer of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, a theatrical death rock band she co-founded in 1990. Named in honor of cult horror film heroine Karen Black, the band uses music, drawings and films to dispel the antiquated notion that there is a hierarchy of artistic mediums. In her art and music, Pfahler follows the philosophy of availabism—making the best of what’s available. This is apparent in the low-tech props and homemade costumes the Girls of Karen Black don on stage and which fill Pfahler’s exhibition installations.

8pm Doors / 8:30pm Sights & Sounds
$15 General Admission / Free for Members of The Lab
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Puncture Tones (2016), is a new composition by Chiara Giovando for voice, strings and subwoofers. Puncture Tones plays with the psychoacoustics phenomena of sonic masking, or the presence of a sound that partially or completely masks the perception of another sound. Using sculpture, graphical notation and a play between electronic and acoustic sound, Puncture Tones explores the concept of the mask as a reflective surface for subjectivity.

With Kristina Dutton, violin, Mia Bella D’Augelli, violin, Crystal Pascucci, cello, Danishta Rivera, voice and singing mask, Jake Freeman, voice and singing mask, Chiara Giovando, voice and electronics.

Puncture Tones will open with solo precision from Yasi Perera and a film program including new short works from Wei Li and light of the tulpa, an expanded cinema performance by arc that uses xerox printed 16mm film based on occult color theories found in the book Thought Forms (Annie Besant & C.W. Leadbeater. 1901). light of the tulpa is a stroboscopic inquiry into the visual and sonic invocations of the book's printed color fields.