Doors at 8pm doors / Music at 9pm
with Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta opening

Under the name Nivhek, Liz Harris (Grouper) maps richly detailed inner worlds where enigmatic vibrations and voices glide dimly in and out of the void. Double album After its own death / Walking in a spiral towards the house consists of opaque assemblages of Mellotron, guitar, field recordings, tapes, and broken FX pedals. In pacing, palette, and poignancy, these sides rank among Harris' most stark, primordial work: fragile, feverish, ominous, and otherworldly.

Bay Area artist Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta will perform a piece titled "In Defense of She Who Smiles, the Armed Beauty, the Horse Thief."

8:00pm doors / 8:30pm show

Jim White and George Xylouris have been friends since Jim’s early days in Dirty Three. Their musical connection goes back to then and led them to start Xylouris White in 2013. Since then, they have released three albums and been touring the world. The Sisypheans is their fourth release.

Jim on The Sisypheans:
“As George Xylouris and I traveled around these last five years, we found ourselves talking about Sisyphus. George had a theory about Sisyphus, con- demned to climb that hill with that rock forever. George saw him carrying the rock in different ways, in his left hand, behind his back, pushing it with his head while crawling and noticing each journey the seasons changing, the grass and the insects. The meaning was clear and for George it fit with playing the popular Cretan song “Proto Hanoti” many turns each day for his life and dis- covering it new each time . . . I found it fit in with a long held set of thoughts I’d had, that if one concentrated activity and thought enough on one thing it would expand and be a whole world. It sounded like the same idea and also with the idea of first principles, for it to be new each time: that is our job as musicians.

We would talk about this as we traveled playing music. One day a waitress heard us talking, and she asked if we knew the Camus essay about Sisyphus. We didn’t, but I got it in English and then we found it in Greek and it fit too. When we were playing in Louisville and working on Black Peak, we stayed at a house and saw the artwork you see on the cover, by Elsa Hansen Oldham . . .We’d finished the circular trilogy of Goats, Black Peak, and Mother and we found ourselves making –. What we do leads us to who we are, the Sisypheans.”

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Greek Studies at San Francisco State University

6:30pm doors / 7pm talk
RSVP

Join Miranda Lash, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum, for a free public program at The Lab, co-presented with Artadia. Her talk, titled The Urgency of Art, discusses the crucial role of artists and artist-run spaces, looking specifically at case studies in New Orleans, Appalachia, and Athens, Greece. Lash will visit San Francisco for three days to participate in Art & Dialogue: New York. During her stay, she will visit with eight Artadia Awardees.

Miranda Lash is the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum and a board member for the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Her recent exhibitions at the Speed include Yinka Shonibare: The American Library (co-curated with Alice Gray Stites), Keltie Ferris: *O*P*E*N*, and BRUCE CONNER: FOREVER AND EVER (co-curated with Dean Otto). Her 2017 exhibition Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art, co-organized with Trevor Schoonmaker, garnered praise from sources including The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and NPR. Lash was a member of the Artistic Director’s Council for the international triennial Prospect.4 in New Orleans (2017-2018). Currently she is the 2019 Curatorial Fellow for ARCAthens, a residency program based in Athens, Greece.

From 2008 to 2014, Lash was the founding curator of modern and contemporary art at the New Orleans Museum of Art. There she curated over twenty exhibitions, including the large-scale traveling retrospective exhibition Mel Chin: Rematch and the exhibitions Rashaad Newsome: King of Arms; Katie Holten: Drawn to the Edge; Swoon: Thalassa; Wayne Gonzales: Light to Dark, Dark to Light; and Parallel Universe: Quintron and Miss Pussycat Live at City Park. Lash also presented several artists’ first solo museum exhibitions in the United States including the Venice Biennale Silver Lion awardee Camille Henrot in Camille Henrot: Cities of Ys and the British artist Marcus Coates in Marcus Coates: Animal Instincts. 

Lash’s essays have been published in the Harvard journal Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, the anthology Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art, New American Paintings, The Oxford American, and most recently, Andy Warhol: Revelation published by the Andy Warhol Museum. Lash has been a Clark Fellow at the Clark Art Institute, a consultant for Creative Capital, and a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Artadia’s Art & Dialogue is a national program designed to connect Artadia Awardees and the public with curators and cultural producers from outside of their cities. Artadia currently supports over 330 Awardees working in a diverse array of disciplines in six cities across the country

Performed by Charles Curtis, Rhodri Davies, and Robin Hayward

8:00pm doors / 8:30pm show
$20 general admission

Éliane Radigue (b. 1932) is a pioneering French composer of undulating continuous music marked by patient, virtually imperceptible transformations that purposefully unfold to reveal the intangible, radiant contents of minimal sound—its partials, harmonics, subharmonics and inherent distortions. As a student and assistant to musique concrète pioneers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Radigue mastered tape splicing techniques, but preferred the creation of fluid, delicately balanced feedback works to the spasmodic dissonance of her teachers’ music. Finding peers among minimalist composers in America, Radigue began working with synthesis in 1970, eventually discovering the ARP 2500 synthesizer, which she would use exclusively for her celebrated electronic works to come. With remarkable restraint, Radigue spent years on each electronic piece, painstakingly assembling series of subtle, pulsating ARP recordings to be later mixed meticulously into hourlong suites of precise, perpetual mutation, including masterpieces Trilogie de la mort and Adnos I-III. In 2001, Radigue adapted an early feedback work to live performance on electric bass, Elemental II, and in 2004, with the encouragement of ongoing collaborator Charles Curtis, she permanently abandoned electronics for acoustic composition, beginning with Naldjorlak for solo cello, composed for Curtis. As within each individual work, Radigue has maintained an obstinate focus throughout the flow of her career, her dedication to the materiality of sound earning her numerous accolades and ensuring her place as one of the most important composers of our time.

Occam Ocean is an ongoing series of solo and ensemble pieces composed by Radigue for individual instrumentalists in which a performer's personal performance technique and particular relationship to their instrument function as the compositional material of the piece. The “knights of the Occam,” as Radigue refers to the performers participating in the project, are therefore musicians who have developed individualistic, creative approaches to their instruments; and the resulting compositions are not transferable to other performers on that instrument. Citing the ocean as a calming antidote to the overwhelming nature of our vibratory wave-filled surroundings, Radigue has named the tributary components of her Occam series with the image of fluid water in mind. Solo pieces are Occams, duo pieces Rivers, and larger ensemble pieces Deltas. The process of combining or over-laying the solos as small ensemble pieces, with only minor adjustments in the solos themselves, recalls Radigue's procedure in the early feedback works made as sound installations, in which individual feedback loops are to combined freely in slight non-synchronization such that combinations of loops rarely or never repeat. With the extreme simplicity of Occam’s razor, continuous pieces that are iridescent on their own achieve a new radiance of interacting pulsation in their River and Delta configurations. The Occam series began in 2011 with a solo for harpist Rhodri Davies and has continued steadily to the present, counting now well over fifty individual solos and ensemble pieces.

Acknowledged internationally as a performer of new and experimental music, cellist Charles Curtis has been associated with minimalist pioneer La Monte Young and Marina Zazeela since 1987, their intimate working relationship having yielded retroactive recalibrations of pieces like Young’s 1958 Trio for Strings. Curtis is also the first performer to collaborate with Éliane Radigue on a work for an unamplified, acoustic instrument without electronic support or accompaniment. This work, Naldjorlak, composed in 2004 and premiered in December 2005, is an hour-long, exhaustive enquiry into the inherent resonating properties of the cello.

Rhodri Davies is an improvising harpist who confronts traditional concepts of the harp through his use of preparations, detuned, bowed, and e-bowed strings. One of the most prominent members of the London reductionist school of improvised music, new pieces for solo harp have been composed for him by Philip Corner and Yasunao Tone, in addition to Éliane Radigue.

Robin Hayward is a tuba player and composer who has introduced radical playing techniques to brass instruments, initially through the discovery of the ‘noise-valve’ and later through the development of the first fully microtonal tuba in 2009. In 2012 he invented the Hayward Tuning Vine, partly out of a desire to visualise the harmonic space implicit within the microtonal tuba, and began working on a solo tuba piece with Éliane Radigue, which became Occam XI. Other composer collaborations include Christian Wolff and Alvin Lucier.

7:00pm doors / 7:30pm sound

Éliane Radigue (b. 1932) is a pioneering French composer of undulating continuous music marked by patient, virtually imperceptible transformations that purposefully unfold to reveal the intangible, radiant contents of minimal sound—its partials, harmonics, subharmonics and inherent distortions. As a student and assistant to musique concrète pioneers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Radigue mastered tape splicing techniques, but preferred the creation of fluid, delicately balanced feedback works to the spasmodic dissonance of her teachers’ music. Finding peers among minimalist composers in America, Radigue began working with synthesis in 1970, eventually discovering the ARP 2500 synthesizer, which she would use exclusively for her celebrated electronic works to come. With remarkable restraint, Radigue spent years on each electronic piece, painstakingly assembling series of subtle, pulsating ARP recordings to be later mixed meticulously into hourlong suites of precise, perpetual mutation. In 2001, Radigue adapted an early feedback work to live performance on electric bass, Elemental II, and in 2004, with the encouragement of ongoing collaborator Charles Curtis, she permanently abandoned electronics for acoustic composition, beginning with Naldjorlak for solo cello, composed for Curtis. As within each individual work, Radigue has maintained an obstinate focus throughout the flow of her career, her dedication to the materiality of sound earning her numerous accolades and ensuring her place as one of the most important composers of our time.

Created between 1985 and 1993, Trilogie de la Mort is considered by many to be Éliane Radigue’s masterpiece. An extended sonic meditation on death informed by Radigue’s dedicated engagement with Tibetan Buddhism, the piece is made up of three hour-long ARP 2500 synthesizer compositions: Kyema, Kailasha, and Koumé. Kyema was inspired by the Bardo Thodol, or Tibetan Book of the Dead, with six sections reflecting the six bardos, or intermediate states of life and death which constitute the existential continuity of a being. Shortly after finishing the piece in 1988, Radigue learned of a tragic car accident which took the life of her son Yves. Two weeks later, she began work on Kailasha, named after the most sacred of the Tibetan mountains, Mount Kailash. Although an actual visit to the site, considered to be the center of the world in Tibetan cosmology, was beyond Radigue’s capacity, the piece functions both as a sonic pilgrimage and a memorial to her deceased son and was completed in 1991. A subsequent trip to Nepal for the cremation of her Tibetan master convinced Radigue of the transcendental aspect of death as part of a perpetual becoming, lending a heightened clarity to Koumé, which she finished in 1993, completing the trilogy. Trilogie de la Mort was premiered in November 1993 at the monastery at Cimiez in Nice where the sound from hidden loudspeakers seemed, according to minimalist composer Tom Johnson, to ooze out of the walls.

Trilogie de la Mort will be diffused using a newly produced reel-to-reel tape edition of the original master, one of a series produced by Blank Forms in New York in collaboration with Radigue for the high quality presentation of her work.

Trilogie de la Mort is part of Éliane Radigue: Intermediate States, a retrospective curated by Lawrence Kumpf and Charles Curtis and developed in collaboration with Éliane Radigue for Blank Forms in New York. The retrospective seeks to present Radigue’s practice in a richly contextualized, holistic manner to draw out important connections between her early and late periods of work, examining the breadth of her practice and juxtaposing her compositions with new interpretations and experimental re-stagings by contemporary composers. The retrospective will continue in New York with more programs into 2020.

Éliane Radigue: Intermediate States has been made possible with generous support from Wales Arts International, the Goethe-Institut, and through the New Music Fund, a program of FACE Foundation, with generous funding from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, Florence Gould Foundation, Fondation CHANEL, French Ministry of Culture, Institut français-Paris, and SACEM (Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique).

Please join us for a talk by Silvia Federici followed by a vegetarian lunch.

Silvia Federici is a feminist activist, writer, and a teacher. In 1972 she was one of the cofounders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the Wages For Housework campaign internationally. In the 1990s, after a period of teaching and research in Nigeria, she was active in the anti-globalization movement and the U.S. anti–death penalty movement. She is one of the co-founders of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, an organization dedicated to generating support for the struggles of students and teachers in Africa against the structural adjustment of African economies and educational systems. From 1987 to 2005 she taught international studies, women studies, and political philosophy courses at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. All through these years she has written books and essays on philosophy and feminist theory, women’s history, education and culture, and more recently the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalization and for a feminist reconstruction of the commons.

8:00pm doors / 8:30pm show
$15 general admission / $10 members
Reserve seats: member login or guest registration

Martin Creed is known for winning the Turner Prize in 2001 with The Lights Going On And Off, and over the following years for many works involving live music, dance and the use of words — in the form of word-sculptures, talks and songs. Most recently he has been working on a new one-person show, "Getting Changed”, which is part-talk, part-concert, part-cabaret. It is the follow-up to the show "Words & Music" which he did at the Edinburgh Festival in 2017 and has played around the world.

Some of the themes of the new show are borders both personal and national, communication in the form of clothes, and words as clothes for feelings, all put together live in Martin's responsive freestyle way.

8:00pm doors / 8:30pm show
$15 general admission / $10 members
Reserve seats: member login or guest registration

Over the last decade Makoto Kawashima has emerged as one of the most original improvisers in a new generation of Japanese players. His releases on his own Homosacer label as well as on what would be the final album released by P.S.F. Records reveal a haunting and intense style of playing, bursting with a brutality and virtue that reflect the deepest foundations of Japanese free jazz. Kawashima was born in 1981 in Saitama, a prefecture of the Greater Tokyo Area, but it wasn’t until 2008 that he first picked up the alto saxophone, electing to perform primarily in a solo configuration since 2010. Following the tradition of alto forebears Kaoru Abe and Masayoshi Urabe, he recorded his 2015 record Homo Sacer for P.S.F. Records. Its publication and recent reissue by Black Editions have represented something of a passing of the free improvisation torch, with the session boasting an impassioned performance by Kawashima using one of Kaoru Abe’s reeds given to him by the latter’s mother. Leaping between subdued lyrical lamentations and insistent trills, Kawashima sculpts negative space as counterpoint for his dizzying screeches into the void. This will be Kawashima's first ever performance in California.

Grammy winner Henry Kaiser is widely recognized as one of the most creative and innovative guitarists, improvisers, and producers in the fields of rock, jazz, world, and contemporary experimental musics. The California-based musician is one of the most extensively recorded as well, having appeared on more than 330 different albums and contributed to countless television and film soundtracks. Mr. Kaiser not only produces and contributes to a staggering number of recorded projects, he performs frequently throughout the USA, Canada, Europe and Japan, with several regular groupings as well as solo guitar concerts and concerts of freely improvised music with a host of diverse instrumentalists. He is also a longtime research diver in the US Antarctic Program. He has shot more footage under Antarctic ice than any other videographer/cinematographer. Kaiser was nominated for an academy award for his film with Werner Herzog “Encounters at the End of the World.”

Soo Yeon Lyuh is a haegeum (Korean two-string bowed instrument) player, composer, and improviser currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Rigorously trained in court and folk repertories from a young age, Lyuh is known for her masterful performances of new compositions for the haegeum. Deeply invested in exploring new musical possibilities via improvisation, Lyuh has collaborated with the Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Fred Frith, and numerous other diverse international performers and composers. She has performed renowned contemporary and experimental concerts in festivals and venues all over the world including India, Turkey, Spain and at the Isang Yun Music Festival in North Korea. Lyuh has recorded multiple CDs of Korean court music, Jazz, and improvisation, as well as being featured on an improvisational recording with Henry Kaiser, Bill Laswell, Rudresh Mahanthappa, and Simon Barker

8pm doors / 8:30pm performance
$15 general admission / Free for members
Reserve seats: member login or guest registration

Tom Hall is an Australian audio/visual artist, residing in Los Angeles. His practice involves extensive exploration into place, space and time. Inspired by peripheral environments found in the everyday, he focuses on an exploratory discourse to engage and recontextualize found materials, using sound and imagery as a means to translate and create hybrid environments through temporal translations. These outcomes vary and include drone, melody, glitch and installations; portrayed using analog and digital synthesis, computer programming and reactionary visuals. Hall has released a number of recordings in the past two decade on labels such as Elli records, Overlap, Arlen, and Presto!? along with extensive exhibitions and live performance tours worldwide. Hall also works as a Content Developer for the revered Cycling ’74, creators of the visual programming language Max/MSP & Jitter. http://tomhall.com.au

Scott Arford works with sound, video and space. He has been active in the Bay Area's underground music and art scene since 1995. His work spans styles and mediums and includes live a/v performance, installations, and recorded works. Arford has shown work globally including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Sounding Festivals in Guangzhou, China and Taipei, Taiwan, Liquid Architecture in Melbourne, Australia, Sonic Light in Amsterdam, and the Center for Contemporary Arts in Kitakyushu, Japan. His awards include an Honorable Mention in the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica. Arford received a Bachelor of Architecture from the College of Architecture and Design at Kansas State University in 1991. http://www.7hz.org

Jorge Bachmann is a San Francisco based Sound Artist and curator. He has been involved in San Francisco's experimental music/dance scene since the early 2000. Working across a wide range of explorations, Bachmann's work is eclectic, going from subtle "Musique Concrète" Soundscapes to analog modular synth minimalism. Since the early 1980's he has been exploring the strange, unique and microscopic sounds of everyday life. Collecting field recordings and creating immersive soundscapes. Blurring the boundaries between wilderness sound environments and man-made sounds. Bachmann has composed music for MOBU Dance troupe and Christine Bonansea Dance Company. He has performed and exhibited in North America, Europe, Japan, Taiwan and South America. In 2009 he performed his audio-visual piece, "Coleoptera", at the 10th Francisco Electronic Music Festival. In recent years he has performed and improvised with the likes of Alessandro Cortini, Bryan Day, Michael Gendreau, Mason Jones, David Graves, Danishta Rivero, Markus Hawkings, Yuko Matsuyama, Kevin Corcoran, Jaroba and Takahiro Kawaguchi. His last solo album "Mare Island" is on Ithaca's VauxFlores Industrial label. At present he is also part of the bands, “Faults”, "Collision Stories" and "audre". http://soundcloud.com/ruidobello/

8:00pm Doors / 8:30 pm Performance
ALL SEATS HAVE BEEN RESERVED – Standing room and floor seats will be released at the door depending on space. Add your name to the queue at the front desk when you arrive and we will start releasing spaces at 8:20pm

The San Francisco Arts Commission is thrilled to present legendary composer, performer, and media artist Pamela Z in a live performance of works for solo voice, electronics, and projected image. This performance is planned in conjunction with side by side/in the world, an exhibition on view at the SFAC Main Gallery which explores the idea of sanctuary through the work of ten California artists including Pamela Z. For the exhibition, Z presents Suitcase, a mixed media installation which features a suitcase as both a bag and a home for a video projection of a vulnerable and inconsolable female subject that occupies it. Part of a larger work called Baggage Allowance, Suitcase asks the viewer to think about the things we carry with us both physically and emotionally when we travel by choice or by necessity.

Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist who makes solo works combining a wide range of vocal techniques with electronic processing, samples, gesture activated MIDI controllers, and video. She has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Her work has been presented at venues and exhibitions including Bang on a Can (NY), the Japan Interlink Festival, Other Minds (SF), the Venice Biennale, and the Dakar Biennale. She's created installations and has composed scores for dance, film, and chamber ensembles (including Kronos Quartet). Her awards include the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency, the Herb Alpert Award, and an Ars Electronica honorable mention, and the NEA/Japan-US Fellowship. pamelaz.com

Image: Pamela Z performing at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria Photo: rubra (courtesy of Ars Electronica)

7:30pm doors / 8pm readings
$8 entry (no one turned away for lack of funds), free for members

Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, "Someone's Dead Already" was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book "Heaven Is All Goodbyes" was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award.

8pm doors / 8:30pm performance
$15 general admission / Free for members
Reserve seats: member login or guest registration

Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener: Dance
Phillip Greenlief: Saxophone
Evelyn Davis: Piano 

Since 2010 Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener have created dance in response to complex and active spatial environments, often merging elements of fantasy, absurdity, and quiet contemplation into challenging multifaceted performance. After working together in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Mitchell and Riener developed a keen interest in the way abstraction and representation coincide in the body. Their collaborative work takes many forms, from site-specific installations, improvisational dances, and traditional proscenium pieces to highly crafted and intimate, immersive experiences. Historical influences and aesthetic forms collapse into a visually charged hybrid physical language. Together they have been part of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Dance Development program, the New York City Center Choreographic Fellowship, and have been artists in residence at EMPAC, Mount Tremper Arts, Wellesley College, Jacob’s Pillow, and Pieter. Their work has been presented at MOMA PS1 as part of Greater NY, The Chocolate Factory, New York Live Arts, Danspace Project, REDCAT, ICA Boston and Summer Stages Dance, the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, On the Boards, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Since his emergence on the west coast in the late 1970s, saxophonist Phillip Greenlief has achieved international critical acclaim for his recordings and performances with musicians and composers in the post-jazz continuum as well as new music innovators and virtuosic improvisers. He has performed and recorded with Wadada Leo Smith, Meredith Monk, Rashaun Mitchell and They Might Be Giants; albums include That Overt Desire of Object with Joelle Leandre, All At Once with FPR (Frank Gratkowski, Jon Raskin, PG), and Lantskap Logic with Fred Frith and Evelyn Davis. Recent residencies have included Headlands Center for the Arts and the Banff Center for the Arts. His critical writing has been published in Artforum, SFMOMA's Open Space, and Signal to Noise.

Detroit native and general wanderer Evelyn Davis is an inside/prepared/new music pianist, improvisor, pipe organist, composer, vocalist, synthesist, teacher, songstress, and maker of /participator in oddly shaped musics with an occasional side of performance art. She is an improviser that has recorded with Phillip Greenlief, Fred Frith, and Michael Zerang, among many other esteemed musicians from Chicago and the SF Bay Area. She has appeared at several prog festivals in Europe, including Rock in Opposition festival in Carmeaux, France, and Different Sounds Festival in Lublin, Poland.  Evelyn holds degrees in Jazz from Southwestern Community College, in Composition from Indiana University, and a Master’s degree in Performance and Improvisation from Mills College. Evelyn created and performed the music of Frankenixon, with the help of guitarist Joe Kiplinger.

7:30pm doors / 8pm show
$9-18 sliding scale general admission / Free for members
Tickets at the door

Chancletas D’Oro,​ ​XUXA SANTAMARIA’s third release and second full-length LP, is a loose concept album focused on exploring femme and womxn narratives drawn from both history and works of fiction​.

​Interdisciplinary artist ​Sofía Córdova​ ​and ​Matthew Gonzalez Kirkland​ ​are XUXA SANTAMARIA, a musical collective channeling feminist sci-fi, the Final Fantasy 7 OST, So So Def All Stars Volumes 1-3, Garbage, Kid Creole, Celia Cruz y La Sonora Matancera and The Stooges variously or all at once. In March 2015 the duo released a mixtape, ​Billionair Rainbow​, a 6 track bilingual meditation on societal alliances and entanglements with money: desire, power, debt and revulsion. Their first album, ​Chucha Santamaria y Usted​, was released in 2011 album to cult acclaim. In addition to these two song-based projects, they also have done a series of one off semi-improvisational long-form experimental performances - most recently ​Song4Sanctuary​ ​at SF City Hall (commissioned by the SF Arts Commission) and ​WALL a​ t the Internet Archive (as part of the Soundwave Biennial) - and score all of Cordova’s video art and installations.

Also featuring w/ FOOZOOL, Las Sucias, Tyler Holmes, Felidae.

8:00pm Doors / 8:30pm Performance
$15 Guests / $10 Members
Reserve seats: member login or guest registration

The Invisible Hands - الأيادى الخفية
Debut San Francisco Performance
Alan Bishop (of the legendary underground outfit Sun City Girls) has spent the better part of the past decade based in Cairo on a number of critical missions, but perhaps most notable is The Invisible Hands – the band he formed in 2011 with Egyptian musicians Cherif El Masri and Aya Hemeda. Via blues-rock, desert-psych, and the irresistible conjure of cinematic flourish, their 2013 debut album audaciously features an Arabic and English version of each song. Indeed the idiosyncrasies of Bishop’s own songwriting and that in collaboration with El Masri, transcend languages, as the band is apt to emote in a number of tongues in concert. Already familiar as a live act to the adventurous music scenes in Europe and Egypt, in July of 2019, the group embarks on their first tour of the U.S. with the quartet of Bishop, El-Masri, Hemeda, and Adham.

Alvarius B
In addition to his recent work in The Invisible Hands, our bard of the sardonic, Alvarius B. (aka Alan Bishop of Sun City Girls) has managed an appreciable expansion of his singer-songwriter and six-string strangler oeuvre, much of it cataloged on 2017’s bodacious Triple LP "With a Beaker on the Burner and an Otter in the Oven." His salty solo performances pull from a now easily triple-digit songbook that stretches back into his quarter century with Sun City Girls, and forward epochs.

8:00pm Doors / 8:30pm Performance
$15 Guests / $10 Members
Reserve seats: member login or guest registration

Pan Sonic's Ilpo Väisänen, Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider TM) will weave together all sorts of electronic and electroacoustic badassery and present a unique performance of improvised music for treated electric guitar, modular synth and rhythm devices. Collectively, die Angel model a complex physicality through raw, elemental inputs, exploring a flux of reactive feedback processes and mutating, unstructured sonic states generated from crackling fusions of electronics, drums, electric guitar and field recordings warped and riddled with FX. They basically sound like Pan Sonic at their most intricate and visceral.

X A M B U C A is an international concept multimedia/music performance group consisting of sound artist Chandra Shukla (ex-Psychic TV) and Elisa Faires. X A M B U C A is an ongoing multimedia collective of a constant Chandra Shukla with help from several other trusted authorities in the past; namely RK Faulhaber, Lux Vibratus (Chrome), Dave Jones (Sturgeon Hoof), Elisa Faires, Larry Thrasher, Todd Mellors (Saifir), M.S. Waldron along with the video expertise of Jason Scott Furr. The crew has been seen if not heard sonically feeding the beast known as X A M B U C A.

Thomas Dimuzio is a musician, composer, improviser, sound designer, mastering engineer, label proprietor, and music technologist residing in San Francisco, California. Dimuzio's music is like a sonic excursion transporting the listener into other worldly aural realms. “His work has a narrative, filmic tug that will draw you into its dark corners, ears alert… brilliant and rarely less than entertaining.” (Peter Marsh, BBC) His recordings have been released internationally by ReR Megacorp, Asphodel, RRRecords, No Fun Productions, Sonoris, Drone Records, Record Label Records, Odd Size, Seeland, MonoType and other independent labels. Among his collaborators are Chris Cutler, Dan Burke, Joseph Hammer, Alan Courtis, Nick Didkovsky, Due Process, Voice of Eye, Fred Frith, David Lee Myers, Alaric, ISIS, 5uu's, Matmos, Wobbly and Negativland. Recent performances include AngelicA Festival Internazionale di Musica, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, CCRMA at Stanford, Gray Area Buchla Festival, and Ende Tymes Festival of Experimental Art and Liberation. Dimuzio hosted KPFA’s monthly Frequency Modulation Radio featuring live on-air performances of sonic practitioners exploring the fringes of music and sound.

7:30pm doors / 8pm readings
$8 entry (no one turned away for lack of funds), free for members

Cecily Nicholson is a part of the Joint Effort prison abolitionist group and manages school and public programs at the Surrey Art Gallery, on Semiamhoo, Kwantlen and Katzie territory. She is the author of Triage; From the Poplars, winner of the Dorothy Livesay BC Poetry Prize; and Wayside Sang, which won the Governor General's award for English language poetry in 2018.

Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, "Someone's Dead Already" was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book "Heaven Is All Goodbyes" was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award.

7:30-9:00pm, readings start promptly at 8pm
$8 entry (no one turned away for lack of funds), free for members

Willie Perdomo is the author of The Crazy Bunch, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Smoking Lovely, winner of the PEN Open Book Award; and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, a finalist for the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The Common, Bomb Magazine, and African Voices. He teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, "Someone's Dead Already" was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book "Heaven Is All Goodbyes" was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award.

7:00 pm doors / 7:30pm show
Free

Hecha en México, Norma Liliana Valdez NORMA LILIANA VALDEZ made her way to California in her mother’s pregnant belly. She is an alumna of the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop, the Writing Program at UC Berkeley Extension, and was a 2014 Hedgebrook writer-in-residence. A member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop and a CantoMundo fellow, her work appears in The Rumpus, Huizache, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and the anthology Latinas: Struggles & Protests in 21st Century USA, among others. Her chapbook, Preparing the Body, is forthcoming in fall 2019 from YesYes Books.

SARA BORJAS is a Xicanx pocha and a Fresno poet. Her debut collection of poetry, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff was published by Noemi Press as part of the Akrilica Series in March, 2019. She co-hosts and produces “The Lovesick Poetry Podcast”—a west coast poetry podcast launching in 2019, alongside IRL cousin and award-winning poet, Joseph Rios. Sara is a 2017 CantoMundo Fellow and the recipient of the 2014 Blue Mesa Poetry Prize. Her work can be found in Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Poem-a-Day by The Academy of American Poets, and The Offing, amongst others. She lives in Los Angeles but stays rooted in Fresno. Find her @saraborhaz or at www.saraborjas.com.

MONICA SOK is a Cambodian American poet and the daughter of former refugees. She is the author of Year Zero, winner of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her work has been recognized with a "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Prize. Other honors include fellowships from Hedgebrook, Elizabeth George Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, Jerome Foundation, Montalvo Arts Center, MacDowell Colony, Saltonstall Foundation, and others. Currently, Sok is a 2018-2020 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Poet-in-Residence at Banteay Srei in Oakland. Her debut poetry collection A Nail the Evening Hangs On is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2020. (Photo Credit: Nicholas Nichols). 

MK CHAVEZ is the author of Mothermorphosis, and Dear Animal, (Nomadic Press.) Chavez was a recipient of a 2017 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award for poetry, and in the same year, her poem The New White House, Finding Myself Among the Ruins was selected by Eileen Myles for the Cosmonauts Avenue Poetry Prize. In 2018 Alley Cats Books published her lyric essay, A Brief History of the Selfie as a chapbook. She is or has been a fellow with CantoMundo, Hedgebrook, North Street Collective Resident Program; she is co-founder/curator of the reading series Lyrics & Dirges, co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival. Her most recent publications can be found in bags of coffee from Nomad Coffee and on Academy of American Poets, Poem-A-Day as the featured poem for December 19, 2018.

LETICIA HERNÁNDEZ-LINARES is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and author of Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl.  Widely published, she is also the co-editor of The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States.  A recipient of four San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist grants, she has lived and made art in the Mission District of San Francisco for over two decades. She is a long time educator and community worker and teaches in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. Visit her: joinleticia.com   

Originally from San Francisco, TONGO EISEN-MARTIN is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, "Someone's Dead Already" was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book "Heaven Is All Goodbyes" was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award.

7:00 pm doors / 7:30pm show
Free admission
Presented in collaboration with The Poetry Center and supported by the Walter & Elise Haas Fund 

Darius James (author of Negrophobia: An Urban Parable and That’s Blaxploitation!; writer and on-screen narrator in documentary film The United States of Hoodoo) joins with Haitian electronic music composer/percussionist/turntablist Val Jeanty (aka Val-Inc) for the West Coast premier of their collaborative performance project.

“Our work is Spiritual so it will take on a form and name as we progress.” Val Jeanty

“Val and I agreed early on it was much more important to develop the work before we gave a name to our project. Though we have been working on this for a few years, only recently have we begun defining what it is. The only thing we knew, it was spoken-word married to ritual drumming and it was based in an authentic expression of Voodoo. Voodoo is very simple. It is spirit and the interaction with spirits. Voodoo has a bad rep because 1) the French are embarrassed they lost the jewel of their colonial empire to ‘ignorant savages’ (see: Hayti: Or, the Black Republic); 2) An alcoholic journalist in the late ’20s kickstarting present-day disinformation (see: The Magic Island by Wm. Seabrook). The truth is its spiritual reality and beauty is no different from Hinduism or Tibetan Buddhism (it just might take a dead chicken or two to get there). What Val and I have observed is that the loa are readapting and changing (the old cycle of death and rebirth of the gods). We reflect that change.” Darius James

8:30pm doors / 9:00pm show
$15 general admission / $10 members
Tickets available at the door

Damon & Naomi’s 21st century songs may be a bit more musically complex than their albums made for Sub Pop in the 1990s, or their recordings with Galaxie 500 in the 1980s, but as journalists (and twin sisters) Jenn and Liz Pelly point out in collaborative liner notes that accompany this release, there are strong continuities with the mood of those earlier albums. “In their acoustic dream pop, inspired by poised English folk, I hear composure and also intensity; delicacy and also rigor; a hushed quality as well as strength, which is to say stoicism. I hear grace and what makes grace so emotionally necessary. Theirs are magic-hour songs, pushing the dualities of our emotional lives into stark relief,” says Jenn.

$15 general admission / $10 members
Doors 8pm / Show 9pm
Reserve seats: member login or guest registration

UNIVERSAL EYES is the culmination of UNIVERSAL INDIANS and WOLF EYES. UNIVERSAL INDIANS started in Lansing Michigan in the early shadows of the 90’s, with Gretchen Gonzales (now Gonzales Davidson), Bryan Ramirez, & Johnny “Inzane” Olson. After moving to the Detroit area in the late 90’s, Rammer was replaced by Aaron Dilloway, who along with Nathan Young were already in the throes of primitive electronic global domination that is WOLF EYES. Around the dawn of the 2000’s, Gretchen went full time with the moody & cold stylings of SLUMBER PARTY and after a wild Bowling Green Ohio gig, Olson joined WOLF EYES full time. After some drama that would make even Fleetwood Mac disappear into the shadows of suburbia and toss their EQ into a lonely fire, UNIVERSAL INDIANS appeared to have fate / faded into the packed history book pages of Michigan musical lore. As age and time seem to dust over wounds while magically healing them, the quartet met again in the northern suburbs of Detroit on a brisk spring Sunday in 2018. They hauled modern and ancient instruments into a home studio and just like that: the dream / nightmare had hot blood pumping thru its’ duct-taped sound body once again, as if the missing years were nothing but a minute hurdle. The kings and queen of noise were reunited.

RED CULEBRA is a Moog duet and collaboration of Bay Area electronic musicians and performance artists led by gal*in_dog aka Guillermo Galindo and Cristóbal Martínez. Accelerations across all vectors of society, warfare, and capitalism evoke a byproduct ritual of sexual and sonic violence that lays unresponsive to new age fetishes, magical realism, and the parochial moralities of American politics. Inspired by their complicated Post-Mexican backgrounds, Galindo and Martínez create and perform rituals based on cycles of repetition and uniformity. The sonic, graphic, and repetitive nature of their work requires both endurance and determination from their audiences, while denying participating publics the opportunity to fetishize ceremony. Red Culebra’s performance art includes sound invocations, moving images, and movement by performers. This ceremony is monotony sustained by pragmatism and our baser instincts, a public gathering for acknowledging human ferocity — a self-implicating metaphor for our enduring and determined appetite.

$20 general admission / $12 members
10pm Doors / 10:30pm Sound
Reserve seats: member login or guest registration

Russell Haswell is a restlessly forward-thinking, genre-defying artist, performer and curator born in Coventry and currently based in London, England. With a background steeped in conceptual art, computer music, black metal, noise, techno, laser-graphics, free-stye and solo improvisation, his practice is renowned for broaching the extremities of visual and sonic arts.

Pita is the pseudonym of Editions Mego founder Peter Rehberg. Born in London Rehberg has resided in Vienna for term his adult life. It was here in the early 90’s that Rehberg harnessed aspects of noise, industrial, electro-acoustic and techno to develop a new approach to music. Whether constructing an album entirely from the recordings of a fridge or harnessing the live electronic potential of laptops soon after they hit the market Pita has always been at the forefront of contemporary radical music practice often paving the way for many to follow. Birthing the extreme computer music genre, scoring the works of controversial French theatre director Gisele Vienne, ongoing collaborations with Jim O’Rourke, Fennesz, Marcus Schmickler and Stephen O’Malley all define Rehberg’s open ended approach to the creative act. As head of the influential Editions Mego family of labels, he has released albums by renowned artists like Fennesz, Heather Leigh, Klara Lewis, Kevin Drumm, Thomas Brinkmann, Florian Hecker, Bernard Parmegiani, Russell Haswell, KTL, Iannis Xenakis, Oren Ambarchi, Bill Orcutt, Mark Fell and many more. “One of the most perceptive and mercurial sound artists at work today.” – Nick Cain, The Wire.

8:30pm doors / 9pm show
$15 general admission / $10 members
Reserve seats: member login or guest registration

This marks Japanese three-piece band Kukangendai's first appearance in U.S. In spring of 2019, the band's new album will be released from Ideologic Organ curated by Stephen O'Malley from SUNN O))). http://editionsmego.com/release/SOMA032

Kukangendai was founded in 2006 with Junya Noguchi on guitar and vocals, Keisuke Koyano on bass guitar, and Hideaki Yamada on drums. Performing as a three-piece, its tracks are made through a process of editing and replicating deliberate error.

This music creates a sense of distortion and places a burden on the performers, leading to their characteristically stoic and humorous live shows. In recent years, the band has attempted to construct and implement a form of live concert in which they go back and forth between playing multiple simultaneous songs in parallel, but the flow of time as a whole manifests as a single unified rhythm.

In 2016, Kukangendai opened a venue-cum-studio "Soto" in Kyoto. In November 2018, they released a LP "ZURERU" in collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Reading starts promptly at 7pm
Free

"What is it to construct the time-based artistic creation that is a book-length work, while dealing with the minute-by-minute concerns and distractions of a day job? Suzanne Stein’s book-length poem New Sutras was written during the eight years that mark her tenure as founding editor-in-chief of SFMOMA’s Open Space; the same day job I have had while writing And What’s More. You could say the two books have nothing in common, and on one level that’s true. But that isn’t the level that interests me at all." – Claudia La Rocco

Suzanne Stein’s poetry publications and performance documents include The Kim Game, TOUT VA BIEN, and Passenger Ship; her book-length poem New Sutras is forthcoming this spring. With the poet Steve Benson, she is the author of DO YOUR OWN DAMN LAUNDRY, just released from Gauss PDF, which collects the 36 improvisational dialogues they performed together between 2011 and 2012. Writing has appeared recently in The Best American Experimental Writing, Elderly, and Open Space; performance recordings are archived at PennSound. Suzanne was the founding editor, and for eight years editor-in-chief, of Open Space, SFMOMA'S hybrid art and language platform and publication. In the mid-90s she was the co-director and film curator of a little San Francisco gallery called {four walls. After thirty years in the Bay Area, she now lives in San Diego, CA.

Commissioned Project
Claudia La Rocco: And What’s More
June 1–June 30, 2019 

Claudia La Rocco's And What’s More is a literary, performance, art, and sound project that refuses traditional audience/maker/doer relationships. The third in her experimental Olivia Trilogy, And What’s More developed from years of La Rocco's collaborations with artists in different fields, exploring how form and content mutate but also cohere across disciplines, and how an artist can remain true to herself while working in service of others. For this project, rather than asking artists to explicitly interpret her creation, she brings talented individuals into her fictitious imaginings (through the book form of And What’s More) in order to create a loose conversation between and among forms, both on and off the page: "A lot of what sparks my enthusiasm here is curiosity. What would happen if...? Specific to all of the individuals is a bristly intelligence — for some this is structural, for some physical, for some linguistic, philosophical, and so on… And there isn't anything I like more than intelligence. Even when intelligence fails, it's interesting." With characteristic humor and poetry, La Rocco invites her collaborating artists to use The Lab’s space as a "page or a performance, or something else entirely."

Claudia La Rocco is a writer whose work frequently revolves around interdisciplinary performances and projects. She is the author of The Best Most Useless Dress (Badlands Unlimited, 2014) and the chapbook I am trying to do the assignment ([2nd Floor Projects], 2018). The first two installments of The Olivia Trilogy, petit cadeau and Interstitial, were published in print, performance, and digital editions by The Chocolate Factory in 2015 and Michelle Ellsworth’s Man Pant Publishing imprint in 2016; the final book is forthcoming from The Lab. La Rocco’s duo with musician/composer Phillip Greenlief, animals & giraffes, has released the albums July (with various musicians; Edgetone Records, 2017) and Landlocked Beach (with Wobbly; Creative Sources, 2018). Her poetry and prose have been published in numerous anthologies and she has bylines in such publications as Artforum, BOMB, and The New York Times, where she was an arts critic and reporter from 2005-2015. She has received grants and residencies from such organizations as the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, and Headlands Center for the Arts, and her work has been presented by The Walker Art Center, The Kitchen, The Whitney Museum of American Art, et al.