A classically trained and experimental cellist based in the Bay Area, Monica Scott bridges contemporary composition and free improvisation. She performs with the ensembles Rova Saxophone Quartet Extended, sfSound, and other avant-garde projects, known for her refined tone, extended techniques, and collaborations with composers expanding the cello's sonic language.

"Danishta Rivero is an improviser, performer, and sound artist based in Oakland, California. She explores the artifacts resulting from heavy processing of the voice and their relationship to its acoustic resonance.

As a soloist, Rivero often performs as Caribay, conjuring the eponymous mountain spirit, whose laments cause avalanches.

She is a member of electro-acoustic duo Voicehandler with percussionist Jacob Felix Heule. She is also half of Las Sucias, a feminist tropical noise duo with Alexandra Buschman-Román."

An adventurous bassoonist active in experimental and improvisational music, Cody Putman explores the instrument's microtonal, percussive, and textural possibilities. He has appeared in Bay Area new music settings blending classical training with noise and electroacoustic influences.

A Japanese-born koto player and improviser based in San Francisco, Kanoko Nishi Smith is celebrated for pushing traditional Japanese string performance into contemporary experimental contexts. Her work spans noise, free improvisation, and sound art, emphasizing delicate textures and unconventional tuning systems.

"Lisa Mezzacappa is a San Francisco Bay Area-based bassist, bandleader, composer, curator and producer. An active collaborator in the Bay Area music community for more than a dozen years, she leads her own groups Bait & Switch, the Interlopers, Nightshade, Eartheaters and the Lisa Mezzacappa Trio, and co-leads the ensembles BODABODA, duo B., Cylinder, the Mezzacappa-Phillips Duo, and the Caribbean folk band Les Gwan Jupons. Lisa has released her music on the Clean Feed, NoBusiness, Leo, NotTwo, Evander, Odd Shaped Case and Edgetone record labels, and has recorded as a sideperson for the Tzadik, Kadima and Porto Franco labels. She collaborates frequently on cross-disciplinary projects in sound installation, film/video, sculpture and public music/art.

As curator, she programs the annual JazzPOP concert seres at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, now in its 10th year; and a live cinema series, Mission Eye and Ear, at Artists' Television Access. She founded the Monday Makeout creative music series in the Mission District of San Francisco, and programs the Best Coast Jazz Composers series as a member of the artistic committee San Francisco's Center for New Music. In 2012 she started the "Festival-of-Us," a semi-annual festival celebrating Bay Area creative jazz and improvised music. Recent projects include an avant-folk string band, the Interlopers; Eartheaters, a trio with Brooklyn vocalist Fay Victor; and BODABODA, a cross-planetary collaboration with Venice reed player/composer Piero Bittolo Bon. In fall 2015 she premieres Glorious Ravage, a multi-media song cycle for large ensemble with commissioned films, inspired by the writings of Victorian lady adventurers.

Lisa has been artist-in-residence at Djerassi Resident Artists Program (2008, 2013), Headlands Center for the Arts (2006, 2015), the Banff International Jazz Workshop (2000), and the Painted Bride Arts Center (2000). She holds an MA in ethnomusicology from UC Berkeley (2003), and a BA in music from the University of Virginia (1997). She has performed at countless Bay Area venues including Intersection for the Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SFMOMA, Yoshi's, the Jazzschool, and the de Young Museum, San Francisco; as well as the Earshot Jazz Festival, Seattle; the Montreal Jazz Festival and Victoriaville Festival de Musique Actuelle, Canada; the Monterey Jazz Festival, CA; Moers Festival, Germany; and Novara Jazz Festival, Italy.

Lisa has been awarded grants by the MAP Fund, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, American Composers Forum, the City of Oakland, Meet the Composer and Southern Exposure/the Andy Warhol Foundation. She performs as a sideperson in original jazz, improv and chamber ensembles led by estemmed bandleaders and West Coast musical visionaries, like Phillip Greenlief, Aaron Novik, Beth Custer, Randy McKean, Marco Eneidi, Vijay Anderson, Aaron Bennett, Myles Boisen, Steve Adams, Graham Connah, Jon Raskin, Cory Wright and Ross Hammond, and collaborates often with Darren Johnston, Vinny Golia, Katy Stephan, Aram Shelton, Kjell Nordeson, Murray Campbell, Jason Levis, Dina Maccabee, Noah Phillips, Rob Ewing, Kasey Knudsen, Myles Boisen, Sam Ospovat, John Hanes, and many many others."

A member of the Bay Area's creative jazz and improvised music scenes, Joshua Marshall combines a muscular, expressive tone with exploratory phrasing. He performs frequently with ensembles such as Rova, Earspray, and various reductionist and electroacoustic projects.

An interdisciplinary artist, composer, and performer, Kevin Ck Lo works across sound, movement, and conceptual performance. His practice emphasizes embodied listening, subtle gesture, and textural soundscapes that dissolve the boundaries between instrument and environment.

Cheryl E. Leonard is a San Francisco-based composer, performer, field recordist, and instrument builder whose works investigate sounds, structures, and objects from the natural world. Her projects cultivate stones, wood, water, ice, sand, shells, feathers, and bones as musical instruments, and often feature one-of-a-kind sculptural instruments and field recordings from remote locales. Leonard is fascinated by the subtle textures and intricacies of sounds, especially very quiet phenomena. She uses microphones to uncover and explore micro-aural worlds within her sound sources, and develops compositions that highlight the unique voices she discovers. Structurally and thematically, her creations often reflect on natural phenomena and processes. Her recent work focuses on environmental issues, especially climate change in the polar regions and California and the extinction of species.

Leonard's music has been performed worldwide. Her compositions for natural-object instruments have been featured on several television programs, including KQED TV's Spark, and in Tim Perkis's video documentary Noisy People. She has received grants from the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, New Music USA, American Composer's Forum, American Music Center, ASCAP, Meet the Composer, the Eric Stokes Fund, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Leonard has been commissioned to create music and instruments for Kronos Quartet, Hope Mohr Dance's Bridge Project, the La Jolla Historical Society, Funsch Dance, and Illuminated Corridor. She has been awarded residencies at Kunstnarhuset Messen, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, the Arctic Circle, Engine 27, the Paul Dresher Ensemble ARC Program, and Villa Montalvo. Recordings of her music are available from Great Hoary Marmot Music, Nexmap, Ubuibi, Unusual Animals, Eh?, Engraved Glass, Apraxia Records, 23 Five Inc, Old Gold Records, and The Lab. Additionally, Leonard has contributed to several publications about music and sound art; and her instruments, installations, and graphic scores have been exhibited in art galleries in the U. S., Norway, Australia, Mexica, and Argentina.

Beyond her individual work, Leonard has collaborated extensively with other musicians, across artistic disciplines, and with scientists. Over the past three decades she has played in many experimental music ensembles and noise bands. These days she often performs with the groups Thomas Carnacki, Euphotic, and Big City Orchestra. Leonard has produced numerous installations and multimedia works together with visual artists, including Adfreeze Project with Oona Stern, Sila and Thresholds with Genevieve Swifte, and Tides:Estuary, Frozen Over and Watershed with Rebecca Haseltine. She has also composed for dance, theater, film, and video; designed sounds for exhibits in science museums; and developed works with climatologists, oceanographers, and biologists.

Leonard holds a BA from Hampshire College and an MA from Mills College, both in music composition. She studied composition and electronic music with Alvin Curran, Chris Brown, George Lewis, Frederic Rzewski, Laeticia Sonami, Salvatore Macchia, and Alan Bonde; and performance art with Moira Roth, Carole E. Schneemann, and Betsy Damon."

A longtime figure in the Bay Area experimental community, John Ingle is known for his precise control of multiphonics and microtones. His work integrates classical saxophone performance with contemporary improvisation and collaborative sound projects.

Clarinetist, composer, and computer music innovator, Matt Ingalls is the founder of sfSound and a central figure in the Bay Area's experimental scene. His work combines intricate acoustic performance with live electronic manipulation and conceptual composition.

A veteran improviser and vocalist, Ron Heglin is a member of the Rova Saxophone Quartet's extended ensembles and other avant-garde collectives. He is known for his use of overtone singing and unconventional brass techniques that merge vocal and instrumental resonance.

A versatile flutist dedicated to contemporary and experimental repertoire, Diane Grubbe performs with sfSound and numerous new music ensembles, exploring the sonic range of the flute from pure tone to breath and noise.

A composer and improviser, Sarah Grace Graves uses voice and electronics to explore fragility, resonance, and the border between speech and sound. Her performances emphasize intimacy, textural subtlety, and experimental vocal technique.

"Jacob Felix Heule is a percussionist and electronic musician focused on sound-oriented improvisation following the traditions of electro-acoustic improv, noise, and 20th-century composition. His playing embraces both rough-edged intensity and disciplined instrumental technique."

"Tom Djll studied electronic music with Stephen Scott at the Colorado College, working with the EMS Synthi 100 system at Packard Hall. In 1978 and 79 Djll studied at the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, NY, with Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, George Lewis, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Karl Berger and many other giants of new music. He spent the years 1981-1993 working with the Serge Modular Music System before enrolling in Mills College Contemporary Music Program, where he extended his quest to develop and integrate an idiosyncratic trumpet language into an electronic sound environment, while also pursuing advanced improvisation studies, formally, with Pauline Oliveros, and, informally, with Jack Wright. While at Mills, Djll concentrated on microtonal composition, split-tone trumpet technique, and computer music. He also worked extensively with Chris Brown, resulting in contributions to Brown's recordings LAVA (Tzadik) and DUETS (Artifact).

Further refinement of trumpet languages and free improvisation with his band GROSSE ABFAHRT was undertaken from 1999 - 2010, published on the Emanem, Creative Sources, and Setola di Maiale labels. Beginning in 2012, Djll gradually re-introduced electronics into his sound-set. The results are heard in projects like hackMIDI (extreme electro-mechanical piano music), piano + analog electronics in TENDER BUTTONS (with Tania Chen and Gino Robair), delicate environments in EUPHOTIC (with Cheryl Leonard and Bryan Day), austere acoustic spaces with KOKUO (Kanoko Nishi-Smith, John McCowen, Jacob Felix Heule, and Kyle Bruckmann) and ongoing sessions and performances within the lively and ever-evolving Bay Area scene, including: Tim Perkis, Amanda Chaudhary, Jordan Glenn, Clarke Robinson, Suki O'Kane, Matt Ingalls, Tom Nunn, bran(...)pos, and Karen Stackpole.

Obligatory list of famous musicians Djll has played and/or recorded with:

Roscoe Mitchell, David Toop, Fred Frith, William Winant, Rova Saxophone Quartet, Pauline Oliveros, Ava Mendoza, John Butcher, Vladimir Tarasov, Le Quan Ninh, Tania Chen, Wobbly, Frank Gratkowski, Miya Masaoka, nmperign, Tatsuya Nakatani, Vijay Iyer, and Zeena Parkins."

"Kevin Corcoran works with percussion, field recordings and electronics with an open interest in sound as medium as it moves through contexts of music, art, communication and place.

As a percussionist he is focused on techniques which extend the sonic possibilities of the instrument by emphasizing textural sound, friction, sympathetic vibration, sustained tones and the use of found objects with an interest in freely arranging events in duration rather than marking time by rhythm. Whether working in sparse sound with a single drum and cymbal or frenetic contexts on the drum kit, improvisation is crucial to his practice as generative method and non-hierarchical exchange of ideas.

Through field recordings he observes and interacts with sites and objects with specific interests in abandoned architecture, urban excess, and intersections of infrastructure and open space. Electronic sound features in his work through the use of cassette tapes, computer software, feedback systems and various means of amplification.

Based in San Francisco, California, he collaborates across disciplines and borders having performed in the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, China and Taiwan with musicians, dancers, filmmakers, writers and visual artists. In addition to making live and recorded sound and music, he has exhibited sound installations and experimental video works.

Beyond his own work he is a co-organizer of the concert series Re:Sound which takes place in an abandoned munitions magazine on Mare Island and operates under 23Five, a long running nonprofit dedicated to the increased awareness of sound in the arts."

Known for his work with Boston noise and improvisation groups before relocating to the Bay Area, Chris Cooper (also of Fat Worm of Error) is a guitarist and electronic manipulator whose performances fuse extended technique, feedback, and dense, spontaneous structures.

"Composer/performer Kyle Bruckmann's work extends from a Western classical foundation into genre-bending gray areas encompassing free jazz, electronic music and post-punk rock. A busy and varied performance schedule and appearances on more than 60 recordings have led to his recognition as "an excellent composer, striking the right balance between form and freedom" (Signal to Noise), "a modern day renaissance musician" (Dusted) and "a seasoned improviser with impressive extended technique and peculiar artistic flair" (All Music Guide).

Shortly after moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2003, he joined forces with acclaimed new music collective sfSound and with Quinteto Latino (a woodwind quintet specializing in Latin American composers). He is now also a member of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Eco Ensemble, and Splinter Reeds. He has worked with the San Francisco Symphony and most of the area's regional orchestras remaining active in an international community of improvisers and sound artists. Current local improvising working groups include Addleds, Shudder, and mchtnchts.

From 1996 until his westward relocation, he was a fixture in Chicago's experimental music underground, with frequent collaborators Jason Ajemian, Jim Baker, Jeb Bishop, Olivia Block, Guillermo Gregorio, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Robbie Hunsinger, Bob Marsh, Weasel Walter, and Michael Zerang. Long-term affiliations include the electro-acoustic duo EKG, the "rock" monstrosity Lozenge, and the Creative Music quintet Wrack (recipient of a 2012 Chamber Music America New Jazz Works award).

Bruckmann earned undergraduate degrees in music and psychology at Rice University in Houston, studying oboe with Robert Atherholt, serving as music director of campus radio station KTRU, and achieving academic distinction as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He completed his Masters degree in 1996 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he studied oboe performance with Harry Sargous and contemporary improvisation with Ed Sarath."