"If it's in Paris that Sophie Agnel was born in 1964, it is towards other sounding islands in the heart of a reinvented temporality that she dwells today, at the stern of a grand piano, an instrument that she turns into a real living & vibrating organism.

Classically trained, escaped from jazz (drawn away by the too strict treatment of harmony), Sophie Agnel boards the piano from every sonic angle this musical vessel can offer : keys, strings & board are simultaneously apprehended, in a mixed procedure (as we say of painting techniques) that would be understated if it was reduced to the cagian definition of the prepared piano. Considering the instrument - that she extends with several accessories, paper cups, balls or strings - as a poetic supplier of anamorphic textures, the musician takes it to be an equal match to the wider diversity of musical systems, whatever the craft they where conceived in (from physiological to electro-acoustic) ...

We would then no longer be surprised to notice her understandings with Michel Doneda and to find her to the side of the wet saxophone of Alessandro Bosetti, of the acoustified electric guitar of Olivier Benoit, of the voices of Catherine Jauniaux and Phil Minton, or the keyboard of Christine Wodraska...

The same seal of esthetic evidence marks all of her musical companionships, with this same taste, beyond the narrative, for the delicate sonic quests and blossoming of dimensions to which the auditor takes part through an active listening : in the heart of Jean Pallandre's phonographic worlds, of Jerôme Noetinger & Lionel Marchetti's small scale cinema, John Butcher or Axel Dörner's crimpy tissues, by the lovely machines of Erik M or Ikue Mori, the harmonico-stratospheric rustling of Stéphane Rives...

The originality of the research conducted by Sophie Agnel today leads her to develop, in solo or with significantly chosen companions, a most refined and highly poetic approach to sound that makes each of her concerts a moving construction filled with chiseled musical gestures, a soft and sumptuous irradiation."-Guillaume Tarche

"Michael Zerang was born in Chicago, Illinois, and is a first-generation American of Assyrian decent. He has been a professional musician, composer, and producer since 1976, focusing extensively on improvised music, free jazz, contemporary composition, puppet theater, experimental theater, and international musical forms.

Michael has collaborated with contemporary theater, dance, and other multidisciplinary forms and has received three Joseph Jefferson Awards for Original Music Composition in Theater, in collaboration with Redmoon Theater, in 1996, 1998, and 2000.

As a percussionist and composer, Michael has over eighty titles in his discography and has toured nationally and internationally to 34 countries since 1981, and works with and ever-widening pool of collaborators.

Michael founded and was the artistic director of the Link's Hall Performance Series in Chicago from 1985-1989 where he produced over 300 concerts of jazz, traditional ethnic folk music, electronic music, and other forms of forward thinking music. Michael has been a Board Member of Links Hall Since 1989. He continued to produce concerts at Cafe Urbus Orbis from 1994-1996, and at his own space, The Candlestick Maker in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood, from 2001 - 2005.

Michael has taught as a guest artist at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in performance technique, sound design, and sound/music as it relates to puppetry; rhythmic analysis for dancers at The Dance Center of Columbia College, Northwestern University, and MoMing Dance and Arts Center; courses in Composer/Choreographer Collaborations at Northwestern University; music to children at The Jane Adams Hull House.

Michael currently tours and holds workshops in improvisational music, and teaches private lessons in rhythmic analysis, music composition, and percussion technique.