"Andrew Lafkas: bass. Berlin, Germany

Andrew Lafkas is a musician currently living in Berlin, Germany. His primary instrument is the contrabass. He is currently focused on developing pieces for largish ensembles that encourage group intuition; this interest is greatly inspired by and influenced by experiences working in groups led by Milo Fine and Bill Dixon. He is also active in the groups Oceans Roar 1000 Drums, with Todd Capp and Bryan Eubanks, and a trio with Marcia Bassett and Barry Weisblat. He has performed at venues and festivals including Walker Art Center, The Living Theatre, Experimental Intermedia, the Vision Festival, and the Seattle Improvised Music Festival."

"Marcia Bassett is a NYC-based musician and artist known for her innovative and unconventional approach to music. Exploring the realms of sound collage, improvisation, and immersive audio-visual environments, Bassett's work delves into the cultural world and immediate surroundings, encountering various phenomena that have the potential to be transformative within ourselves and our environment. Her artistic vision is to create a heady sonic interplay of otherworldly narratives that blend elements of trance and critique.

As the founder of Yew Recordings, Heavy Conversation and Heavy Blossom and working with smaller independent labels, Bassett has maintained a DIY approach to music publishing. Some of her recent solo recordings include the critically acclaimed "Midnight Xpander LP," which was recorded at Elektronmusikstudion EMS in Stockholm. She also recently released "Undulating Arkasboning" cassette on Artsy Records in 2022 and a Digi-EP titled "Altering The Form" on the Belgian label KRUT.

Bassett frequently collaborates with other artists and musicians on live improvised performances, installations, and multimedia projects. Recent tours and works include a visual sound residency with Ursula Scherrer at Sonoscopia, Porto, PT; live performances with Samara Lubelski, including an evening at the Clark Art Institute (MA) and Tubby's (NY); "Triangulated Waves," an electric guitar and violin improvisation with Samara Lubelski for an abstract film showcased at Tabakalara in San Sebastián, Spain. With Ursula Scherrer, she has engaged in an ongoing collaboration of light, sound, and installations, notably "Interwoven," a site-specific installation, Tunis, TNSA, "Time_Untime" Roulette Intermedium, NYC, "FACE" a la Maison, Paris, FR and a multimedia installation featuring live visuals and sound with Ursula Scherrer and Sergej Vutuc at The Film Gallery in Paris, France. "The Eternal Now" is a collaborative project by Marcia Bassett, Ted Gordon, and Jeffery Perkins. The project showcases Jeffery Perkins' colorslide stroboscopic light experiments while Marcia and Ted explore Buchla Music Easel improvisations.

Other past collaborations and solo projects include work with Andrew Lafkas' large ensemble, Alternate Models, presenting "Two Paths with Active Shadows Under Three Moons and Surveillance" at Experimental Intermedia and Eyebeam in NYC; "Survival Of Laments" a live improvisation with Margarida Garcia and Manuel Mota at Festival Oude Muziek 2018, Utrecht. She showcased an improvised sound performance titled "Transitory Freezing of Perpetual Motion" with Jenny Graf and dancers at the Here-10 Evenings Festival in Sweden, created live improvised sound interaction with the performance artist Narcissister, and composed an original soundtrack for the Single Channel Video "Ten Ways of Doing Time," directed by James Fotopoulos and Laura Parnes in 2013.

Her boundary-pushing approach, penchant for collaboration, and relentless exploration of the sonic realm continue to inspire and shape the contemporary music landscape. She has been an integral part of several influential bands and pursued solo work under the moniker Zaimph.

Bassett's involvement with the band Un, formed in the early 1990s, showcased her distinctive approach to sound. Un, known for their hypnotic and dissonant soundscapes, released their self-titled album "Un" (1996) and tour-only 7" on the legendary Siltbreeze label. Another notable collaboration for Bassett was with Double Leopards, an experimental collective that emerged in the late 1990s. With their improvisational and exploratory approach, Double Leopards created densely layered sonic tapestries that blurred the boundaries between noise, drone, and psychedelia. Bassett's involvement with the band resulted in a number of releases, including "Halve Maen" (2003) and "A Hole Is True" (2004). Bassett's musical journey also led her to join forces with Pete Nolan and Steve Gunn, in the band GHQ. GHQ's music delves into folk-infused territories, blending intricate guitar work and improvisation. Their collaborative efforts produced celestial raga-drenched drone albums such as "Cosmology of Eye" (2006) and "Crystal Healing" (2007). Bassett was also a member of Hototogisu alongside Matthew Bower. Together, they created blistering and intense sonic landscapes laced with smoked-drenched noise psychedelia. In addition to her collaborations, Bassett has released solo material under the moniker Zaimph. As Zaimph, she created cracked-raga song structures with dense electronic and synthesizer drones to create soundscapes where a lurking apocalypse is eclipsed by shimmering, meditative beauty. Her solo works often feature layers of vocals, guitar manipulations, percussive scrapings, and hypnotic textures, creating immersive sonic environments. Notable releases under the Zaimph moniker include "Sexual Inifity" (2006); "Between the Infinite and the Finite" (2016) and "Rhizomatic Gaze" (2018). Her work has left an indelible mark on the experimental music scene and has mapped regions still only dimly understood by subsequent sonic travelers."

"Ron Stabinsky recently released his debut album, Free for One, the culmination of more than a decade of evolving his improvised solo language. In addition to continuing to pursue his ongoing interest in solo piano improvisation, he enjoys working on music in a stylistically diverse array of situations throughout the United States and Europe with many other musicians and ensembles, including free-improvising saxophonist Jack Wright, bass trombone virtuoso David Taylor, Meat Puppets bassist Cris Kirkwood, and NEA Jazz Master David Liebman. Recent festival appearances include Newport Jazz Festival, North Sea Jazz Festival (Netherlands), Moers Festival (Germany), Jazzfestival Saalfelden (Austria), Outreach Festival (Austria), and Jazz and More Festival Sibiu (Romania). He is currently a regular member of the band Mostly Other People Do the Killing, the new music ensemble Relâche, the Charles Evans Quartet, and the Peter Evans Quintet."

"C. Spencer Yeh was born in Taipei, Taiwan 1975, moved to the US in 1980; studied radio/television/film at Northwestern University, and is now based out of Cincinnati, Ohio. Yeh is active both as a solo and collaborative artist, as well as with his primary project, Burning Star Core. As an improviser, Yeh is focused on developing a personal vocabulary using violin, voice, and electronics. As a sound artist/composer, Yeh works with all aspects available surrounding a work, aurally and physically, as elements key to the cumulative experience. He is concerned not only with the sensual aspects of 'sound organization,' but the gestural qualities as well. Yeh has collaborated with a deep and ever-growing list of artists and groups, including Tony Conrad, New Humans with Vito Acconci, Evan Parker, Thurston Moore, Amy Granat with Jutta Koether, Justin Lieberman, Don Dietrich and Ben Hall (as The New Monuments), Prurient, and Jandek. He has performed at festivals and venues such as Sonar, FIMAV at Victoriaville, Frieze Arts Fair, No Fun Fest, High Zero, the 24 Hour Drone People at Fylkingen, The Kitchen, ZKM Karlsruhe, and has also exhibited visual art, sound, and video works internationally."

"Andrew Lafkas: bass. Berlin, Germany

Andrew Lafkas is a musician currently living in Berlin, Germany. His primary instrument is the contrabass. He is currently focused on developing pieces for largish ensembles that encourage group intuition; this interest is greatly inspired by and influenced by experiences working in groups led by Milo Fine and Bill Dixon. He is also active in the groups Oceans Roar 1000 Drums, with Todd Capp and Bryan Eubanks, and a trio with Marcia Bassett and Barry Weisblat. He has performed at venues and festivals including Walker Art Center, The Living Theatre, Experimental Intermedia, the Vision Festival, and the Seattle Improvised Music Festival."

"Ryan Sawyer is a drummer and percussionist from the USA. He has played with several artists and bands like, Tv On The Radio, At The Drive-In, Scarlet Johanson, Massive Attack, Boredoms (77 & 88 Boadrum), The Mekons, Thurston Moore, among others.He currently is playing with, Stars Like Fleas, Tall Firs, and Eye Contact."

"Sean Meehan is a drummer who most notably plays a pared-down kit often consisting of a single snare drum and cymbal, creating sounds that range from the subtle friction of a fork rubbing against a drum to tones that seem electronically-generated. These complex, sometimes subtle sonorities require a great deal of concentration for the performer and listener, foregrounding the act of listening just as much as the production of sound, and bringing the audience's attention to both spatial acoustics and social interactions within a space.

Meehan traces much of his development as a musician to the time he spent as a teen in the public library, in particular reading Downbeat Magazine's Blindfold Tests, for which magazine staff would play recordings for jazz musicians without identifying the artists. The guest musician would comment and guess whom they were hearing. From this he understood the importance of having a unique sound and language. How to obtain that goal was informed by other books Meehan selected for the provocative titles running down their spines: As Serious As Your Life: Black Music And The Free-Jazz Revolution, 1957-1977, by Valerie Wilmer helped him understand that the way to one's own music was for it to be a reflection of one's particular social context, politics, and inner being; and from a distant shelf, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music by Hermann von Helmholtz provided a lifetime of information and inspiration.

Some of Meehan's early performances were at the Amica Bunker series for improvised music, located at the Anarchist's Switchboard and later at ABC No Rio, New York. Since then, he has presented at many venues, including the Instal Festival, Glasgow, The Whitney Biennial, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and Goethe-Institut, Hanoi, but he primarily performs at small, informal, transient spaces and artist-run festivals.

For nearly twenty years, Meehan and saxophonist Tamio Shiraishi presented a summer concert series, always in different locations in New York City that Meehan considered to be marginal. Meehan's work with Shiraishi most directly reflects his interest in urbanism, which includes the acts of walking, writing, filmmaking, and talking to strangers, as well as the practices or concepts of social history, cartography, community control of land, foreclosure and eviction prevention, and tenant advocacy. Three of these concerts have been documented on LP: In the City (Fusetron, 2003) and Summer Concerts 2002 & 2003 (GD Stereo, 2005). In 2007 the duo worked with Arika, a cultural presenter in Scotland, to mount a condensed multi-concert version of these works in similarly "marginal" locations throughout the United Kingdom.

His other significant collaborators include: John Dierker, Geoff Dugan, Michelle Ellsworth, James Fei, Ellen Fullman, Paul Hoskin, Greg Kelley, Andrew Lafkas, Sachiko M, Ben Manley, John McCowen, Ken Montgomery, Toshimaru Nakamura, Kendall Pigg, Matthew Sperry, Edwin Torres, Taku Unami, Barry Weisblat, and Barry Wolifson.

Meehan also makes music-related objects, intended to be used in the way recordings are, but within the listener's imagination, rather than aurally. These include Field Recordings Vol 3 (2003) a folio of letterpress cards, and Audio (2001) a boxed set of four cassette-like objects. These too are rooted in Meehan's early experiences in the library imagining what free jazz sounded like based on Wilmer's descriptions long before actually hearing it, and imagining the swirling, beating tones of Helmholtz's Victorian-era experiments, which Meehan paid homage to in the abridged book-on-tape Meehan Reads Helmholtz (2017).

Meehan completed both his M.A. and M.U.P. at Hunter College of the City University of New York before obtaining his J.D. at the City University of New York School of Law."

Selected Discography:

Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Drums and Drones
w/ The Seconds
w/ Alan Licht
w/ Peter Aaron
w/ Collapsible Shoulder
w/ Thollem McDonas
w/ Seth Misterka:
w/ Jeremiah Cymerman
w/ Man Forever
w/ Karlie Bruce
w/ Fretless Brothers
w/ Sway Machinery
w/ Tyondai Braxton

Ben Owen works with sound using various approaches including improvisation, recording, listening, and composition. His instruments are simple electronics - played, mixed, re-patched in their own trajectory of small sound, broken and accidental. Over the past few years he has been interested in presenting works, performing and recording in outdoor spaces. His focus is in the sustained, immersive, minimal soundscapes that interact within a defined space as well as an outside environment.