"Sally Gates is a New Zealand musician and composer based in New York. Her avant-rock trio, Titan to Tachyons recently released their second album Vonals through John Zorn's Tzadik records. Received to excellent critical acclaim, Vonals was included in Spin's Best Metal of September 22, and was said to "harness virtuosity...with an enticingly organic fluidity" by The Wire.

This year's recipient of the Wellington Jazz Festival Composer Commission, Gates returned home to premiere her piece Thought & Terraform for solo guitar at the Wellington Opera House, and booked a series of other performances around the country.

A versatile musician with "slinky, avant-noir guitar work", Gates often curates performances in NYC with various improvisational music groups, most notably as a 'secret guest' in a John Zorn ensemble. Other recent collaborators have included Zoh Amba, Brian Chase, Greg Fox, and Sam Ospovat.

Before relocating to New York, Gates released original music with the Miami progressive-metal band Orbweaver, and toured throughout the US, Canada, and New Zealand with other acts such as Gigan, Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky, and Relentless Attrition."

"Matteo Liberatore is a boundary-pushing guitarist and composer working at the intersection of free, contemporary classical, electronic, and noise music. Based in Brooklyn, Liberatore spent much of his life in the medieval region of Abruzzo, Italy, amidst dramatic landscapes reflected in a playing and composing style of "unsettling beauty" and "striking physicality" (The New York City Jazz Record).

Matteo is known for his nuanced treatment of timbre, texture, gestures, and rhythms, and his work aims to convey precise musical ideas--whether through the elegant immediacy of unadorned instrumentation or the affecting dislocations of electronics and preparations. The latter approach can be heard in his first solo album--aptly titled Solos--released on Innova Recordings in 2018: "This is not just sonic novelty or gratuitous use of extended techniques; each of the pieces, while largely improvised, [has] clarity and purpose" (Avant Music News). Solos was included in Ted Gioia's best albums of 2018.

An active member of New York's improv scene, Liberatore has performed with Ralph Alessi, Elliott Sharp, Tony Malaby, Ingrid Laubrock, Jon Irabagon, Tom Rainey, Nina Dante, Brian Chase, Andrea Parkins, Ava Mendoza, Amirtha Kidambi, Sandy Ewen, Weasel Walter, Joanna Mattrey, Brandon Lopez, Carlo Costa, and Michael Foster. Liberatore also partners with performance artists and dancers such as Dia Dearstyne and Rachel Mckinstry.

In his formative years Liberatore studied classical guitar under Maestro Marco Salcito at Conservatorio di Foggia; obtained his M.M. in Jazz Performance at NYU, working with Jean-Michael Pilc, Wayne Krantz, and Peter Bernstein; and toured the U.S. and Europe in art-rock and electropop projects such as Una Lux, with a debut EP produced by former Sonic Youth producer Nick Sansano and reviewed favorably by NPR, WNYC, and Magnum Magazine."

"Elliott Sharp is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer.

A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over 30 years, Elliott Sharp has released over eighty-five recordings ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music. He leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction.

His collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt; pop singer Debbie Harry; Ensemble Modern; Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Kronos String Quartet; Ensemble Resonanz; cello innovator Frances Marie Uitti; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; pipa virtuoso Min-Xiao Feng; jazz greats Jack deJohnette, Oliver Lake, and Sonny Sharrock; multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jajouka.

Sharp is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2014 Fellow at Parson's Center for Transformative Media. He received the 2015 Berlin Prize in Musical Composition from the American Academy in Berlin. He has composed scores for feature films and documentaries; created sound-design for interstitials on The Sundance Channel, MTV and Bravo networks; and has presented numerous sound installations in art galleries and museums. He is the subject of a new documentary "Doing The Don't" by filmmaker Bert Shapiro."-Elliott Sharp