Indexical is pleased to present improvisational trio Setting and Oakland-based artist Zekarias Musele Thompson.

Setting
Setting is Nathan Bowles (solo/trio, Pelt, Black Twig Pickers) on strings, keys, tapes, and percussion; Jaime Fennelly (Mind Over Mirrors, Peeesseye) on harmoniums, synthesizers, and piano zither; and Joe Westerlund (solo, Califone, Sylvan Esso, Jake Xerxes Fussell) on drums, percussion, and metallophones. Setting established its own setting and found its footing in regularly scheduled improvisational sessions outside Westerlund’s home in Durham, North Carolina, beginning in 2021. The three players began as two, in the context of occasional Bowles and Westerlund percussion duo performances dating back to 2018. Fennelly provided the initial impetus to gather and play together with intentionality and discipline, as well as an harmonic adhesive and thickening agent in the grain and gravity of his harmonium and synthesizer. As always, Bowles’s background as a pianist and drummer informs his approach to banjo, imparting a woodiness, a piney verticality and resinous tang. Westerlund’s training with Milford Graves is apparent in his polyrhythmic flow and its correspondences to human circulatory and corporeal rhythms.

Zekarias Musele Thompson
Zekarias Musele Thompson (b. 1983) is an artist based in Oakland, CA, and Reykjavik, IS often working in sonic composition, spatial facilitation, photography, collaborative group practice & performance, writing, and mark-making. Their practice is concerned with humanity’s conceptual and emotional organizational structures and how we bring them into material form.
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On the heels of her new album sentiment (out 4/19 on Thrill Jockey), Los Angeles-based artist Claire Rousay performs live at Indexical. Bay Area artist and composer Shanna Sordahl opens.

Claire Rousay
claire rousay is a singular artist, known for challenging conventions in experimental and ambient music forms. rousay masterfully incorporates textural found sounds, sumptuous drones and candid field recordings into music that celebrates the beauty in life’s banalities. her music is curatorial and granular in detail, deftly shaped into emotionally affecting pieces. "sentiment" is a meditation of the poignant emotional terrains of loneliness, nostalgia, sentimentality, guilt, and sex. The album’s narrative arc is guided by delicate musical gestures and artistic vulnerability, audaciously synthesizing disparate and unexpected influences. rousay crafted the songs in various homes, bedrooms, hotels, and other private places, the feeling of time and energy spent alone radiating from each passage. The album is a collection of heart-rending, incisive pop songs that explore universal feelings with subtlety and remarkable vision.

Shanna Sordahl
Shanna Sordahl is a sound artist and composer based in the Bay Area. With analog and digital electronics, amplified cello, and multimedia installation as their primary mediums, Shanna uses sound to create spaces that illustrate possibilities of transformation while questioning ingrained patterns of perception. They often subvert traditional approaches to music, utilizing extended and noise-based playing techniques while drawing from studies of diverse musical traditions, empathy building practices, interactions with physical landscapes, and field recordings. With an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College, Shanna has worked with a variety of choreographers, composers, and artists including Simpson/Stulberg Collaborations, Wax Poet(s), Trimpin, Wrekmeister Harmonies, Sarah Davachi, and Indira Allegra. They also have a body of solo work and perform in the duo SO AR.
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Carlos Giffoni performs his new record Dream Walker live with reactive visuals by Alex Pelly. RM Francis presents a new work in which latent phonological data is extracted from non-linguistic sound in order to generate the tonal, rhythmic, and semantic content of synthesized speech.

Carlos Giffoni
Carlos Giffoni is a Venezuelan experimental musician and writer living in Los Angeles. Carlos came up on the scene as a noise guitar player in the late 90s, with the Load Records band Monotract, as well as solo and collaboration, but quickly pivoted into electronic music composition in the early 00s with milestone releases on Important Records and his label No Fun Productions. The Venezuelan artist's solo and collaborative work with musicians like Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth, Nels Cline from Wilco, Jim O'Rourke, and Merzbow has earned him a reputation as one of experimental music's most-known contemporary performers. From 2004 to 2010 Carlos’ transnational avant-garde music summit No Fun Fest, and celebrated New York record label No Fun Productions, vitally propelled the trajectory and strengthened the cultural camaraderie of noise and improvised music worldwide. Carlos's new record 'Dream Walker' will be released on Ideologic Organ in the Spring of 2024. His music has also been featured in fashion shows and promotional campaigns by Jil Sander, Ermenegildo Zegna, and Prada.

RM Francis
RM Francis is an artist from Seattle working with computer-generated sound and language via recording, performance, and installation. His practice foregrounds computation-based compositional strategies, with a current emphasis on methods that exploit discrepancies between human and artificial auditory systems. His oeuvre spans multimedia work incorporating sound, video, performance, and chocolate (Hyperplastic Other, 2017), investigations of historical computer synthesis methods (A Taxonomy of Guffaws, 2020), procedural text works for a chorus of synthetic voices (Every Single Person Has Some Muscle, 2022), and hallucinatory duets between dictation apps and deep learning networks (pedimos un mensaje, 2023). In addition to his solo projects, in recent years he has collaborated with Jack Callahan and Jeff Witscher, Jung An Tagen, and farmersmanual, among others.
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Berlin-based violinist Sarah Saviet makes a special West Coast appearance at our favorite mountainside venue – Wind River. Join us in the redwoods for an evening-length performance of the serpentine solo violin piece A Coiled Form by UK-based composer Bryn Harrison.

Sarah Saviet
Sarah Saviet is a violinist based in Berlin and dedicated to the performance of contemporary music. She performs as a soloist and chamber musician and is a member of the Saviet/Houston Duo and Ensemble Mosaik. Sarah’s debut solo album SPUN (Coviello Contemporary) was recently nominated for the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik for new music. She has also released on all that dust and another timbre, and her recording of Liza Lim’s violin concerto ‘Speak, Be Silent,’ with the Riot Ensemble on HCR/NMC records was selected as one of New Yorker Magazine’s ‘Best recordings of 2019.’ Recent performances include duo concerts at Ultraschall and AFEKT festivals, soloist with Klangforum Wien as part of Märzmusik in the Berliner Philharmonie, and the premiere of Rebecca Saunders and Enno Poppe’s duo Taste at Witten Festival 2022. Sarah has held visiting artist positions in the composition departments of the University of the Arts Berlin, Huddersfield University, at Goldsmith University London with the Riot Ensemble, and at Harvard University with ELISION Ensemble. She has given workshops on contemporary violin technique at the Manhattan School of Music University of the Arts Berlin, Manhattan School of Music, and Darmstadt Akademie für Tonkunst, and held artist residencies at Aldeburgh Music with composers Lawrence Dunn, Jack Sheen, and artist Rowland Hill.
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Program
5pm - Screening: Last and First Men
– dinner break –
8:30pm - Cel Genesis (Live)

Oakland CA project Cel Genesis combines an aggressive mixture of hardcore and electronic themes under the guise of a dystopic megacorporation with the same name. Horrifying visuals and strobe lights assault viewers between gabber kicks and pristine sound design.

Cel Genesis
Cel Genesis Innovations, Known For Pioneering Strides In Non-terrestrial Biomedical Industrial Development, Are Advancing The Human Condition Yet Again With Patented New Methodologies In Tissue-Machine Transmission, World-Class Standards For Privatized Research-to-Defense Platforms, And Have Become Global Leaders In Biological Solutions and Patient Liquefaction Technologies! Reserve Your Participation Immediately For Upcoming Cel Genesis P2P Networking Forums And Change Into "Something Unrecognizable, Something Beautiful."™️

Last and First Men
Last and First Men juxtaposes a science fiction story written in 1930 and a haunting musical score with filmed images of the “Spomenik” – futuristic, abstract stone monuments erected during the communist era in the former Yugoslav republics. The narrator describes the life and society of a dying future race of humans, while taking us through a landscape of surreal and phantasmagorical monuments - filmed in 16mm black and white. These structures – once intended as symbols of Unity and Brotherhood but now forgotten, derelict and overgrown by vegetation – stand like lone, abandoned beacons, still beaming their message into the wilderness of the Balkan republics. The roving camera takes us through this futuristic landscape while we gradually learn all about the tragic and yet hopeful story of the last humans. The film creates a poetic relationship between these decaying concrete monuments and Olaf Stapledon’s story of a crumbling future civilization and synthesizes out of these seemingly unrelated elements an allegory on remembrance, unity, commemoration and the death of ideals and utopia.

Framed Listen
Framed Listen is a series in which artists across a wide spectrum of genre and sonic palette are asked to curate visual material that contextualizes their music practice. Each evening of the series is based around a different artist, opening with a screening and concluding with a performance. The series aims to highlight and expand engagement with different forms of experimental music, giving attendees a deeper look into the work of these extraordinary musicians.

Co-sponsored by KZSC and Redwood Records.
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Indexical is pleased to present an evening of forward-thinking live electronics from Vancouver-based composer Stefan Maier with an opening set from Bay Area fixture Sharkiface.

Stefan Maier
Stefan Maier (b. 1990) is an artist and composer based in Vancouver, Canada — the unceded, traditional territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Working fluidly between live electronic performance, installation, concert music, writing, and sound design for interdisciplinary projects, his works explore the chaotic flows of sonic matter through buildings, sound systems, instruments, software, and bodies. His work has been presented by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (DE), INA-GRM (FR), Ultima festival (NO), Unsound (PL), Liquid Architecture (AU), MONOM (DE), SPOR festival (DK), Gong Tomorrow (DK), the National Music Centre (CA), and Gaudeamus Muziekweek (NL), among many others. His work as a sound designer and film/dance composer has been presented at Sterischer Herbst (AT), International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL), Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art (NL), and V-A-C foundation (RU). Stefan has composed works of chamber music for Talea Ensemble (USA), ECM+ (CA), Ensemble Experimental (DE), Le NEM (CA), and Catchpenny (NL), among many others. In 2017 he received a Mayor’s Art Award from the City of Vancouver and was a 2019 Macdowell Colony Fellow (USA). Stefan is Assistant Professor of Sound Art and Sound Design at Simon Fraser University.

Sharkiface
Sharkiface, the solo project of Angela Edwards, whose trail of achievements and accolades began in the 90s, in Austin, Texas. Starting with her experience booking and doing tour management for Daniel Johnston, she then moved to the Bay Area and quickly became an important staple, collaborating with local exploding psychedelic stalwarts Hans Grüsel's Krankenkabinet, Tarantism, and (rumor has it), Caroliner Rainbow, among many others. Sharkiface has toured the United States steadily, with some stints in Europe and Japan, and has been featured at fests such as San Francisco Electronic Music Fest, No Fun Fest, Colour Out of Space, and Ende Tymes, to name a few. Her 2023 album, "Climax In A Process" brings out career-spanning material and newer tracks inspired by her experience achieving an MFA in Electronic Music at Mills College, where she studied under "expert noodle wranglers" as: Zena Parkins, Laetitia Sonami, John Bischoff, Chris Brown, Tomeka Reid, James Fei and Kala Ramnaf.
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