Octopus Literary Salon
2101 Webster St. #170 Oakland CA 94612
Click for Venue page

Bugs In the Borderlands: A Lunar New Year Evening of Words Meeting Sound

Set 1
Gino Robair (voice/electronics), with Andrew Raffo Dewar (electronics), reads selected sections of “Footnote,” his novel-in-progress.

Set 2
Lisa Margonelli (writer) with Tom Djll (electronic soundscapes) will read about termite queens from her book Underbug: A Tale of Termites and Technology.


Gino Robair has performed and recorded with Tom Waits, Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Nina Hagen, Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, John Butcher, Derek Bailey, Peter Kowald, Otomo Yoshihide, and the ROVA Saxophone Quartet. He is one of the "25 innovative percussionists" included in the book Percussion Profiles (SoundWorld, 2001), as well as a founding member of the Splatter Trio and Pink Mountain. His opera, I, Norton, based on the life of Norton I, Emperor of the United States, has been performed throughout North America and Europe.

Andrew Raffo Dewar (b. 1975 Rosario, Argentina) is a composer, soprano saxophonist, electronic musician, ethnomusicologist, and arts organizer whose work has been performed or installed throughout North America, Southeast Asia, and Europe. He appears on nearly two dozen recordings, including study/work with experimental music innovators Anthony Braxton, Bill Dixon, Steve Lacy and Alvin Lucier. He has received support for his work from the National Endowment for the Arts, Chamber Music America, The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, NewMusicUSA, ASCAP, the Getty Foundation, Arts International, Meet The Composer, The San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dewar is an Associate Professor in New College and the School of Music at the University of Alabama.

Lisa Margonelli is the author of Underbug: A Tale of Termites and Technology and the national bestseller Oil On the Brain: Petroleum’s Long Strange Trip to Your Tank. She’s written for the Atlantic, Wired, Scientific American, and elsewhere and is the deputy editor of Zocalo Public Square, an ASU magazine of ideas. Her first book was awarded the Northern California Book Award in Non-Fiction, and she has received fellowships from the Breadloaf Writers Conference, the New America Foundation, the Mesa Refuge and the Sundance Institute. After living in the Bay Area for 20 years, she now lives in Maine.

Tom Djll has spent over 30 years developing an idiosyncratic trumpet language and presenting the results inside electrified sound environments. A composer, improviser, and occasional writer on music, he studied at Berklee College of Music, the Colorado College and Mills College Center for Contemporary Music, and is the recipient of an MFA degree from the Mills Center for Contemporary Music, as well as a Deeploma from Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening Organization, and was awarded the Paul Merritt Henry Prize for Composition at Mills. An active participant in the San Francisco Bay Area new music community since 1985, his current projects include TENDER BUTTONS with Tania Chen and Gino Robair, KINDA GREEN with Tim Perkis, KOKUO with Kyle Bruckmann, Kanoko Nishi-Smith, Jacob Felix Heule and John McCowen, EUPHOTIC with Cheryl Leonard and Bryan Day, and various electronic solo projects.

Cost: Donations accepted

Audio samples in which musicians at this event play:

Videos featuring musicians playing at this event