Sharmi Basu, Claire Cronin, Future Twin, Madrigal
|||||||||||||||||||||| Sharmi Basu ||||||||||||||||||||||
SHARMI BASU is an Oakland born and based South Asian woman of color creating experimental music as a means of decolonizing musical language. She attempts to catalyze a political, yet ethereal aesthetic by combining her anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics with a commitment to spirituality within the arts. Beast Nest, Sharmi's primary performing project, utilizes an unwavering depression and restrained horror to channel left-eyed spirits. She is an MFA graduate from the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Electronic Music and Recording Media and has worked with Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, John Bischoff, Pauline Oliveros, Chris Brown, Maggi Payne, and more. Her workshops on “Decolonizing Sound” have been featured at the International Society for Improvised Music, the Empowering Women of Color Conference, and have reached international audiences. She performs almost 100 times a year and has toured through the US and Canada as well as internationally in Europe. She specializes in new media controllers, improvisation in electronic music, and intersectionality within music and social justice. She also founded and hosts an all people-of-color improvisation and performance group called the MARA Performance Collective in Oakland, CA and was an organizer the Universe is Lit: A Bay Area Black and Brown Punk Fest. Sharmi is imperfect and is always learning and hopes to help develop a world that embraces and nourishes self-empowerment for all people.
|||||||||||||||||||||| Claire Cronin ||||||||||||||||||||||
Claire Cronin is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar from Los Angeles who currently lives in the Bay Area.
Her new record, Big Dread Moon, came out June 14, 2019 from Orindal Records. In 2016, Ba Da Bing Records released Came Down a Storm, a collaborative album with John Dieterich.
As a writer, Cronin is the author of A Spirit is a Mood Without a Body, winner of the 2018 Dead Lake Chapbook contest. She has a memoir about her obsession with the horror genre forthcoming from Repeater Books in 2020. Cronin's work can be found in Bennington Review, Sixth Finch, Vinyl Poetry, BOAAT, Cloud Rodeo, Yalobusha Review, Fairy Tale Review, and other places.
As an artist, Cronin has performed in solo and collaborative pieces at The Hammer Museum, Redcat, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and Machine Project, and held residencies at Elsewhere Artist Collaborative and Monte Vista Projects.
Cronin has an MFA in Poetry from the University of California, Irvine and a PhD in English from the University of Georgia, where she was also a Lamar Dodd Interdisciplinary Fellow in 2018-2019. Her research areas include twentieth-century and contemporary American poetry, horror, the occult, and death and spectrality in visual media.
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Future Twin is the moniker for generative musician and multi-media artist Jean Jeanie aka Sara Jean Yaste. She is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, singer and dancer. She describes her sound as avant pop. Deli Magazine calls it "soul-gayz."
"Music for the front-lines, in a time when the word revolution is alternatively mocked, pimped, played-out and ignored, Jean Jeanie makes it like another world is still possible. She evokes just about everything great in the pantheon of rock-and-roll. Patti Smith’s poetics, the art-drenched cool of St. Vincent and X-Ray Specs. The harmonies of the Wilson Sisters. The gospel according to Saints Strummer, Near and Makeba.
Her songs and voice seem to stop time, bend it, transport us to when and where you feel music creates insurrection. Where love matters like nothing else. A time when gender doesn't come packaged with pain. A place beyond cynicism where visions of the apocalypse are replaced by the politics of the imagination.
It’s hard to be certain if she’s right, looking out at the planet Future Twin currently calls home. But as long as there is music this good to be found in between the cracks, there is hope for redemption."
On stage and in the studio, Jean Jeanie performs rogue/solo, navigating vocals and multiple electronic and traditional instruments; other times she activates a cadre of musician collaborators, currently including Alexey Turanov (Oakland via Russia), Mike E.G. (Brooklyn via SF), and Miles DeIaco (Berlin via SF). She has performed and toured with La Femme, the Black Lips, Black Angels, Heartless Bastards, Thee Oh Sees, Lightning Bolt and Two Gallants.
|||||||||||||||||||||| Madrigal ||||||||||||||||||||||
Sordid and soulful songs for the haggard and heartbroken, performed solo by interdisciplinary artist, Anthony A. Russell (Guillotine, Woolly Man, The Human De-Selection & Realization Nature Group).
www.aarussell.com