Serving the San Francisco Bay Area New Music Community

                 
The Lab
2948 16th St
San Francisco CA   

The Lab is a catalyst for artistic experimentation. Our projects ignite critical dialogue amongst individuals, organizations, and communities. We support diverse and underserved artists, providing them with essential resources, time, and space to develop work that takes risks and pushes the boundaries of the non-profit platform. As a site of constant innovation and iteration, our programming exposes the elements of art making and transforms the creative process here and abroad.

We are W.A.G.E. Certified. W.A.G.E. Certification is a program initiated and operated by working artists that publicly recognizes non-profit arts organizations demonstrating a commitment to voluntarily paying artist fees that meet a minimum standard.

The Lab does not accept unsolicited submissions.
http://www.thelab.org

Upcoming Events:
Thursday, March 20 2025 8:30 PM
Lucy Railton + Amma Ateria

Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
$26 adv / $28 door / free or discounted for members

British cellist and composer Lucy Railton presents a visceral live set drawing on music from her Modern Love release Corner Dancer, bridging experimental electronic and electroacoustic practices with the conventions of new music, employing a deep consideration of sound and its properties, implementing cello and antiquated string instruments, analog and digital synthesizers, drum machines and voice—and exploring alternate tuning systems, psychoacoustic phenomena, and timbral control.

Lucy Railton is a British, Berlin based cellist, composer and curator working internationally in sound, dance, film and installation since 2007. She has released music on labels Modern Love, Editions Mego - GRM Portraits, PAN (with Peter Zinovieff), Shelter Press, Ideologic Organ and ECM, and currently collaborates on projects with Shō player Michiko Ogawa ‘Fragments of Reincarnation’, Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley ‘Does Spring Hide Its Joy’, Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith ‘Correspondences’, Derek Jarman’s ‘BLUE’ live with Simon Fisher Turner, presentations of Maryanne Amacher’s electroacoustic work ‘GLIA’ and as a member of the Berlin ensemble 'Harmonic Space'.


Amma Ateria is a philosophy held through her work, — to give strength to disintegration and fragility, to rebuild from aftermath, from dust. An electroacoustic composer / sound artist, her work examines psychoacoustics in binaural beats, brainwave entrainment, and equal-loudness contour. With immediacy of tension / release, she navigates between oppositions, transforming deafening noise into self hypnosis and metamorphosis. Compositions developed during her concussion recovery, utilizes brainwave entrainment, time shifts, and changes of neurological responses to DELTA, THETA, ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA waves as materials and focal point. With memories of condensed cities, she gravitates to frequencies of close-ranged airplanes, polyrhythmic occurrences, out-of-body experiences, sustained harmonics intersected with musique concrète, and lost speech.

‘The Entropic Arias: I. Neurogenesis Overload’ sonically encapsulates Ateria's post-concussion neurogenesis as it enters stages of maximal entropy. A series of sonic movements develops as she navigates entropy acceleration to reach equilibrium. This work invites audiences into a space where breakdowns—sonic or cognitive—become thresholds for clarity and balance for meditation, blurring the line between collapse and emergence.
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Friday, March 21 2025 8:30 PM
Still House Plants + Phipps Pt

Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
$23 adv / $25 door / free or discounted for members

Still House Plants are a UK-based three-piece made up of Jess Hickie-Kallenbach, Finlay Clark, and David Kennedy. From a minimalist approach of guitar, drums and vocals they create fractious and sharp music with a melting pop heart. Bridging elements of sampling, slow core, and repetition, the trio have developed a sound that constantly breaks apart and fuses together again.


Phipps Pt. is the sound project of Canadian conduit, Lovage Sharrock. What began as a series of one-off performances pairing her hypnotic fingerpicked guitar patterns and fragile vocals with a rotating roster of impressive collaborators, has evolved with the regular accompaniment of Jon Leidecker (Wobbly / Negativland / Thurston Moore Group) live processing the moment.

Each conjured performance is raw, distinct and unrepeatable. In their live act, Sharrock’s vocals vacillate between delicate, seductive, humorous and disturbed, offering moments of profound beauty and catharsis within joy and deep discomfort. Together, they continue to push the boundaries of what it means to connect through music, creating spaces where composition and experimental sound converge. Their sophomore album, Songs We No Longer Sing, is set to release later this year.
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Saturday, March 22 2025 8:30 PM
Tarta Relena + Sholeh Asgary / Leila Abdul-Rauf

Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
$29 adv / $30 door / free or discounted for members

Catalan duo Tarta Relena make their San Francisco debut at The Lab, after a standout performance at Unsound 2024 and on their way to Big Ears 2025.

The project was born in 2016 by two singers who explore a cappella the sounds of the different styles in vocal music. Tarta Relena wants to build a repertoire that goes from traditional music to original songs that are related to the geographical area of ​​the Mediterranean. They do not fear to widen the limits of the sacred and the profane. Experimentation is the core of their identity, and the blend of vocal techniques is their creative engine. In the arrangements, the two very different timbres live together with the synthetic sounds and electronic samples. Always looking for complexity in simplicity and maximum expression with the minimum of elements.

Tarta Relena presents a new album that flirts with the notion of tragic thinking: diverse characters who find themselves facing unstoppable consequences, known and unknown at the same time. A conceptual mix of what fate has ready for us, our thirst for knowledge and the inability to integrate future versions of ourselves. They try to capture in music and lyrics the tension and mystery of what we do not understand, coming from logics that escape our usual ways of existing.


Sholeh Asgary (b. Iran) engages performance, interdisciplinary forms, and collective processes to investigate, memorialize, and express the complexities of joy and survival inherent in diasporic and refugee experiences. Her work challenges colonial assumptions about what is heard, proposing new futures through sound. Featured in Art in America's 2022 "New Talent Issue," Asgary was a Bay Area Now 9 artist at YBCA, a 2023 Artadia Finalist, and part of the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (2024). She is exhibited in PST-Getty's Atmosphere of Sound and supported by institutions such as PICA, MASS MoCA, and Headlands. Asgary is faculty at UC Berkeley.


Leila Abdul-Rauf is a composer and multi-instrumentalist based in Oakland. She is a main songwriter, guitarist, vocalist, lyricist and co-founder of extreme metal band Vastum and electronic ambient trio Ionophore. As a solo artist using voice, trumpet and electronics as primary instruments, Leila has released five full-length albums under her name, and has collaborated with countless others. She has toured nationally and internationally, including performances at Hopscotch Music Festival in 2016, the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival reception in 2018, Seattle’s Northwest Terror Fest in 2022, and the Arab American National Museum in 2024.

Using voice, trumpet and synthesizer as primary instruments, Leila Abdul-Rauf creates a cinematic atmosphere of introspection, accessing what is often unconscious and obscured by the human condition; songs are not so much composed as captured from dreams.
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Thursday, March 27 2025 8:30 PM
MSHR + Shatter Pattern

Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
$17 adv / $20 door / free or discounted for members

MSHR is an art collective that collaboratively builds and explores sculptural electronic systems. Their performances and installations integrate electrical signals and human presence, weaving dense networks of causality to form audiovisual environments that babble with life-like current. They explore intuitive and technical gradients between sonic and sculptural forms, using analog circuitry and open-source software to sculpt mutually resonant hyperobjects. MSHR was founded by Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper in 2011 in Portland, Oregon. The name MSHR is a modular acronym designed to hold varied ideas over time. It can be pronounced as an acronym or like a thing that meshes.

Shatter Pattern reallocates the memory space divided during dreams in hopes of generating a shared access platform for auditory practices that can slow down and speed up event perception. Music partakes of body-phenomena, and shatter pattern music endeavors to translate into unknowable bodies. Using polyrhythm, textural sound and vocal processing, shatter patterns break down and stretch our sensory expectations of what a human song can be. Shatter Pattern (previously Waxy Tomb) has performed at CCRMA, the Lab, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Algorithmic Art Assembly, with releases on Embalming Lately(NYC), Gilgongo Records (Arizona) and Weird Ear (Oakland).
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Sunday, March 30 2025 6:00 PM
Zachary James Watkins: Exciting Sites of Opposition III with Li(sa E.) Harris and Jamael Smith

Workshop Performance at 6pm
Free with RSVP

Zachary James Watkins’s Exciting Sites of Opposition III is the latest in a series of works by Watkins exploring the multiplicity of the term resonance in human relations and in acoustics, especially as it relates to histories of struggle and resilience. The initial work in this series, completed in 2015 at the invitation of Indigenous art collective Postcommodity, involved a community activation of the Black Heritage Society’s Heritage Hall in Guelph, Ontario, built by formerly enslaved Africans who escaped the United States aided by abolitionists and First Nation Tribes.

In 2024, Watkins returned to this theme while clearing out his mother’s art studio where he grew up in Lubbock, Texas, after her passing, collaborating with family members and soprano Lisa E. Harris on a collection of site-specific recordings. For his commission from The Lab and third entry into this series of works, Watkins is joined again by Lisa E. Harris and Bay Area-based bassoonist Jamael Smith. The trio will work within the newly excavated, raw space of the historic San Francisco Labor Temple, as a pre-renovation site of The Lab, with Watkins tuning his equipment to the site and exploring the location through improvisation and activation of natural resonances.
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