Indexical is pleased to present new work from Portland-based artist and musician Luke Wyland and Peruvian American composer, vocalist, and performing artist Briana Marela.

Luke Wyland
Luke Wyland is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, and cultural organizer based in Portland, Oregon. As a person who stutters, his work is rooted in disability justice and the rich terrain of speech diversity. In collaboration with the nonprofit SPACE, he curates the Library of Dysfluent Voices—a first-of-its-kind living archive that reimagines stuttering as a generative, expressive mode of communication. Through sound art, community exchange, and immersive installation, he explores the textures of voice and the politics of fluency, inviting new ways of listening and learning.

For over two decades, Wyland has released critically acclaimed music with the groups AU and Methods Body, as LWW, and under his own name, working with labels including New Amsterdam, Beacon Sound, Balmat, The Leaf Label, and Aagoo Records. He has performed internationally at venues and festivals such as the Whitney Museum, Ecstatic Music Festival, Issue Project Room, PICA’s TBA Festival, End of the Road, and Les Nuits Botanique.

Briana Marela
Briana Marela is a Peruvian American composer, vocalist, and performing artist based out of Oakland, CA. Using her voice as a focal point, she makes use of visually engaging elements of tech augmented gestures and objects to compose and perform her music live. Her gestural and lyrical song performances draw from elements of both experimental electronic music and vocal driven pop music. Using a visual programming language and machine learning, she is able to make custom tools to create compositions with varying fixed elements that transition into moments of improvisation. She was most recently a spatial sound artist in residence at Audium in San Francisco for their residency New Voices IV, performing her multi-channel piece live every weekend from February to April 2025. She is currently a Montalvo Lucas Arts Music and Composition fellow. She received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College in 2020.

Her newest full length release My Inner Rest, is due to be released on June 6th 2025 via AKP Recordings. Marela has self-released past albums, as well as releasing records with Jagjaguwar, Surface World and PIAPTK.
✚gCal  ✚iCal  More...

Rick Walker (found & invented sound/extended vocal techniques/loops) presents A Celebration of 30 Years of Live Looping with guest artists: David Tristram (iPhone/loops) and John Connell (sampler/synth/loops)

Rick Walker
Rick Walker is the founder of the world's largest annual international live looping festival which turns 25 next year. He is currently celebrating his 30th year a live looping artist in public, having headlined experimental, creative, noise and loopfests in 17 countries worldwide. He thinks of himself as a Found and Invented Sound, Multi-instrumental, Solo Live Looping Artist and is also known for his seminal work in the World Music Fusion movement of the 80's and 90's as a drummer/multi-percussionist and band leader. He led the new wave band, Tao Chemical, the worldbeat band, Rhythmical and the world fusion band, Worlds Collide into the early 2000s when he began to make Abstract Electronica and kick start the Live Looping movement. He also is an inventor of both Hardware and Software instruments for audio and video.

David Tristram
David Tristram is a video artist and musician working in Santa Cruz California.

Tryptich Descending
This three part electronic looping composition explores polyrhythm and harmony and the space where they converge. Multiple periodic modulations combine to form short syncopated phrases, while loop periods create longer term temporal structure. In a second section, physically based synthesis allows evocative duets and trios where audio-rate modulations meld. Finally, these elements are replicated, manipulated, and deconstructed to reveal their most basic nature.

CHATT3R
Santa Cruz electronic musician John Connell AKA CHATT3R uses Hardware Synthesizers, Samplers, and iOS to create dark beats and soundscapes informed by his lifelong passion for Industrial, Metal, Noise, and Post-punk. John studied traditional Persian instruments for 8 years with Bay Area teachers, and has performed at the Y2K International Live Looping Festival since 2008. From 2014-2018 he participated in numerous tours throughout France, Italy, Germany, Czechia, Switzerland, and Mexico.
✚gCal  ✚iCal  More...

Indexical is pleased to present FIAT, a four hour durational performance for viola and multi-channel sine wave array.

FIAT
FIAT is an opportunity to engage with skepticism and belief in the effects of sound on bodies and minds. Over the course of four hours with the sunset at the center, Whitney Johnson (AKA Matchess) performs in the midst of a multi-channel sine wave array. The theory of brainwave entrainment claims that clockwise movement through this installation can relax the listener, and counterclockwise movement can energize. With these possibilities in mind, FIAT is composed by the body of each listener through motion, attention, and intention—a coming into being by act of will.

Whitney Johnson
Whitney Johnson uses sound to explore relationships between bodies and minds. She composes, performs, records, and installs multi-channel sound from the viola, sine waves, Max/MSP, organ, synthesizers, vocalization, tape looping, and field recording. Her latest recordings, Hav and Stena (2024, Drag City) adopt alter egos to approach sonic material from two sides, following the cult of Hermaphroditus through Cyprus and Greece and her own symbolic and biological ancestry in Sweden. Recent performance-installations have considered the effects of sound on the body. FIAT (2023, Forecast Platform Berlin), The Tuning of the Elements (2023, Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago), Huizkol (2020, Lampo), and Fundamental 256 Hz (2019, Longform Editions) each consider the possibility of brainwave entrainment, an alternative healing technique using binaural beats to induce relaxed or energized mental states. In tandem with her sound practice, she received her doctorate in the sociology of sound from the University of Chicago in 2018 and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship on sound and technology in the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University in Sweden in 2022. She began as Assistant Professor of Sound Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in August 2024.
✚gCal  ✚iCal  More...

Indexial is pleased to present a performance from abstract turntablist, sound artist, and DJ Maria Chavez with an opening set by Puerto Rican Bay Area experimental sound artist Alexandra Buschman-Romá's project La Macacoa.

Maria Chavez
Born in Lima, Peru and based in NYC, Maria Chávez is best known as an abstract turntablist, sound artist and DJ. Coincidence, chance and failures are themes that unite her work across mediums, including improvised performance, sound and marble sculpture, visual art, book objects and an extensive history with multi-channel installation. Her approach is rooted in Deep Listening, a form of embodied listening developed by her late mentor Pauline Oliveros. Maria’s relationship with Oliveros was recently covered in a BBC3 radio episode of Afterwords, chronicling the late composers impact on a new generation of artists. She also graced the cover of The Wire in April 2023 with The Turntable Trio.

Maria is the only abstract turntablist in the world who performs with a rare needle known as the RAKE Double Needle. This special device contains two needles on one head, allowing it to read two different segments of a single record at the same time. Paired with her inimitable ability to create unforgettable sonic experiences from shards of broken records, each performance is truly unique.

Maria’s practice is profoundly expansive, responsive and curious. Her work has been featured and supported by a myriad of institutions over the past decades including Rewire Festival, Counterflows Festival, Donau Festival, MoMA PS1, The Getty, DOCUMENTA 14, the JUDD Foundation, Cambridge University Press and many, many more. Chavez’s 2012 book, Of Technique: Chance Procedures on Turntable has garnered a reputation as both an academic resource on turntablism and a foundational text for a new generation of turntablists.

La Macacoa
La Macacoa is Puerto Rican Bay Area experimental sound artist Alexandra Buschman-Román (she/they). As a singer and improviser, they use multiple microphones, electronic hardware, and body gestures/movement to expand the voice. As a composer and electronic percussionist, they draw from Afro-Caribbean music and Taino (indigenous Caribbean) stories. Performances are mystical rituals.

Part of Alexandra’s roots are in the Puerto Rican classical and electronic music vanguard studying composition at the Music Conservatory with Manuel Ceide (Berio student), and Rafael Aponte Ledée (Ginastera student). They moved to Oakland in 2007 to study Composition and Improvisation with Fred Frith, Chris Brown, and Maggie Payne, and Deep Listening with Pauline Oliveros at Mills College.

Alexandra is half of avant-tropical duo Las Sucias, with Danishta Rivero. They also perform and tour under monicker Demonsleeper, singing songs about nightmares and lucid dreams using dark ambient, drone noise, and heavy somnambulist pulses.
✚gCal  ✚iCal  More...

Indexical is pleased to present Berlin-based musician and sound artist Eric Wong's spatialized sonic performance project with Bluetooth speakers. Media artist Anna Friz presents a sonic activation of objects often rendered invisible as parts of infrastructure or embedded in every day routines.

Eric Wong utilizes multiple Bluetooth speakers to facilitate a spatialized sonic experience that decentralizes the overarching PA system. The portability of the speakers enables performers and audience to relate to the sound sources in different ways. The speakers are placed sporadically across the space, or among the audience, who may also interact with the speakers during the performance. The pitch materials are either in ratio with one another for different shades of harmonies, or are interfering with each other in closely deviated frequencies. Audience’s physical distances from individual speakers also affect the shades of harmonies or depths of interference they experience.

Eric Wong
Eric Wong is a Berlin-based musician and sound artist whose work involves auditory perception and the exploration of human relationships with sonic environments. He often incorporates spatialized sound and reduced expressions in his work, focusing on fewer gestures instead of constructing linear or non-linear sonic narratives.​​​​

Wong​ has performed at venues and festivals including Volksbühne (Berlin), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Twenty Alpha (Hong Kong), KM28 (Berlin), Ftarri (Tokyo), 411 Kent Avenue (Brooklyn), ausland (Berlin), Record Shop (Brooklyn), Q-O2 (Brussels), PAS (Berlin), Richten 25 (Berlin), Les 26 Chaises (Paris), OTOOTO (Tokyo), Ting Shuo Hear Say (Tainan), Cute Lab (Brooklyn), Moozak (Vienna), Hošek Contemporary (Berlin), Labor Sonor (Berlin), Les 26 Chaises (Paris), Freespace Noise Fest (Hong Kong), Cynetart (Dresden), Internationales Klangkunstfest (Berlin), Blaues Rauschen (Herne), Soundance Festival (Berlin), Festival Experimentelle Musik (Munich), and Sound Forms (Hong Kong).

He has released music on labels Edition Wandelweiser, Creative Sources, Inexhaustible Editions, Full Body Massage Records, Lona Records, Sello Postal, Vintage Vinyl HK, Party Perfect!, Aloe Records, and Ftarri.

Anna Friz
Anna Friz is a radio, sound and media artist. She has presented work internationally since 1998; recent venues include The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Sonandes Bienal Internacional de Arte Sonoro (La Paz, Bolivia), Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro (Valparaíso and Santiago, Chile), Bienal Sur (Argentina), Heroines of Sound Festival, Berlin Germany), esc Medien Kunst Labor (Graz, Austria), Donaueschinger Musiktage 2024 (Donaueschingen, Germany), Radio Art Zone (Esch-Zur-Alzette, Luxembourg), and more. Her radio artworks have been commissioned by national public radio in Canada, Australia, Austria, Finland, Germany, Denmark, and Spain, and heard on public and independent airwaves all over the world. She is currently Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz.
✚gCal  ✚iCal  More...

On tour from New York City, modular synthesist Matthew Ryals presents a live improvised solo set in support of his new album Exalge, out September 5 on Infrequent Seams. The LP documents a spontaneous first meeting with Italian violist Federica Furlani, recorded live in Milan. Copies of the album will be available at the show.

Ryals will also lead a workshop the following afternoon titled Cultivating an Improvisational Practice as an Electronic Musician, offering insight and approaches for integrating improvisation into an electronic music practice.

Matthew Ryals
Matthew Ryals (he/him) is a New York City-based synthesist and composer-improviser whose music delves into improvisation, real-time sound generation, cybernetics, chance operations, and archival experimentation. Described as “a sonic explorer on the frontier of experimental music” whose work is “a fascinating foray to the edges of generative music production” (Plastic Mag), Matthew’s music has been praised for its “full-blown cybernetic synth shocks and mirrors” that are “unabashedly confident” (Tabs Out) and for treating sounds “as if they were alive, breathing” to create something “truly immersive and unforgettable” (Beats Per Minute).

A dedicated educator, Matthew teaches modular synthesis, electronic music composition, music production, and guitar to students worldwide, including workshops for Art Science Connect at THE GRADUATE CENTER CUNY and an upcoming workshop at Indexical in Santa Cruz. He also co-curates Artifact, a Brooklyn-based experimental music series that was awarded a Brooklyn Arts Fund grant by Brooklyn Arts Council to support its 2025 season and has presented artists such as Lea Bertucci, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Cecilia Lopez, Brandon Lopez, Laura Cocks, and Joanna Mattrey.

Originally from rural Arkansas, Matthew holds an MM in classical guitar from the Cleveland Institute of Music and a BM from Arkansas State University.

CHARI
CHARI is an NY Emmy-nominated composer and interdisciplinary artist working across sound, performance, and media art. As a performer, their work investigates societal “fault lines”—points of tension and release that impact the human condition. As a media artist, their critical engagement with archives and embodiment operates through, with, and against technology, informed by Black cultural practices, scholarship, and technological methodologies. As a composer, they are known for dense, evolving electronic compositions, experimental classical ensemble pieces, a powerful and delicate singing voice, and multichannel sound installations.

Recent works include Speculative Landscapes, an archival project using embodied mapping to document sites tied to the Gullah-Geechee in South Carolina; Breaking Time, a large ensemble piece premiered in 2025 with the Seattle Modern Orchestra; and MUTATE, a large-scale installation and performance that created an archive in a 20,000-square-foot Seattle Steamplant to house Black cultural artifacts. Building on MUTATE, their current research focuses on building a performable archive in three-dimensional digital space.

CHARI is currently an Assistant Professor of Black Media Practices in the Film and Digital Media Department at UC Santa Cruz.
✚gCal  ✚iCal  More...

Modular synthesist and composer-improviser Matthew Ryals leads a workshop on how to begin integrating improvisation into your practice as an electronic musician. We’ll explore instrument setups, practice methods, and approaches to developing a personal improvisational language. The workshop examines how improvisation can unlock new sonic possibilities, transform your relationship to sound-making, and deepen your connection to live performance.

Open to electronic musicians working with any setup including modular synthesizers, laptops, hybrid software-hardware systems, and electro-acoustic instruments.

There are two ways to participate:

1. Soundmakers – These participants bring their own setup. Each Soundmaker will have dedicated time to talk about their work, share their instrument / setup, and optionally do a short performance. They’ll receive direct feedback from Matthew, as well as from the group in a supportive discussion format. Some experience is recommended, but you don’t need to be “advanced.”

2. Soundthinkers – These participants are there to observe, ask questions, and engage in discussion. However, they won't bring equipment, perform, or receive individual feedback. Soundthinkers can be of any experience level.

Loose Schedule:

2:00 PM - Presentation

Matthew will introduce his background in improvisation and how it’s become integral to his own practice.

Discussion on designing an instrument / setup for improvisation, building an improvisational vocabulary, approaches to practicing improvisation, and related topics.

Matthew will give an overview of his own modular synthesizer setup, share some of the thinking behind it, and demonstrate some of its capabilities.

3:30 PM - Break

4:00 PM - Participant Performances

Matthew will facilitate a session in which Soundmakers (see above) each present their own setup and ideas, demonstrate sounds, and optionally perform a 10-minute improvisation. Each set will be followed by direct feedback from Matthew as well as the group. The emphasis will be on positivity, encouragement, and idea-sharing. (Actual set times may adjust due to number of participants.)

Matthew Ryals
Matthew Ryals is a NYC-based synthesist and composer-improviser. Described as “a sonic explorer on the frontier of experimental music” (Plastic Mag), Matthew has been praised for treating sounds “as if they were alive, breathing” to create something “truly immersive and unforgettable” (Beats Per Minute).

Matthew has released three studio albums and a series of EPs on 3OP, SØVN, and dingn\dents, and will release a solo record on Infrequent Seams in Fall 2025 and a collaborative album with Jacob Sachs-Mishalanie on Oxtail Recordings in 2026.

An active performer as both a soloist and in group configurations, Matthew has performed internationally across Europe, Asia, and North America, and will be featured on High Zero Festival in Baltimore and Ex Nihilo Festival in Omaha in Fall 2025. He has collaborated with such artists as Madison Greenstone, Nava Dunkelman, and Stephan Haluska. Matthew received a 2025 Art Omi: Music Residency, 2025 Foundation of Contemporary Arts Grant, a 2022-23 New Music USA Award, and a 2021 IEA Electronic Media Residency.

A dedicated educator, Matthew teaches worldwide, including workshops for Art Science Connect at THE GRADUATE CENTER CUNY and an upcoming workshop at Indexical in Santa Cruz, CA.
✚gCal  ✚iCal  More...

Percussionist Jon Mueller presents All Colors Present, a sound and visual meditation in collaboration with Tom Lecky. Bay Area improvisation duo Voicehandler opens.

All Colors Present
Why? Why do we obey and follow our compulsions? What do we seek as our horizon rolls away at a rate constant to our progress, in perpetual ceaseless motion, as we float forever forward in worldless, magnetized thrall? All Colors Present vivifies an inchoate force that has propelled Jon Mueller since he first engaged sound with action. At the center of these two bilaterally symmetrical pieces is a source, an essential substance with no influence, precedent, or subsequent approval — just a cellular impetus to Exist.

Jon Mueller’s singular performance idiom is an awe-inspiring display of elegant athleticism, preternatural focus, brute restraint, and ecstatic, monastic reverie. It requires and demands a state of inner quietude from witnesses. Here, two crisp beats repeat and reverberate—one, then two; two, then one—in a confluence of hand and stick, drumhead, and heartbeat. Yet, from this seemingly metronomic exercise blossoms every possible tint and hue of infinite spectral sound.

An apt reference point resides within the broad, decades-spanning catalog of Table of the Elements. Like Tony Conrad’s surging Outside the Dream Syndicate, the aural and conceptual headwinds are real, but the perceived affronts of provocation are not. These works are not endurance challenges, nor are they threadbare minimalist upholstery. They are not obstacles. They are invitations. Within their simplicity and formalism await a sympathetic repose, a comfort. These are gestures of generosity.

Why do we undertake these efforts? Mueller doesn’t overtly intend this to be his final work. Yet he recognizes an apotheosis of a lifelong path, a throughline that has dragged him from his origin to this moment. None of us may ever grasp the purpose of our innermost drive. We strain towards destinations of numinous obliteration.

What is the sense of it all? The answer may be another question. Have we at least honored ourselves and that most primal urge that beckons us to surge further and farther and beyond…?

"People have asked if there is a certain kind of meditation I practice to prepare for this kind of playing, and I say, "This. This is what I do.""
— Jon Mueller

Jon Mueller
Renowned percussionist and drummer Jon Mueller is celebrated for his uncommon technique, rigor, and virtuosity. Notable solo performances have taken place at the Guggenheim Museum, New Museum, Issue Project Room, SXSW, Big Ears Festival, Hopscotch Fest, and Witching Hour Festival. Beyond his solo work, Mueller has performed and recorded with Olivia Block, Who is the Witness?, Mind Over Mirrors, Volcano Choir, Collections of Colonies of Bees and Pele.

Tom Lecky
Tom Lecky has worked in photography, music (as Hallock Hill), the book arts, prose and poetry writing, and literary criticism. His creative work concentrates on memory, place, and environment, the work of the imagination, perception, and the intersections of abstraction and representation. He often interweaves appropriated texts and images with his own, evoking a conversation with the history of book design and illustration.

Voicehandler
Danishta Rivero: voice & electronics
Jacob Felix Heule: bass drum & electronics

Voicehandler plays intuitive, incantatory music grounded in the most primitive and somatic instruments -- the voice and percussion -- juxtaposed with contemporary, disembodied electronics. We situate ourselves in our physical and social environment through our music. Our improvisations are shaped by their setting and context.

The performance is loose and exploratory, at various times energetic and meditative. Rivero’s voice embraces noise, with the lines blurred between electronic processing and extended vocal techniques. Heule has a special interest in friction techniques, and embraces limited instrumentation - like a single drum and a single cymbal - as a commitment to exploring the depth of his instruments.

“…bizarre glossolalia, witch-like chattering, deliriously stuttering as an obsessed medium, as a distorted mouthpiece of Latina experiences. Heule… patters on predator paws or becomes very meek when the ghosts whisper as if with paranormal tape voices or increasingly only sizzling pure noise or switching off the human factor in waves of hum.”
✚gCal  ✚iCal  More...