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.
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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.
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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.”
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