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About Us
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:
28
Mar
Saturday, March 28 2026 8:30 PM
Moin + Ava Mendoza
Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
$27 adv / $29 door / member discounts
Moin are a three-piece based in London that comprises of Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews of the band Raime (Blackest Ever Black, RR) and percussionist Valentina Magaletti who operates over a great range of projects such as Vanishing Twin, Tomaga and Lafawandah.
The band navigate a revolving set of influences from obvious touch points such as alt rock, post-punk, art-rock and doom metal to more abstract ideas found in improv and found sound recording. In addition to these more closely related areas, shades of electronic music are still present providing a constant dialogue between the two practices.
The sound is direct but subtly re-assembled.
Ava Mendoza is a guitarist, songwriter and composer. Best known for her solo guitar/voice performances, and as the leader of the experimental rock band Unnatural Ways, she has received critical acclaim for her guitar work's compelling combination of technique and visceral impact.
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17
Apr
Friday, April 17 2026 8:30 PM
Thingamajigs Performance Group (Bay Area + Beyond)
Skylighght (Gelsey Bell and Erin Rogers) (New York) (West Coast Premiere)
Skylighght is the duo project of vocalist Gelsey Bell and saxophonist Erin Rogers, both active figures of the New York City experimental music community who have worked together for 15+ years as part of the new music collective, thingNY. Composed collaboratively in 2019, Skylighght cultivates a minimalist music constructed upon the organic acoustic vibrations of interlaced resonances and a mutual performer sensitivity. An exploration of resonant properties, Skylighght has been performed in a variety of spaces from a farm silo to a cemetery catacombs, under a historic bridge in Central Park and inside various concert halls. In 2024, Chaiken Records released a record of the project, recognized for its “richness in concept and sound” (I Care If You Listen).
https://gelseybellerinrogers.bandcamp.com/album/skylighght
With a core ensemble featuring interdisciplinary artist Rae Diamond, performative projectionist and sound artist Keith Evans, and musician composer
Suki O'Kane
, and co-founder Edward Schocker, Thingamajigs Performance Group is reuniting with co-founder Dylan Bolles and guest artist
Wayne Grim
to present in their traditions of durational performance, alternate tuning, group and open compositional formats, interdisciplinary and inter-cultural collaboration, and site work. Their fields of institutional study, performance practice, and instrumentation are directly informed by Japanese noh and gagaku, Korean pansori, sijo,and sinawi, formal training in both Western and Eastern art practices, and a commitment to experimental art.
https://bimodalpress.bandcamp.com/album/window
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24
Apr
Friday, April 24 2026 8:30 PM
Lea Bertucci: The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity
Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
$23 adv / $25 door / free or discounted for members
Crystalline, minimal and dissonant, The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity is a new composition for sampled and live early flutes in 8-channel sound by Lea Bertucci. Steeped in folkloric influences, this work is a haunting contemplation of time, duration and memory that evokes the primeval and futuristic simultaneously. Written for master flutist, early music scholar, and member of the legendary early music group Sequentia, Norbert Rodenkirchen, this work reaches back through the spans of history and catapults ancient music into an immersive present.
The collection of flutes that Norbert has amassed over many decades features unique instruments not usually found in the repertoire of most flutists, which spans from the Renaissance to Medieval to Neolithic. Pre-recorded sustained pitches and abstracted melodic fragments generated from five of Norbert’s flutes (Medieval Traverso, Swan Bone, Sheep Bone, Renaissance Tenor and Renaissance Bass) are sampled and live deployed across an eight channel speaker array. Cutting edge audio technology in symbiosis with the deep history of music creates pathways for a new kind of listening.
Norbert Rodenkirchen performs live fragments of ancient songs and improvisations related to the origin of the flutes. Sustained tones and an idiosyncratic isopolyphony are two major aesthetic features of the work. The drones pulsing through the sound system create a lush and dissonant bed over which Norbert plays with minimal amplification, in effect expanding and contracting the instrument from its point of live origin to a diffused, spatialized sonic environment. This piece contemplates the depths of human history through the lens of our contemporary upheavals.
Norbert Rodenkirchen, who studied flute and Baroque traverso at the music academy Koeln, has been the flute player of the internationally acclaimed ensemble for medieval music Sequentia since 1996 and also works regularly with the French ensemble Dialogos directed by Katarina Livljanic. With both ensembles and also with his medieval soloprograms “Medieval Echoes” and “Hameln Anno 1284” Norbert Rodenkirchen has been invited to numerous international festivals between New York City (Lincoln Center Festival), Vancouver, London, Melbourne, Paris, Boston and Lviv, a.o.. He is also much in demand as a composer of music for theater and film as well as a producer for CD projects. Additionally he founded the ensemble Candens Lilium which specializes on a dialogue between medieval music and modern avantgarde. Norbert Rodenkirchen has given many workshops on medieval instrumental improvisation and related topics as an unconventional lecturer and coach, f.e. at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, the Haute Ecole de la Musique in Geneve, the Schola Cantorum in Basel, the University of Oregon in Eugene, and the Wellesley College near Boston.
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25
Apr
Saturday, April 25 2026 7:30 PM
Dafne Vicente-Sandoval and Charles Curtis
Doors 7pm / Show 7:30pm
$17 adv / $20 door / free or discounted for members
Dafne Vicente-Sandoval works at the intersection of bassoon acoustics, spatial resonance and amplification; Charles Curtis explores classical cello performance, precise tuning and sustained sound. Together their work marks out a distinctive perspective on contemporary experimental music. Working collectively with composers Alvin Lucier, Tashi Wada and Éliane Radigue, and individually with Jakob Ullmann, Phill Niblock, Peter Ablinger, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, and Christian Wolff, Vicente-Sandoval and Curtis present shared concerts of work made for them along with original sound pieces.
For their presentation at The Lab on Saturday April 25, two live performances will frame a listening session of unreleased and rarely-heard recordings from their personal inventory. Vicente-Sandoval will premiere a new version of Tashi Wada's Witness, in which a series of microtonally inflected scales and tetrachords are explored through repetition, variation and improvisation. Vicente-Sandoval's own Minos Circuit Rewired, for microphone feedback, voice and disassembled bassoon, will highlight the evening performance. Curtis will intersperse short performances, possibly including music of Tashi Wada, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff and J. S. Bach, and other works-in-progress. Interspersed throughout the program, material from Vicente-Sandoval & Curtis’s archive will be heard through The Lab’s superb sound system.
https://www.thelab.org/projects/2026/3/12/dafne-vicente-sandoval-and-charles-curtis
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9
May
Saturday, May 9 2026 8:30 PM
Colleen + Sally Decker and Briana Marela
Doors 7:30pm / Show 8:30pm
$23 adv / $25 door / free or discounted for members
The compositions of Colleen, aka multi-instrumentalist Cécile Schott, are as richly varied as they are precise. Each of Colleen’s albums is shaped by her predetermined distinct instrumentation and parameters, including works composed entirely of music boxes, pocket synthesizers, and baroque stringed instruments. The connective essence of Schott’s music is in her ability to create pieces within specificity that are both transcendently expansive and imbued with profound emotions. Libres antes del final is an album that reaches for the hope and desire to be truly freed from unnecessary suffering and harmful thoughts before reaching the end of one’s life cycle.
Sally Decker and Briana Marela perform and compose as a collaborative duo, drawing from their solo practices to create work inspired and initiated from the trust forged through their friendship. With an emphasis on voice, text, and improvisational textural soundscapes, they seek connection to healing oneself and others through their work with sound. Their debut album Small Tremble in Slow Motion was released on Surface World in 2022, and explores the expansive possibilities of being present with oneself within experiences of deep emotional contraction such as grief and loss.
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