Monday 14 July 2025
Briana Marela
Patrick Gallagher
Carrie DeCunzo + Christian Mirande
Victor Vieira-Branco + Sam Yulsman
Matt Robidoux
8 pm / 15$
Program notes courtesy of @all__ball
Briana Marela (Oakland, CA) Peruvian American composer, vocalist, and performance artist. Her recent music centers the voice, technology embodied through gesture and enhanced objects. Her gestural and lyrical song performances draw from elements of both experimental electronic music and vocal driven pop music. Using the visual coding language MaxMSP and machine learning, she is able to make custom tools to create compositions with varying fixed elements that transition into moments of improvisation. She is a 2024 Montalvo Lucas Arts Music and Composition fellow as well as an AAUW Career Development Grant recipient. She is currently a spatial sound artist in residence at Audium in San Francisco. She has toured with artists such as Jenny Hval, Waxahatchee, Emel Mathlouthi and has toured across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Europe. She has played such festivals as Sasquatch, Decibel, and Green Man (UK). She has been interviewed by Vogue, Interview Magazine, and Billboard. In 2018 she received a commission from Radiolab’s More Perfect Podcast to write a song about the 4th amendment for their album celebrating the constitutional amendments. Her most recent albums include the independently released You Are A Wave, an experimental electronic music album, marked by the grief of the sudden passing of her father in April 2020, with a focus on voice and Buchla 100. As well as a collaborative album of poetry/spoken word lyrics, noise, and ambient electronic textures with Oakland artist Sally Decker, titled Small Tremble in Slow Motion, released by Surface World in June 2022. This collaboration with Decker was the result of a remote residency with the organization Qubit in NYC. This audio visual collaboration was an exploration of the expansive possibilities of being present with oneself within experiences of deep emotional contraction such as grief and loss.
Patrick Gallagher (Philadelphia, PA) With a formal education in mathematics, Gallagher employs generative/algorithmic processes, guided improvisation, and intuitive sound collage in an effort to weave evocative and evolving sonic narratives. Exploring the various developments of 20th century composition and contemporary computer music, he seeks to fuse that technicality with the cathartic and rapturous nature of the DIY noise underground. Previous works employed a wide range of sound sources – synthesizers, field recordings, tabletop guitar, etc. – however, Gallagher currently focuses almost entirely on digital synthesis, particularly additive and granular techniques. Gallagher has released albums on cassette and vinyl through ENXPL (enmossed x Psychic Liberation), Hot Releases, Refulgent Sepulchre, Tone Log, and other independent labels.
Carrie DeCunzo + Christian Mirande (Philadelphia, PA)
Christian Mirande utilizes voice, magnetic tape, various audio synthesis and resynthesis methods, and instruments from the fretless bass to Odnes Martenot to iphone voice memo. His current work deals primarily with spoken voice over both musical and abstract settings. Prior to this was highly ambient in focus, taking strong cues from Brian Eno in both form and practice. Dealing with themes of memory and place, work stretching from roughly 2012-2017 weaved field recordings with failing and hysteresis stressed audio tape to evoke the fading pastoral landscapes of his native Pennsylvania and further afield. Christian has performed and worked with artists including Aaron Dilloway, Network Glass, Jason Lescalleet, Good Area, Theodore Cale Shaffer, Sydney Spann, Jack Callahan, Duncan Harrison, Russell Walker, and Nat Baldwin. He has been a member of the groups Open Corner, The Flea Circus and Buck Young. His most recent record was released by Stockport’s Regional Bears imprint with previous releases on Hanson, Vitrine, No Rent and Ascetic House among others. He is inspired by the honest and loving music production of Steve Albini and the caring and boundless performance of Pauline Oliveros.
Carrie DeCunzo is a computer musician, pianist, vocalist, and video and installation artist. Her work deals with social and ecological ethics, and she incorporates visual language and theater into her compositional and performance practice. She has performed and released music under the monikers beautywork, Natural Pleasures, and Carrie Ford. She has released on Hold Tapes, No Rent Records, Love is the Law, Sprawl Tapes, American Damage, and KSX Solutions. MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College and studied geography and political ecology at the University of Vermont.
Victor Vieira-Branco is a vibraphonist, composer, and improviser now based in Philadelphia, PA after spending much of his life in and around São Paulo, Brazil. He leads and writes for Bark Culture, a trio featuring bassist John Moran and drummer Joey Sullivan. The trio has since received acclaim for it’s debut Warm Wisdom by Hank Shteamer, listing it as the debut release of 2024, as well as landing a spot on Best Jazz on Bandcamp September 2024. While Bark Culture is his main vehicle as a composer, his performance work includes working with Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra, Chad Taylor Quintet and Daniel Villarreal Trio amongst others. He is also a member of Philadelphia’s longest-standing artist-run gallery, Vox Populi, where he curates and presents an improvised music series World Again.
Matt Robidoux is a San Francisco based composer, improviser, and educator interested in the convergence of movement and sound as it relates to free improvisation and accessibility. Their primary instrument is the “corn synth” — (Kinetically Operated Randomness Network) a modular system that interprets physical input from two “ears of corn” sculptures cast in aluminum.