The Lab

2948 16th St San Francisco, CA, 94103

(415) 864-8855

The Lab is a nonprofit experimental art and performance space located in the Mission District of San Francisco.

Alvin Lucier performed by Charles Curtis & Dafne Vicente-Sandoval
Dec
17
3:00 PM15:00

Alvin Lucier performed by Charles Curtis & Dafne Vicente-Sandoval

Sunday, Dec. 17 at 3pm
Free | RSVP

Please join us for an end-of-the-year event, with works by Alvin Lucier performed by cellist Charles Curtis and bassoonist Dafne Vicente-Sandoval.

Alvin Lucier, Same and Different (2021) for bassoon and pure wave
Alvin Lucier, Slices (2007-2011) for cello and pre-recorded orchestra

Same and Different: During the course of the performance an electronically generated pure wave tuned at 442 Hz flows from a single loudspeaker mounted behind and above the heads of the audience. A bassoonist plays a series of 126 long tones consisting of near-unison variations of the pure wave caused by different fingerings. Small variations in pitch cause audible beating. The farther the distance between the pitches, the faster the beating; at unison, no beating occurs. Furthermore, the beating patterns may be heard to spin in space above the heads of the listeners.

In Slices for cello and pre-recorded orchestra, a 53-note chromatic tone cluster is sustained by 53 orchestral instruments, each recorded individually and looped. Against this sustaining surface, the solo cello performs melodic orderings of the 53-note set; with each played tone, the cluster is successively erased and then re-inscribed, in a gradual process timed and inflected by the soloist in real time. The entire cluster is traversed seven times altogether.

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Stephen O'Malley and François J Bonnet + Andy Guthrie
Dec
15
8:00 PM20:00

Stephen O'Malley and François J Bonnet + Andy Guthrie

Fri., Dec. 15 at The Lab
Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
Buy Tickets
$29.46 advance / $30 door / discounted or free for members
Request your personal member DICE Code here.
Questions? Contact thelabsf@thelab.org

François J. Bonnet and Stephen O’Malley are long-term collaborators around editorial projects like Recollection GRM and Portraits GRM labels & SPECTRES journal. Their first album, Cylene appeared in late spring 2019, and the Cylene Suisse Redux LP in spring 2021 (with production by Jim O’Rourke and Ryoji Ikeda), both were released on Editions Mego. The music of this duo suggests a world at the same time serene and anxious, evoking the calm before or after the storm without excluding, from time to time, the storm itself.

François J. Bonnet is a Franco-Swiss composer, writer and theoretician based in Paris. He’s been a member of INA GRM since 2007 and became its director in 2018. He has published several books : The Order of Sounds, The Infra-World, After Death(all published by Urbanomic) and The Music To Come(Shelter Press).

Stephen O’Malley is a guitarist, producer, composer, and visual artist who has conceptualized and participated in numerous drone and experimental music groups for over two decades – SUNN O))), KTL, and Khanate being among his best-known creations. Wildly prolific, O’Malley’s oeuvre is defined by its remarkable breadth, complexity and multidisciplinary interests. O’Malley is also a vigorous live performer and has toured around the world since 2000. His live performances feature a reverberating fog of electric guitar minimalism – sorcery that challenges boundaries of space and time.

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Prepared Guitar Ensemble: Workshop and Performance with Fred Frith
Dec
9
1:00 PM13:00

Prepared Guitar Ensemble: Workshop and Performance with Fred Frith

Sat., Dec. 9 at The Lab
Workshop 1pm / Performance 3pm
$15 Suggested Donation for Performance

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Request your personal member DICE Code here.
Questions? Contact thelabsf@thelab.org

Prepared Guitar Ensemble, a collaboration founded by San Francisco based composer Matt Robidoux in 2019 with Creativity Explored, a SF studio-based collective that partners with people with developmental disabilities to nurture and celebrate creative potential in all of us, is a space where artists meet to make sound inclusively with instruments of their own design. Our instruments were designed by CE artists remotely in a series of Zoom workshops from 2020-2021 and realized by instrument builder and multi-instrumentalist Sudhu Tewari.

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JJJJJerome Ellis + Agnes Martian
Dec
8
8:00 PM20:00

JJJJJerome Ellis + Agnes Martian

Fri., Dec. 8 at The Lab
Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
Buy Tickets
$23.80 advance / $25 door / discounted or free for members
Request your personal member DICE Code here.
Questions? Contact thelabsf@thelab.org

In an effort to ensure this event is accessible to all audience members, The Lab is requiring masks to be worn by anyone who is able.

JJJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a disabled animal, artist, and proud stutterer. He prays, reads, gardens, cycles, surfs, and plays. Through music, text, performance, video, and photography he researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time. Born in 1989 to Jamaican and Grenadian immigrants, he lives in Norfolk, Virginia, USA with his wife, ecologist-poet Luísa Black Ellis.

His debut album, The Clearing (2021), was called “an astonishing, must-listen project” (The Guardian). It was co-produced by NNA Tapes and The Poetry Project, and it was released with an accompanying book published by Wendy’s Subway. Poet/essayist/playwright Claudia Rankine said of the book: “The Clearing is many things: a lyrical celebration of and inquiry into the intersections of blackness, music, and disabled speech; a restless interrogation of linear time; an intimate portrait of the author’s real-time experience of his stutter; a baptism in syllable and sound; and a manuscript illuminated by The Stutter.

Benjamin Rodgers and Zekarias Thompson started Agnes Martian in Oakland in 2019 as a weekly ritual of free form sonic exploration, drawing on friends from a wide variety of musical backgrounds for sprawling warehouse noise sessions. The project continually adapts to changing circumstances and moods, reflecting a collaborative and deconstructive approach to cosmic music-making.

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Jack Callahan & Jeff Witscher + Drought Spa
Nov
18
8:00 PM20:00

Jack Callahan & Jeff Witscher + Drought Spa

Sat., Nov. 18 at The Lab
Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
Buy Tickets
$15.87 advance / $17 door / discounted or free for members
Questions? Contact thelabsf@thelab.org

American musicians Jeff Witscher and Jack Callahan are known for their far-ranging work under various monikers (Rene Hell, die Reihe) and deep individual histories within noise, computer music, and new music circles. Their collaborative work often experiments with transparent composition systems and the limits of our current music technology, sharing sensibilities with radio art, A.A. meetings, group therapy sessions, formalist and fluxus generative poetry experiments, and Q&A formats. They probe into the purpose and meaning of experimental music and showcase tensions inherent to the communication of ideas—exploring what music can be in a world where almost everything is reduced to signals and information. Together, their alliance charts a path for truly avant-garde music in the 21st century. (Nick James Scavo)

Drought Spa is the interdisciplinary experiment of artists alex cruse and Kevin CK Lo, who live and work on Chochenyo Ohlone land. Since 2015 cruse and Lo have used generative visuals, stochastic synthesis, sensing-technologies, video, text, and movement to explore questions regarding statecraft and the built environment; the political economy of machinic/nonhuman sensing; and the weaponization of time-based media, among other topics.

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About Ed by Robert Glück: A Celebration
Nov
17
7:00 PM19:00

About Ed by Robert Glück: A Celebration

Nov. 17, 2023 at 7pm
Free | Register to Attend

Small Press Traffic celebrates the release of Robert Glück’s About Ed (The New York Review of Books, 2023), about the artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai and much else. It is “a challenging and beautiful book by one of America's finest and most adventurous writers.”

"I’ve probably never anticipated a book so eagerly. About Ed is love the way it happens: awkward, lyrical with antagonism, stuff & flourish. Love has duration and is irreplaceable. And this is such a book." —Eileen Myles

Please join us as we “leap through Ed into lyric time.”

Robert Glück will be introduced by Brandon Brown.

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