November 9, 10, and 11, 2023
8:00pm doors / 8:30pm show
Workshop (free admission) at 1pm on Nov. 11
Tickets $15 (discounted or free for members)
Festival Pass: $40
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The three-day festival gathers a broad cross-section of composers associated with the legendary and now defunct Mills College Music Department for a series of performances driven by questions around legacy, institutional memory, and creative regeneration. The festival is named after famed musician “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s Seven Years of Crazy Love, a compilation featuring musicians from the Mills College community released in the late seventies.
Participating artists have been directed towards recordings from the 7000+ item audio archive at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills, and invited to create new works inspired by their finds and/or create new realizations of these historic compositions.
With the loss of institutional support at Mills comes an opportunity to disentangle the values and aesthetics of individual artists from those of the institution. New space opens to reimagine what creative community looks like and how it is organized, and this festival aims to take a step in that direction. One lesson we have learned from our participation in the Mills music community is the value of experimentation for its own sake. At the very least, we aim to honor this essential tradition.
The festival is curated and organized by Sally Decker, Brendan Glasson, Briana Marela, Michelle Moeller, Matt Robidoux, and Mitch Stahlmann in collaboration with Laetitia Sonami, who realized a version of this project in her final seminar at Mills.
Thursday, Nov. 9
Sally Decker, Brendan Glasson, Briana Marela Lizárraga, Michelle Moeller, Matt Robidoux, and Mitch Stahlmann make up the House band opening up the festival Thursday evening. We are also the six people who organized and curated this festival! We are all graduates of the Mills music program, and met, collaborated, and became friends while at Mills. Currently we all have our own practices, sometimes collaborate with each other in various configurations, and support each other’s work as artists and people.
Junior Mint Prince (JMP) is a multimedia sonic duo consisting of two joy-seeking freaks: Lula Asplund and Naomi Harrison-Clay. Formed in 2018 while studying at Mills College, JMP draws from free improvisation, freak folk, spoken word poetry, computer music, Deep Listening, and performance art. JMP uses vulnerability and raw emotionality to channel wayward spirits and inner children through an orchestra of guttural squeals, hypnotic sonic gestures, absurdist ritual acts, and carefully crafted whispered words. Their toys include found objects, homemade instruments, computers, transducers, analog synthesizers, field recordings, acoustic guitars, puppets, trash art, and more. By exposing themselves like amoeba under the harsh light of the stage, they hope to make their audiences blush.
Cheryl E. Leonard is a composer, performer, field recordist, and instrument builder whose works investigate natural sites and ecosystems, and human relationships to them. She uses microphones and amplification to explore sonic intricacies, highlighting unique voices and soundscapes while addressing environmental issues. Her projects often feature sculptural natural-object instruments and field recordings from remote locales. Leonard’s works have been presented in concerts and art exhibitions throughout the world. Grants awarded include the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, American Music Center, American Composers Forum, and ASCAP. Her recordings are available on Other Minds Records, mappa, Gilgongo, and numerous other labels.
John Bischoff (b. 1949, San Francisco) is a composer known for his solo constructions in real-time synthesis and the pioneering development of computer network music. His recent performances combine hands-on analog circuitry and digital synthesis in open dialog. Bischoff was a founding member of The League of Automatic Music Composers (1978) and The Hub (1986). As a member of the Hub he was awarded a ZKM Giga-Hertz Prize for life-time achievement in 2018. He also received an Artist Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 1999. He was on faculty for many years in the legendary Music Department at Mills College.
James Fei (b. Taipei, Taiwan) is a composer, saxophonist and live electronic musician. Works by Fei have been performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, Bang on a Can All-Stars, MATA Micro Orchestra and Noord-Hollands Philharmonisch Orkest. Recordings can be found on Leo Records, Improvised Music from Japan, CRI, Krabbesholm and Organized Sound. Fei has taught at Mills College since 2006, where he is Luther Bruise Marchant Professor of Music and Director of the Center for Contemporary Music.
Friday, Nov. 10
Chari Glogovac-Smith, an accomplished Emmy Nominated composer, performer, scholar, and interdisciplinary artist, wields a unique blend of experimental techniques in their artistic pursuits. Their work deeply probes the dynamic interplay between the human experience, society and technology, with black and queer studies as a foundational framework. In their recent artistic endeavors, Chari has taken a path of profound questioning. Their explorations encompass themes like empathy, conflict, the natural world, cultural interconnections, historical perspectives, social justice, the concept of healing, the practice of listening, and the fluidity of time.
Sharmi Basu (they/them) is a multimedia performance artist, curator, composer, and arts organizer born and based in the unceded territories of the Chochenyo Ohlone peoples (Oakland, CA). They create expansive textural sound and performance pieces investigating resistance and organizing strategies through decolonial worldbuilding and interactive sculpture. Sharmi’s performance project, Beast Nest, transmutes experiences of trauma through complex sonic textural layering. Sharmi received their MFA from Mills College and hosts workshops internationally that center on sound, somatics, decolonization, and conflict & accountability. They have performed at SFMOMA, YBCA, SFEMF, and Ableton Loop, and have exhibited at Coaxial, Southern Exposure, SOMArts, Counterpulse, Gray Area, and Ars Electronica. Sharmi is a board member for Safer DIY Spaces, Bay Area Girls Rock Camp, and California FM. They co-founded the first-ever Bay Area Black and Brown Punk Festival, and are known in their community for curating empowering creative spaces for disabled QTBIPOC artists.
Madalyn Merkey is a composer and performer of live computer music based in Silicon Valley. Merkey creates sound events with elemental sonic material—voice, sine waves, and pulses—to generate lush synthetic environments with the aid of acoustic readings from microphones and sensors. Her recent work observes the principles of acoustic instruments and material spaces to design real-time sound synthesis programs. She has performed solo computer music compositions at Yale Union, Issue Project Room, and Block Cinema, and designed sound installations for Robert Irwin's Central Garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
Paul DeMarinis has been making noises with wires, batteries and household appliances since the age of four. He studied film with Paul Sharits at Antioch College and electronic music with Robert Ashley at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College and worked with David Tudor. DeMarinis of the first artists to use microcomputers, and has worked in the areas of interactive software, synthetic speech, noise and obsolete or impossible media. He has presented his installations, performances and public artworks widely. He teaches art at Stanford University in California.
Laetitia Sonami is a pioneering sound artist and performer known for her innovative use of technology in her work. After studying with Eliane Radigue in Paris, she moved to the United States and received her MFA from the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in 1980. Sonami has created several unique instruments for live performance, amongst which the lady’s glove and her current Spring Spyre. Sonami's work often explores themes of embodiment and the relationship between the body and technology. She has exhibited and performed her work at major international festivals and venues and has mentored many young artists in the field.
Saturday, Nov. 11
1pm Workshop with Danishta Rivero (free admission and participation)
Danishta Rivero is an improviser, performer, and sound artist based in Oakland, California. She explores the artifacts resulting from heavy processing of the voice and their relationship to its acoustic resonance. Danishta’s artistic practice and inquiry are grounded in and woven from the continuums of experimentalism, free improvisation, electro-acoustic music, performance, multimedia, and sound art. As a soloist, Rivero sometimes performs as Caribay, conjuring the eponymous mountain spirit, whose laments cause avalanches. She is a member of electro-acoustic duo Voicehandler with percussionist Jacob Felix Heule. She is also half of Las Sucias, a tropical noise duo with Alexandra Buschman-Román.
Kevin Robinson is a performer-composer, educator and multi-woodwind instrumentalist who explores various interdisciplinary approaches to composition and improvisation. He is a native of Baltimore, MD and is currently based in Oakland, CA. He has a MA in Composition Program from Mills College where he is studied with Roscoe Mitchell, Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins and others. He received his BFA in Jazz Reeds from California Institute of the Arts where he studied composition with Wadada Leo Smith and Vinny Golia. Robinson is the leader of the band The Kevin Robinson Ensemble (KREation) which was established in 2003.
Reviled for his "shapeless sonic tinkering" by the Los Angeles Times, Oakland musician Matt Ingalls is a composer, clarinetist, concert producer, and computer music programmer. Often incorporating elements of improvisation, his music is heavily influenced by his long involvement in computer music. His composerly solo improvisations explore extended clarinet techniques that interact with the acoustic space, often as combination tones. Matt is the founder and co-director of sfSound, currently curating the Mosswood Sound Series weekly concerts of new and experimental music in Oakland. Matt was a grad student at Mills in the mid-1990’s, primarily studying with Alvin Curran, Chris Brown, and George Lewis.
La Macacoa is composer, improviser, and singer Alexandra Buschman Román. She has been based in the Bay Area since starting Composition studies at Mills College in 2007, and after completing Composition studies at the Puerto Rico Music Conservatory. They use electronic hardware, voice, improvisation, and mysticism to connect the bodies and the spirits in the performance space. They draw from the Afro- Caribbean and Taino music and spirituality of their roots. She is half of the groundbreaking experimental dance duo Las Sucias and is also somnambulist Noise persona Demonsleeper.
Blectum from Blechdom makes a parlor trick of whisking listeners away on a psychedelic organic-electronic ride filled with chaotic Snauses and fractal Mallards. Kevin (Kristin Galvin) + Blevin (Bevin Kelley) are intertwined in a serious generative long-form game for the future. Their monstrous walls of well-executed sound and piles of visionary questing sonic antics first spawned within their mind-field-meld deep in the illicit sound spaces of San Francisco’s glory-wormhole days circa 1997. Over the years they have accumulated a mound of treasures and trophies that now lie beneath a sleeping fiendish dragon-basilisk.