Friday, January 28, 2022
7pm doors / 7:30pm show
Tickets $15 (discounted or free for members)
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Masks, proof of vaccine & booster shot (or negative COVID-19 tests taken within 48 hrs) required for entry. Feeling sick? The performance will be broadcast live to thelab.org.

Oakland-based, CA, Marshall Trammell is a composer, archivist, sound installation designer, percussionist and self-styled Music Research Strategist. development. He performs with In Defense of Memory, with Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) & Carlos Santistevan (mestizo), White People Killed Them with Raven Chacon (Navajo) & John Dietrich (white), and with Aaron Turner (white) & Tashi Dorji (Bhutan). Known for past projects such as Mutual Aid Project, Black Spirituals, has worked with David Murray, Pauline Oliveros, India Cooke, Roscoe Mitchell, Joe MacPhee, Saul Williams, Lisa E. Harris, Genny LIm, Francis Wong, John Jang, Susan Alcorn, Daniel Carter, Ada Pinkston, Luke Stewart, Jamal Moore, Kade Twist, Bruce Ackely, Thurston Moore and others. Productions include the commissioned premiere of “The Moon Is Down: The Status Quo Is My Enemy” for the Borealis Festival (Bergen, Norway) in March 2022, “Eleven Postures: for Burn the Temples/Break Up Bells” (Borealis premiere:film), directed by Matt Volla, and “Eleven Postures'' (audio) produced by Jacob Felix Huele on SIGE Records (Seattle). musicresearchstrategies.info

Guitarist Tashi Dorji grew up in Bhutan, South Asia, and in 2000 moved to Asheville, North Carolina, to attend college. Shortly afterwards he fell in with a community of anarchist punks, and while the music he plays has changed since then, his use of it to express anti-hierarchical and anti-capitalist sentiment has not. Dorji had not been improvising for very long before he made his first cassette in 2009. Following the release of a self-titled debut LP via Ben Chasny’s Hermit Hut imprint, he began touring the USA and Europe, often playing blazing electric music quite a bit louder than his early acoustic experiments. Dorji's most enduring associations to date have been with the percussionists Thom Nguyen (in the duo Manas) and Tyler Damon, and saxophonists Dave Rempis (who joins Damon and Dorji in the trio Kuzu) and Mette Rasmussen. tashidorji.bandcamp.com

Aaron Turner is a musician and artist based in Vashon, WA, publicly active since 1995. He is most widely recognized for his role as a founding member of the metal bands SUMAC and Isis, snd has also participated in projects such as House of Low Culture, Pharaoh Overlord, Old Man Gloom, and Mamiffer. Active primarily as a guitarist, he has maintained an abiding interest in tethering conscious content to subverted uses of the instrument. His output has been informed by lifetime involvement with underground metal/punk, often materializing in highly abstracted forms utilizing improvisation and longform composition. He has collaborated with artists such as Tashi Dorji, Masami Akita, Caspar Brötzmann, Keiji Haino, Daniel Menche, Marshall Trammell, Stephen O'Malley, Kevin Martin/The Bug, Heather Leigh and many others. Turner is the founder/art director of Hydra Head Records, and more recently the co-founder SIGE Records with partner Faith Coloccia. Current projects include ongoing work with the bands SUMAC, Mamiffer and Old Man Gloom, as well as solo performances/recordings, and collaborations with Jon Mueller and Jussi Lehtisalo of Circle. An album of solo guitar material will be released by Trost records in 2022. sigerecords.bandcamp.com/album/repressions-blossom

Saturday, January 22, 2022
7pm doors / 7:30pm show
Tickets $10 (discounted or free for members)
Get Tickets Now
Masks, proof of vaccine & booster shot (or negative COVID-19 tests taken within 48 hrs) required for entry. Feeling sick? The performance will be broadcast live to thelab.org.

What is the sound of the space where something was supposed to be, but isn't? What music comes from the burden of doing life, out of the din of fatigue? How to sing when you're too tired? Hedva's new work is a composition built with sustained (rather than looped) guitar, in a drone that drags and pulls and continues. The scale of time is unceasing rather than renewed, haunted rather than cyclical. The lyrics quote Clarice Lispector, and the voice is pushed into the muscles of the throat until it breaks. Rather than a concert of songs, the new work is a ritual to bring communal exhaustion and rage into corporal space. This is Hedva's first live performance since January 2020.

Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, musician, and astrologer, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hedva’s practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy. They make mystical doom; hag blues; intimate metal. They are devoted to doom as a liberatory condition, deviant forms of knowledge, and the ways in which a voice can unmake the world. Their approach to sound is informed by Korean shamanist ritual and the Korean tradition of P’ansori singing (which demands rehearsal next to waterfalls, in order to ravage the vocal cords), Keiji Haino, Sainkho Namtchylak, Diamanda Galás, and Jeff Buckley, among others. Hedva’s work, no matter the genre, is different kinds of writing, whether it’s words on a page, screaming in a room, or dragging a hand through water. Their latest album, Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, was released on crystalline morphologies and Sming Sming on January 1, 2021. Hedva is also the author of two books, the novel On Hell (2018) and a collection of poems, performances, and essays, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain (2020).

The Lab strives to host inclusive, accessible events that enable all individuals, including individuals with disabilities, to engage fully. If you have questions about accessibility, please contact The Lab at thelabsf@thelab.org or via telephone at (415) 864-8855.

Photo of Johanna Hedva by Oscar Rohleder