Gold Bolus Artists, in alphabetical order:
Gelsey Bell
Releases: mɔɹniŋ, Heads Together, This is Not a Land of Kings, Toyland, Ciphony
Gelsey Bell is a Brooklyn-based multidisplinary performance creator, composer, and vocalist. She has been described by the New York Times as “one of New York’s most adventurous musicians” and “a charismatic and fiercely intelligent performer.” Her recent works include mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning] (2023), presented in the Prototype Festival; “From the Soil Back to the Soil” (2023) for the Daxophone Consort; Cairns (2020), a soundwalk for Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn (included on the New York Times Best Theater of 2020 list); shuffleyamamba: Yamamba as a Bear (2021), created with Yasuko Yokoshi; thingNY’s SubtacTTTTTTTTT (2020); and Skylighght (2019), created with Erin Rogers. She has also made work with Kimberly Bartosik, Erik Ruin, Anna Sperber, and Modern Garage Movement. She has released multiple albums on Gold Bolus Recordings and received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Opera America, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, New Music USA, and the Japan Foundation, and recent residencies at Pioneer Works, HERE Arts Center, Mount Tremper Arts and the Kinosaki Arts Center in Japan. Performance highlights also include Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 (Broadway) and Ghost Quartet, Robert Ashley’s Improvement and Crash, Darius Jones’s Samesoul Maker, Kate Soper’s Here Be Sirens, Gregory Whitehead’s On the Shore Dimly Seen, and other works by John King, Paul Pinto, Raven Chacon, Alaina Ferris, Brent Michael Davids, Aaron Siegel, Tomomi Adachi, and others. She has a PhD from New York University in performance studies, and is part-time faculty in the College of Performing Arts at the New School.
Website // Twitter // Instagram
Cory Bracken
Releases: REAL ADULT – FAKE PERSON
A composer, performer, improviser, curator, and artistic administrator currently residing in Ridgewood, New York City. Recent projects have included REAL ADULT (solo vehicle for noise music focusing on object-based percussion and electronics), Ashcan Orchestra, Sunwatchers, American Football, Birthmark, Yonatan Gat, KATIEE, LoftOpera, String Orchestra of Brooklyn, Iktus Percussion, and various performance activities as an improviser, noise artist, percussionist, and drummer.
Broadcloth
Releases: In Stitches
Broadcloth performs improvised music with a nod to various compositional outlets. Using a unique instrumentation of voice, cello and accordion/recorders, the trio plays from notated, graphic, embroidered, and textual scores in addition to completely spontaneous pieces. Without shying away from virtuosity, Broadcloth creates music that reflects the order of composition and the risk of unpredictable musical interactions. Emphasis lies on establishing a holistic sound that favors cooperation over hierarchy. Nathan Bontrager (cello and voice), Adam Matlock (accordion, recorders, and voice), and Anne Rhodes (voice and the occasional found doo-dad).
Meaghan Burke
Releases: A Few Concerns
Hailed as “outstanding,” with a “street-smart, feline voice” (The New York Times), Meaghan Burke is a cellist, vocalist, and composer working in the space between contemporary music, improvised music, and songwriting. She is a founding member of the contemporary feminist string quartet The Rhythm Method, avant-grunge band Forever House, and Viennese songwriter collective Loose Lips Sink Ships. Meaghan has worked closely with artists such as Muhal Richard Abrams, Butch Morris, Alex Temple, Miho Hazama, and John Zorn (to name a few), and her translation of Peter Ablinger’s Collected Writings will be published by Kehrer Verlag in 2021. Meaghan has released two albums of her songs: the lush chamber folk of Creature Comforts and her stripped-down debut Other People’s Ghosts, as well as Forever House’s debut album Eaves and Loose Lips Sink Ships’ self-titled debut.
Website // Twitter // Instagram
Ras Moshe Burnett
Release: Fusebox
Ras Moshe Burnett hails from Brooklyn NY from a family of Jazz musicians. His grandfather (Ted “Barnett” professionally) played in many big band formations of the late 30’s throughout the 60’s, and later wrote religious music for the New Caanan Baptist Church in Brooklyn. Ras has been playing in and leading bands for 20 years starting with Reggae bands in the Brooklyn area. He is the founder of the “Music Now” series at The Brecht Forum, which is still going for 14 years despite a change of locations. His latest releases are: “Outsight”-straw2goldpictures.com and “Sunsum”-Bill Cole’s Untempered Ensemble (shadrac records).
The Chutneys
Releases: HOME
Carlos Cotallo Solares
Releases: Hold Music for a Space Rescue
Carlos Cotallo Solares is a Spanish composer and guitarist based in Philadelphia. He studied composition at the University of Iowa, UDK Berlin, and the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg. His music has been performed in festivals and conferences across the US and Europe and his audiovisual collaborations with the filmmaker Timothy David Orme have been featured at film festivals internationally. Carlos also produces and performs experimental rock music under the name Black Stork and is a member of the free-improvisation trio Wombat.
Instagram // YouTube // Website
Du.0
Releases: Thoughts from the Future
Du.0 is a New York City-based violin duo that specializes in experimental contemporary and noise-based improvised music. Formed in 2015 by Aimée Niemann (they/them) and Charlotte Munn-Wood (she/her), the ensemble “[shines] in moments of deep listening”(I Care If You Listen) and cultivates freedom and innovation in its artistic expression. Whether through improvisation, graphic notation, or use of extra-violinistic sounds and instruments, Du.0 seeks to continue the violin’s legacy into the 21st century by expanding beyond the traditional role and identity of the violinist.
Website // Instagram // Facebook
Ensemble Fanaa
Releases: Ensemble Fanaa
Ensemble Fanaa is the meeting point between a myriad of musical styles in the African-American, North African and Middle Eastern traditions. Daro Behroozi (Alto Saxophone/Bass clarinet), John Murchison (Upright Bass, Gimbri), and Dan Kurfirst (Drumset/Frame Drums) utilize their thorough experience in these musics to explore the possibilities of applying approaches learned from the traditions of African-American improvisation to an emerging global musical culture. This enables them to blend and shift between and outside of a diverse range of music making practices as they continue to develop a new rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, and sonic vocabulary sometimes characterized by polyrhythmic drones, chromaqamatic extemporizations, and arrhythmic grooves. Their sound is often centered around the use of the Gimbri, a bass-register instrument from Morocco that is primarily used in traditional Moroccan Healing/Trance music (Gnawa).
Lainie Fefferman
Releases: White Fire
Lainie Fefferman makes music by putting dots on lines, drawing curves in software, writing code in boxes, and finding new and surprising ways to wiggle her vocal chords. Her most recent commissions for the creation of original works have been from Recap Quartet, Greg Oakes, JACK Quartet, Aaron Larget-Caplan, Ensemble Decipher, Tenth Intervention, Sō Percussion, Make Music New York, Experiments in Opera, ETHEL, Kathleen Supové, TILT Brass, James Moore, Eleonore Oppenheim, and Dither. Her one-woman voice & electronics feminist song project White Fire, an electroacoustic meditation on the heroines of the Hebrew Bible, premiered at Merkin Hall in 2016 and she’s been tinkering and touring it internationally ever since. She is a co-founder and director of New Music Gathering, an annual conference/festival hybrid event for the international New Music Community. She had a wonderful time getting her doctorate in composition from Princeton University and is a programming/performing member of Princeton-based laptop ensemble Sideband. She currently teaches and advises a fabulous bunch of music makers as a professor of Music & Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology and recently concluded her time as artist in residence at Nokia Bell Labs.
Florida Lucid Dreaming
Releases: Pleasure of the Present
Florida Lucid Dreaming is Jeff Tobias & Dave Ruder. They make electronic art pop music and in the past they’ve made large ensemble acoustic drone music.
Carrie Frey
Releases: Seagrass
Carrie Frey is a New York City-based violist, teacher, improviser, and composer. Frey is the violist of the Rhythm Method (“a group of individuals with distinct compositional voices and a collective vision for the future of the string quartet” – I Care If You Listen) and a founding member of string trio Chartreuse and quartet Desdemona. She has performed with many of New York City’s notable contemporary ensembles, including Wet Ink Large Ensemble, AMOC*, Talea Ensemble, Wavefield, Cantata Profana, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Frey improvises as a member of Simone Baron’s genre-bending Arco Belo ensemble and electroacoustic trio Hierophant (with Alex van Gils and Alec Goldfarb). Her compositions, described as “a moldering compost heap” (I Care if You Listen), have been performed by the Rhythm Method, Arco Belo, Adrianne Munden-Dixon, and Kal Sugatski. Her debut sonata album, The Grey Light of Day, with pianist Robert Fleitz, was released in 2016, and her first solo album will be released on Gold Bolus in December 2023. Carrie is a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory and the Manhattan School of Music Contemporary Performance Program, and is currently pursuing a doctorate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
GADADU
Releases: The Weatherman is Wrong
GADADU erases distinctions between vocals-oriented singer/songwriter music and instrumentally focused improvised music. They have brought their crackling energy and custom sound to venues across the US & Canada, including major spots in their hometown of NYC like Brooklyn Bowl, Le Poisson Rouge, and the Knitting Factory. They were awarded residencies at Avaloch Farm Music institute in 2018 and Queens College Lefrak Center in 2018.
website // twitter // facebook // instagram
Matthew D. Gantt
Releases: Iterations
Matthew D. Gantt (b. 1987 Durham, NC) is a composer and conceptualist based in New York City. He studied composition at CUNY Brooklyn College under the direction of Morton Subotnick, history and theory with David Grubbs, and contemporary performance practice with Jason Eckardt.
Gantt’s compositional work focuses primarily on the creative use of live electronics, issues of embodiment and environment in digital performance, and the use of open form scores and systems. Areas of inquiry and research include the overlap of contemporary artistic production and consumption, artificial scarcity in the age of digital reproduction, and the recorded document as confluence of artifact and event.
Anthony Gatto
Releases: Small Subversions
Brooklyn, New York, native Anthony Gatto has developed a diverse body of music, often informed by literary and visual arts, exploring narrative modes and structures for opera, film, theater, and the concert hall. His cross-media works include the music and libretto for Wise Blood, after the novel Flannery O’Connor. Commissioned and produced by the Walker Art Center and The Soap Factory Exhibition Space, Wise Blood presents the shattered war veteran Hazel Motes preaching the Church Without Christ from the hood of his car. The immersive production featured second-line brass bands and singers moving through audiences, congregated in installations by Chris Larson referencing locations in the novel. Also commissioned by the Walker Art Center, The Making of Americans, based on the novel by Gertrude Stein, presents her spectacular, universalist language through personae that sketch three generations of American families.
Invisible Circle
Releases: Invisible Circle
kills to kisses
Releases: Lullaby Apocalypse
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John King
Releases: Centripetal Light, Ciphony
John King is a composer, guitarist, and violist who has worked collaboratively with and been commissioned by Kronos Quartet, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Ethel, String Noise, Bang On A Can All-Stars, and Avant Media; as well as by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, New York City Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, and Mannheim Ballet. He has written many operas, among them: ping and what is the word, with texts by Samuel Beckett; la belle captive texts by Alain Robbe-Grillet; and Dice Thrown, based on the Stéphane Mallarmé poem. He premiered his 4-hour long KOSMOS for string quartet and live electronics with the Flux Quartet at The Knockdown Center, Queens, NY. He is also the recipient of the 2009 Alpert Award in the Arts for Music and the 2014 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award for Sound/Music. King was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation/Bellagio Residency for March 2016, in addition to residencies at The McDowell Colony and The Emily Harvey Foundation residency in Venice, Italy.
Knuckleball
Releases: Knuckleball
Knuckleball is Daniel Levine (trumpet), Marc Hannaford (piano), and Devin Gray (drums): a virtuosic trio whose improvising is dynamic and unpredictable. Daniel Levine’s compositions are often dense, fully-notated miniatures, which the group skillfully de-and-reconstructs. There is plenty of structure in the pieces, but the trio interprets it non-linearly, drawing on it as material for improvisation.
Valerie Kuehne
Releases: The Apocalypse as Witnessed by a Slice of American Cheese
Valerie Kuehne is a cross-pollinated work of chaos. Fusing music, performance art, narrative, and experimental curation, she has been told that, “if this music thing doesn’t work out, she’d probably make an awesome cult leader.” (Boston Public Space). Ms. Kuehne has systematically split her time between touring the planet, performing in as many unexpected settings as possible, and building a community for experimental music and performance art. She ran The Super Coda, an experimental cabaret that united electrifying performers for over nine years.
Ms. Kuehne’s work operates under principles of surprise, and focuses on expanding all possible forms of intimacy between performer and audience. she aspires to confront absolute transparency and brutal honesty in her work, as necessary models for performance, especially participatory ones. She has worked as a resident artist/curator at Panoply Performance Laboratory, Spectrum, JACK, Small Beast and Ange Noir. Ms. Kuehne operates a blog of music reviews and performance philosophy and frequently releases albums that blur the line between comfort and discomfort. Ms Kuehne has performed and helped curate many festivals, including the brooklyn experimental song carnival, bipaf, the mpa-b, PAF, the hitparaden international festival for performance kunst, the experiMENTAL festival, Sonic Circuits, jazzPeru, and the Boise Creative & Experimental music festival, to name a few.
Ms. Kuehne is also the creator/curator of Trauma Salon, a platform for artists to collectively and individually process trauma or, if necessary, create it. She is an advocate for those suffering from mental illness and addiction, incessantly seeking new ways to break down stigma and misconceptions about both.
Website // Facebook // YouTube
Woody Leslie
Releases: Courier’s Text Atlas of the USA
Woody Leslie is an artist, book maker, and performer who makes large homes for tiny ideas. Born and raised in northern Vermont, he has lived and worked in many locations nationwide and abroad, and currently lives in Kentucky. Through books, writing, and performance, Woody takes small thoughts about language, memories, and insignificant personal ritual, and reframes them as official histories, grand theories, and significant objects. By co-opting established forms (such as textbooks, maps, recipes, charts and graphs, dictionaries, advertisements, fictitious commercial products, etc.) he invents authority for concepts that have no business being official. With a background in music & performance, Woody incorporates books into his performances, and make performances out of his books, through fictional lectures, interactive and performable books, installations, and take-home book objects.
Thea Little
Releases: Honest Process
Thea Little is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose work draws upon performance art, dance, and experimental opera. She has composed more than 50 scores presented in the U.S. and abroad. Little attended the School of American Ballet and holds MFA and BA degrees in Dance respectively from Hollins University and Columbia University. Thea has performed in the U.S. and Europe with New York City Ballet, The Whitney Museum, The Traveling Trolley in Kingston, NY and WUK in Vienna. She has worked with Neta Pulvermacher, Todd Williams, Moving Theater, Panoply Performance Laboratory, Anaïs Maviel, Feminist Art Group (FAG), and Shen Wei Dance Arts. Prior to Thea’s sold-out performance at National Sawdust during her year-long residency there, her work has been presented at Earthdance, Dåncēhølø, RECESS by the Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation, Asia Society, Women Between Arts at The New School, Center for Performance Research, the NYU Music Department, The Exponential Festival, The Beaux Arts Court in The Brooklyn Museum, and The Performance Mix31 Festival. She is currently a returning LEIMAY Fellow and her next full-length work will be presented at The Hudson Eye and OUTSIGHT. Thea is proud to be on the Advisory Board of New Dance Alliance.
Andrew Livingston (aka Piad Guyvessant)
Releases: Clock Orchard, Thornwood, News from the Oort Cloud, Piad Guyvessant, vol. 2: Marthopolis, Piad Guyvessant vol 1
Andrew is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and performer living in Yonkers, NY. Andrew has had a long, productive and collaborative relationship with singer songwriter Mike Doughty since 2004. Since 2020 they have teamed up with producer Mario Caldatto Jr. to make records and tour as an art rock band called Ghost of Vroom. Andrew is also a longtime member of the composer/performer collective thingNY. Together they have co produced several operas and evening length experiences as well as commissioning other composers to perform and record their work.
Andrew works as a freelance cellist, bassist, guitarist and keyboardist. He also does instrumental arrangements and co-produces records for others. Andrew’s solo work is a marriage of electro-acoustic and psychedelic folk.
Anaïs Maviel
Releases: in the garden, hOULe
Anaïs Maviel is a vocalist, percussionist, composer, writer, and community facilitator. Her work focuses on the function of music as essential to settling common grounds, addressing Relation, and creating utopian future. She is dedicated to creations from solo to large ensemble, music direction, cross-disciplinary works, and to expanding the power of music as a healing & transformative act.
Website // Facebook // Twitter
Adrianne Munden-Dixon
Releases: Lung
Adrianne Munden-Dixon is a violinist, improviser, and composer living in Montréal and New York. She grew up playing notated and improvised music in Savannah, Georgia and still lives in and between those mediums as a solo and chamber musician. She is a founding member of Desdemona and has recently worked with the JACK Quartet, Cassie Wieland, Phong Tran, Raphaël Foisy-Couture, Leo Chang, and more. Her first self-released EP patterns and cycles was described as “bright, colorful violin improvisations, each a compact vision” (The Road to Sound).
Dafna Naphtali
Releases: Fusebox
Dafna Naphtali is a sound-artist, vocalist, electronic musician and guitarist. A performer and composer of experimental, contemporary classical and improvised music since the mid-90’s, she creates custom Max/MSP programming for sound-processing of voice and other instruments, music for robots, multi-channel sound projects and “Walkie Talkie Dreams” audio augmented reality soundwalks in NY and Germany.
The Nouveau Classical Project
Releases: Currents
The Nouveau Classical Project (NCP) is a New York-based contemporary classical music ensemble that is “bringing a refreshing edge to the widely conservative genre” (VICE). It began by collaborations with fashion designers for concerts and has expanded to creating multidisciplinary performances. Its mission is to engage new audiences and show that classical music is a living, breathing art form.
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ellen o
Releases: sparrows and doves
ellen o was a Brooklyn-based producer and vocalist. Originally trained as a classical pianist and composer, she wrote with a vintage MPC and Juno-106, crafting tracks equally inspired by Chicago footwork and dense modernist harmonies. ellen o released her debut album, Sparrows and Doves in 2014 on Brooklyn label Gold Bolus Recordings. Her second album, You/Sonata, was released in 2017 on Babygrande.
Facebook // Twitter // Soundcloud
Pat O’Reilly
Release: Two Perpetual Melodies, Three Sheets to the Wind
Pat O’Reilly is a musician, composer, and dabbler. After missing a beat on a simple cowbell part during a performance at Carnegie Hall, he decided to take a extended hiatus from music. Pat cut his teeth playing drums in Long Island punk bands in the ’00s. After that, he floated around NYC playing dub music with Pedro Parker, keyboard with the rockabilly band Boogie Brains and the occasional orchestral percussion gig with the New York Chamber Players and the West Chester Chamber Symphony. He has performed in happenings with the group Çatal Hüyük (Near East Family) and improvised alongside MIDI operated robotic instruments with the Icelandic composer / guitarist Hallvardur Asgeirsson Herzog. He was also a member of the WAL Bagpipe Band and performed with NYC Balinese Gamelan group Dharma Swara. In 2012 he was a participant in the International Festival for Contemporary Performance Practice at Mannes College, where he performed music by Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter, and Milton Babbitt.
Panoply Performance Laboratory
Releases: Presenting as You, Institute_Institut
PPL performs operations initiated, situated, structured, and/or designed by Esther Neff and Brian McCorkle, often in collaboration with a flexible ensemble, members of local and global communities, and publics of individuals.
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petra
Releases: filament
petra improvises noisily with homemade and off-the-shelf electronics and voice. Her searching, unexpected multimedia work “drives malfunctioning machinery in chaotic directions” (Bristol 24/7) and shows that “even mundane sounds… can be beautiful” (Cville Weekly) through resonances of instrumentality and access. Petra is based in Providence, Rhode Island.
Paul Pinto
Releases: Water Music, Just Love, …Patriots…, minis/Trajectories
Hailed by The Wire as “one of the most exceptional composers in new music, with a sensibility that can handle deadly seriousness and wicked humour” Paul Pinto creates multi-disciplinary music, opera-theater, installation and performance, most often in collaboration with his friends. Some of those friends include the collectives thingNY and Varispeed. Some highlights include Meredith Monk’s Indra’s Net, Patriots with Jeff Young, Gelsey Bell’s mɔɹnɪŋ, Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King, the cyclorama video installation Whiteness with Kameron Neal, an ongoing re-arrangement of Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives, and his first opera Thomas Paine in Violence with Joan La Barbara. He sang and danced on Broadway in Dave Malloy’s Great Comet of 1812, and created many tiny performances during the pandemic for Zoom, television, headphones and the U.S. mail. Recent commissions and partnerships include HERE Arts, Perelman Arts Center, Prototype Festival, Big Ears Festival, Colgate University, The Fisher Center, the Look + Listen Festival, American Opera Projects, Opera America, Culturehub, LaMaMa, Quince Ensemble, WNET ALLARTS, Media Art Xchange, The Exponential Festival, The Rhythm Method, Yarn/Wire, Gelsey Bell and Kristin Marting. He’s a child of immigrants, born and raised in Richmond Hill, Queens, and now calls Jersey City his home, because that’s where his wife, child, dog and vegetable garden are.
Website // Twitter // Vimeo // Facebook
Popebama
Releases: Nation Building
Popebama is a New York-based experimental duo that focuses on exciting performances of unconventional works. The “slippery duo” (—New Yorker), of Erin Rogers (saxophone) and Dennis Sullivan (percussion), apply text, electronics, and high-energy instrumental writing to newly discovered sounds. Popebama has collaborated with yarn/wire (NYC), Tøyen Fil Og Klafferi (Oslo), Brandon Lopez (Brooklyn), Anne La Berge (Amsterdam), Hochschule fur Musik (Freiburg), Jessica Pavone (Queens), Ogni Suono (Cleveland), Rage Thormbones, and DECODER (Resonanzraum, Hamburg). In March 2020, Popebama evening-length music theatre work Fight Songs premiered at the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie as part of the “unterdeck” series with DECODER. Popebama has been featured at NYmusikk Bergen (Norway), Edmonton Fringe Festival (Canada), Splendor (Amsterdam), Le Poisson Rouge (NYC), Diabolical Records (Salt Lake City), VU Symposium (Park City), Bodies-As-Technology (Brooklyn), ReSound Festival (Cleveland), The Stone (NYC), SPLICE Festival (Kalamazoo), Second Sundays (Boston), Studio Loos (Den Haag), Chance & Circumstance Festival (Long Island City). Popebama has participated in residencies at The Walden School (New Hampshire), the Ball State Festival of New Music (Muncie, IN), and UMass Amherst, with lauded performances at the 2017 New Music Gathering and NASA 2018 Biennial (Cincinnati).
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Rallidae
Releases: Turned, And Was
Rallidae is an intimate and unconventional vocal group founded by composer and saxophonist Angela Morris. Combining songs and improvisation, Rallidae inhabits the increasingly populated sonic space between avant-indie and avant-jazz. Their 2014 EP “Paper Birds” was praised as “combining strong melodies and narratives… a genuinely distinctive, and entertaining, combination of sounds and words. “Paper Birds” is an exceptional debut from an exciting and innovative new band.” (All About Jazz) The mostly Brookyln-based group features guitarist Dustin Carlson, bassist Scott Colberg, Angela Morris on tenor saxophone and voice, and the Toronto-based vocalist Alex Samaras (Meredith Monk, Tanya Tagaq).
Dave Ruder
Releases: pilquetoast, not Great, Qualms Rectified, Consider Ruder, Untuned, It Happened, Solo for Guitar, is Great
Dave Ruder is a musician based in Brooklyn. Over the years he has worked as a vocalist, clarinetist, guitarist, composer/songwriter, electronic musician, etc. Much of Dave’s work is done collaboratively as a member of the groups Varispeed, thingNY, and Thee Reps. He has also released numerous solo albums in different styles on Gold Bolus Recordings, a label he started and runs.
Some major creations of Dave’s include Untuned (2007) for ten unplugged, untuned, electric guitars, WHY LIE? (2010), 100+ small, flexible score available online, The Gentleman Rests (2014), a meditation on the certification of the 2000 presidential election commissioned by the Jerome Foundation, and You Must Read a Lot of Jung (2018), an extended sextet created for thingNY.
The Rhythm Method
Releases: The Rhythm Method
Praised as “fierce, fearless, and virtuosic… unapologetically stylistically omnivorous and versatile” (New Music Box) and “trailblazing…skillful composer-performers” (The New Yorker), The Rhythm Method strives to reimagine the string quartet in a contemporary, feminist context. The four performer-composers of The Rhythm Method continually expand their sonic and expressive palette through the use of graphic notation, vocalization, improvisation, songwriting, and theater.
The Rhythm Method’s ongoing activities include the Hidden Mothers Project, a programming initiative that highlights works by historical women composers, and Broad Statements, an annual mini-festival celebrating creative music-making by women, non-binary, and gender-expansive people in a wide array of artistic styles.
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Hannah Selin
Releases: Dream Journal & The Apocalypse
Composer, violist and vocalist Hannah Selin works with acoustic instruments, voices, electronics and field recordings to create striking and vibrant sound-worlds. She grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania helping her parents caretake a cemetery and listening to her mother write songs on scordatura guitar. Her music carries from this a sense of the supernatural, a closeness with the earth, and a love all things resonant. Hannah is co-founder and lead singer with the band GADADU, and violist and founding member of Violalia Duo and SELBA. As a violist, Hannah performs with orchestras and chamber ensembles throughout the New York metropolitan area, and also works as a session musician.
Aaron Siegel
Releases: Your People Saying Hello
Aaron Siegel has worked as a musician, composer, organizer and educator for 25 years in New York City. In his world, there is little distinction between the activities of producing, writing, performing, listening, and learning. Celebrated as a composer of works for percussion (“hypnotic clouds of chiming tones” – The New Yorker) and the stage (“softly shattering” – NY Times), Siegel has a long history as an improvising percussionist and bandleader. Since 2011, Siegel has co-led the radical opera collective Experiments in Opera (“Raw, funny, surreal, and disarmingly human”- Opera News), helping to bring to the stage countless works by composers and writers and expanding the boundaries of musical storytelling. Always happy to explore in community with others, Siegel has created work with A.M. Homes, Mallory Catlett, Tracy K. Smith, Mantra Percussion, Anthony Braxton, Memorize the Sky, Anthony Roth Costanzo and the EiO Writers Room among others.
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Sam Sowyrda
Releases: luminous horizons
Sam Sowyrda is a percussionist and composer living in Long Island. In addition performing his own compositions for vibraphone, hammered dulcimer, and construction sites, he is a member of the frog-prog band Cloud Becomes Your Hand, and the avant-puppet troupe Living Things. When not playing music Sam is usually rebuilding historic barns, fixing pianos, or taking care of his daughters.
String Noise
Releases: Centripetal Light
New York’s most daring violin duo, String Noise composed of violinists Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim Harris is recognized for their distinct blend of disparate genres, from arrangements of songs by punk legends to conceptual minimalist treatises by Alvin Lucier. Expanding the violin duo repertoire in over 50 new titles composed specifically for String Noise — among them works by George Lewis, Christian Wolff, Michael Byron, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, Annie Gosfield, David Lang, Petr Kotik, Du Yun, Eric Lyon, Bernhard Lang, John Zorn, Greg Saunier, Alex Mincek, Tyondai Braxton, Elizabeth Hoffman, Richard Carrick, Jessie Cox, Sam Yulsman, Anaïs Maviel, Lester St. Louis, Jonathan Finlayson, Charles Overton, Caleb Burhans, Catherine Lamb, James Ilgenfritz, and others. String Noise has recorded for Northern Spy Records, Dymaxion Groove, Black Truffle Records, Cold Blue Records, New Focus Recordings, Infrequent Seams, Chaikin Records, Nouveau Electric Records and Astres d’Or, and has been featured on WNYC, WKCR, WFMU and BBC Radio.
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Hans Tammen
Releases: Ten Minutes Late…
Hans Tammen likes to set sounds in motion, and then sitting back to watch the movements unfold. Using textures, timbre and dynamics as primary elements, his music is continuously shifting, with different layers floating into the foreground while others disappear. Whether richly processed guitar sounds from his hybrid interactive guitar/software instrument Endangered Guitar, traditionally notated material for his Third Eye Chamber Orchestra, or graphically notated elements for the all-electronic Dark Circuits Orchestra, his music flows like clockwork, “transforming a sequence of instrumental gestures into a wide territory of semi-hostile discontinuity; percussive, droning, intricately colorful, or simply blowing your socks off” (Touching Extremes).
Carl Testa
Releases: Sn
Carl Testa (b. 1984, Chicago, IL) is a multi-instrumentalist and composer at the intersection of improvised, electronic, experimental music, and new media. As a performer/improviser, he is equally comfortable on string bass, electronics, lighting, and combinations thereof. As a composer, he has written acoustic and electronic music for configurations ranging from solo to chamber orchestra, including multimedia pieces that incorporate electronics, lighting, dance, and theater. His work has been performed throughout the US and Europe, and is documented on many recordings, most recently “Iris (for solo bass and electronics)” (Lockstep Records 2013), and “Sⁿ (for prepared guitar and electronics)”, a collaboration with guitarist Christopher Riggs (Gold Bolus Recordings 2015).
In addition to his work as a leader/collaborator, he performs regularly with composer Anthony Braxton’s ensembles and bassist Mario Pavone’s ensembles. He serves as the Director of Publishing and Creative Technology for Braxton’s Tri-Centric Foundation where he manages all facets of the production of digital and print scores for the organization. He is the production manager for noted jazz venue and record label Firehouse 12. He has also organized The Uncertainty Music Series since 2007, which is an ongoing monthly concert series in New Haven, CT featuring improvised, electronic, and experimental music. He has received support from the New Haven Department of Cultural Affairs and from NewMusicUSA. He lives in New Haven with his wife vocalist Anne Rhodes, and their son Florian.
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Thee Reps
Releases: Minimal Surface
Thee Reps (formerly known as just Reps) formed in late 2014 with an idea of find good musical ideas and exploring them over many repetitions. The current line up is Jeff Tobias (bass), Dave Ruder (guitar), and Sam Morrison (keys), Andie Springer (violin) and Mike McCurdy (drums). Thee Reps released their debut album Minimal Surface in April 2019.
thingNY
Releases: a sense of Dear Nancine, …Patriots…, minis/Trajectories
thingNY is a collective of New York composer-performers who fuse electronic and acoustic chamber music with new opera, improvisation, theater, text, song and installation. Founded in 2006 for an ad hoc festival in the historic Loew’s Jersey City Theater, thingNY performs experimental sound works created collaboratively by the ensemble – Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, Jeffrey Young, Gelsey Bell, Dave Ruder, and Andrew Livingston, Isabel Castellvi, and alejandro t. acierto – and by adventurous composers such as Robert Ashley, Frederic Rzewski, John King, Pauline Oliveros, Miguel Frasconi, Vinko Globokar, John Cage, Julius Eastman, James Tenney, David Snow, and Andrea La Rose.
Website // Facebook // Twitter // Vimeo
Jeff Tobias
Releases: Music from Milky Way Underground
Jeff Tobias is a multi-instrumentalist and composer who has been an active part of the American music underground since 2003. He has contributed to over one hundred physically released recordings, performs on over a dozen different instruments, and has toured the United States and Europe extensively. His saxophone playing has been described as “authentically fearsome … just the sort of thing that fries microphones and never pays the rent.” (Bill Meyer, The Wire, March 2018)
In 2022, he released his debut solo full-length, Recurring Dream, drawing praise from The New York Times. He is a member of Sunwatchers, Modern Nature, and Thee Reps, and has also collaborated with artists including David First, Arthur Doyle, Ryley Walker, Brigid Dawson (The Oh Sees), Andrew Bernstein (Horse Lords), Matt Bachmann, Katie Eastburn, Dan Friel, Heather McIntosh, and many others.
He has composed music for podcasts (The Space Within, Milky Way Underground) and theater. He holds a degree in music composition from Brooklyn College, where he studied with Tania Leon, Jason Eckhardt, Doug Geers, and Doug Cohen.
Website // Instagram // Twitter
Varispeed
Releases: Empty Words
Varispeed is a collective of composer-performers that creates site-specific, sometimes-participatory, oftentimes-durational, forevermore-experimental events. Founded by Aliza Simons, Dave Ruder, Paul Pinto, Brian McCorkle, and Gelsey Bell, Varispeed came together in June 2011 to perform a day-long, site-specific arrangement of Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives. They have subsequently specialized in Ashley’s music, and have also created unique arrangements of large scale works by John Cage, Kenneth Gaburo, and Arthur Jarvinen.
Website // Twitter // Instagram
Sugar Vendil
Release: May We Know Our Own Strength
Sugar Vendil is a composer, pianist, choreographer, and interdisciplinary artist based in Lenapehoking, known as Brooklyn. Her name is a combination of her parents’ names, SUsan and edGAR. She started her artistic life as a classical pianist, and after spending nearly a decade searching for her own voice, her practice evolved into writing her own music and making performances that integrate sound, movement, and unconventional approaches to the piano. She writes and performs her own solo music for piano and electronics and has a keyboard/synth duo, Vanity Project, with composer Trevor Gureckis. Vendil is a proud second generation Filipinx American.
Website // Instagram // Twitter
Vines
Releases: Lung (Vines Version)
Vines is the solo project of composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Cassie Wieland. Praised by The New York Times as “sweetly shimmering,” Wieland masterfully experiments with timbre and texture by exploring intimate sound worlds to achieve the “hand-made” vibe she is often looking for: imperfect, but intentional. Her music has been featured on New Sounds, NPR, The New York Times, Financial Times, I Care if You Listen, AnEarful, and The Road to Sound.
Joseph White
Releases: The Wagging Craze, Toyland, Boomwaggle, Cockfights
Joseph White writes, performs and produces experimental music, theatrical pieces and sound art, focusing on innovative approaches to harmony, digital sampling, speech, and the exploration of unusual social themes. A nomad of genre, country, and cultural scene, his music has been performed everywhere from Quito, Ecuador to Kyoto, Japan, Lower East Side rock clubs to Off-Broadway theatres, experimental music basement shows to concert halls, and everywhere in between. He is currently writing an opera for thingNY, an AI text-generated suite for Popebama, and collaborating on a sonic radio essay with the writer, Agnes Borinsky.
Why Lie?
Releases: Osoitos, The Cities Who Walk
From 2010-2014, Aliza Simons & Dave Ruder played together as Why Lie? Why Lie? released two albums on Gold Bolus Recordings and played across NYC in the guise of a rock band (rounded out by GBR artists Cory Bracken, Ellen O’Meara, and Matthew Gantt), a quiet duo of just Aliza & Dave, and a sort of musical storytelling outfit.
Jeffrey Young
Releases: Hold Music for a Space Rescue, …Patriots…
Jeffrey Young is a violinist, composer, and electronic musician based in Philadelphia. A native of Brooklyn, Jeffrey spent over a decade as a professional musician in the New York City music scene. He has been a member of groups including experimental ensemble thingNY, cabaret-punk band The World/Inferno Friendship Society, cross-disciplinary ensemble LUCERNE FESTIVAL Young Performance, and bass and violin duo Dykes & Young. As a solo artist, he often performs with the software Ableton Live. He has toured the US, Europe, and China and has appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman, the Rachael Ray show, and more.
Jonathan Zorn
Releases: An Alphabet of Quadrupeds, vol 2
Jonathan Zorn is a composer, performer, and curator of experimental, electronic, and improvised music. His electronic music pairs improvising musicians with interactive computer systems to create hybrid, human-machine ensembles. Zorn’s interest in vocal utterance has resulted in a series of pieces in which spoken language is interrupted by electronic forces, drawing attention to the gap between speech and sound. He is currently working on a suite of electroacoustic sound/text/video performance pieces. Zorn has been active as an improvisor on bass and electronics for 15 years and has performed at Red Cat, the Walker Art Center, the Verona Jazz Festival, the Library of Congress, the Seattle Festival of Improvised Music, Line Space Line Festival, and the Chelsea Art Museum. He has performed under the direction of Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier, and Alison Knowles. His work has been published in Ord und Bild, the SEAMUS Journal, Notations 21, and UbuWeb.