Serving the San Francisco Bay Area New Music Community

                 
Indexical
Tannery Arts Center
1050 River St. #119
Santa Cruz CA 95060  
internet@indexical.org

Indexical is dedicated to experimentation in music. Indexical engages the public in radical and unfamiliar work through performance, publication, documentation, educational initiatives, and discussion. We work with historically, culturally, and institutionally underrepresented artists and build community through long-term collaborative projects.
https://www.indexical.org/

Upcoming Events:
Friday, March 28 2025 8:00 PM
Indexical is pleased to present MSHR "Network Entity," a system for live audiovisual improvisation in which sculptural and sonic forms are formally linked in an ever-mutating composition. Bay Area electronic musician Shatter Pattern opens with "nth drop dissolving"

MSHR
MSHR is an art collective that collaboratively builds and explores sculptural electronic systems.Their performances and installations integrate electrical signals and human presence, weaving dense networks of causality to form audiovisual environments that babble with life-like current. They explore intuitive and technical gradients between sonic and sculptural forms, using analog circuitry and open-source software to sculpt mutually resonant hyperobjects.

Shatter Pattern
Shatter Pattern reallocates the memory space divided during dreams in hopes of generating a shared access platform for auditory practices that can slow down and speed up event perception. Music partakes of body-phenomena, and shatter pattern music endeavors to translate into unknowable bodies. Using polyrhythm, textural sound and vocal processing, shatter patterns break down and stretch our sensory expectations of what a human song can be. Shatter Pattern (previously Waxy Tomb) has performed at CCRMA, the Lab, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Algorithmic Art Assembly, with releases on Embalming Lately(NYC), Gilgongo Records (Arizona) and Weird Ear (Oakland).
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Saturday, March 29 2025 7:00 PM
Indexical is pleased to present the Bennardo-Larson Duo (violin and piano) at our favorite mountainside venue – Wind River. Join us in the redwoods for an evening-length program featuring works by Anthony Vine and Maya Bennardo.

Bennardo-Larson Duo
The Bennardo-Larson Duo is an NYC/Stockholm- based contemporary classical duo committed to the performance and promotion of forward- thinking works for violin and piano. Comprised of Maya Bennardo (violin) and Karl Larson (piano), the duo is dedicated to aesthetically diverse programming that illuminates new repertoire for their instrumentation alongside intrepid works from the past. The Bennardo-Larson Duo was formed in 2016 when they undertook the task of learning and performing Charles Ives’s complete works for violin and piano, which they presented on their annual ‘Ives of March’ concerts from 2017-2019. Since then, the duo has steadily built a repertoire of pre-existing and newly-commissioned works for violin and piano.

The Bennardo-Larson duo has been featured on the MATA Festival at the Kitchen in New York, NY, the Bowerbird Series in Philadelphia, PA, the Toledo Museum of Art’s ‘Great Performances Series’ in Toledo, OH, the Music Mansion in Providence, RI, and Khimaira in Stockholm, Sweden. Their programming features the complete Sonatas for Violin and Piano by Charles Ives, Morton Feldman’s monumental ‘For John Cage,’ and ‘a wind's whisper,’ a program featuring works by John Cage, Michael Pisaro, Eva Maria Houben, and two commissions by Adrian Knight and Kristofer Svensson. In April of 2024, the duo will present the world premiere of two substantial new commissions by Anthony Vine and Maya Bennardo on the Bowerbird Series in Philadelphia, PA. These two new works will be the focal point of the upcoming 2024-2025 season and two new albums, which will be released in 2025.
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Saturday, April 5 2025 8:00 PM
Saturday, April 5th, Indexical is pleased to present multi-instrumentalist and composer Elliott Sharp and GTAR Ensemble performing the work of Abe Gibson. A central figure in the experimental music scene in New York since the 1970s, Elliott Sharp performs solo electroacoustic music performed on 8-string guitarbass with electronics. Abe Gibson leads the GTAR Ensemble using hand signals and objects, blending members of the touring ensemble with local musicians.

Elliott Sharp
Elliott Sharp leads SysOrk, Orchestra Carbon, Terraplane, and Tectonics and pioneered use of fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetics in musical composition and interaction. His opera Port Bou premiered October 2014 at Issue Project Room and his suite Tribute:MLK Berlin '64 opened the 2014 Berlin Jazz Festival. Storm Of the Eye appears on violinist Hilary Hahn's Grammy-winning album In 27 Pieces and Turing Test for the Neue Vocalsölisten Stuttgart premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2012. Sharp has been featured at festivals New Music Stockholm, Darmstadt, Donaueschingen, and Au Printemps and is the subject of the documentary film Doing The Don't. Sharp was awarded the Berlin Prize for Music Composition for 2015; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014; a Fellowship from the Center for Transformative Media in 2014. In 2003, he received a Fellowship from the Foundation For Contemporary Art.

Abe Gibson
Abe Gibson (b.1975, Springfield,IL) is a sound/visual artist & member of the groups Frequent Weaver, Net Worth & The PTF. He is also a music historian & author of ‘Here To Blast Your Concept: An Oral History of SST Records’ (Hat and Beard Press, 2025). He has worked with Tatsuya Nakatani, Eugene Chadbourne, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Daniel Carter, Bill MacKay, Ben Boye & many others in his travels. He is also the host/curator of SLO Synth Night & regularly presents concerts & art events in San Luis Obispo.

GTAR Ensemble
GTAR Ensemble was founded in Chicago in 2006 by Abe & Alex Wing & was originally known as Chicago Gtar Ensemble. The group performed regularly from 2006-08 & many luminaries from Chicago’s creative community were involved. Gibson reformed the group in San Luis Obispo when Rob Magill released two archival recordings of the group via his Weird Cry label- ‘Myopic Monday Quintet’ & ‘An Electric Prayer for Derek Bailey’. Gibson conducts the group using hand signals & objects. Ensemble consists of regular members of the SLO ensemble with local musicians filling out the group. GTAR Ensemble has recently performed in SLO, Ojai & Bakersfield.
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Saturday, April 12 2025 8:00 PM
Alan S. Tofighi will perform the composition Psychic Hold/Tychic Drift III: Memory Cone & Phantasms of the Living Room for PEAR REG, alpha wave, electronics, and home appliances. Throughout the piece events, musical, electronic, and mechanical will be activated and made visible by the otherwise invisible synchronization between the performer and the random event generator. Modular synths, motors, acoustical phenomena of the space, and other resonances will be performed throughout the space and work. The events will be connected and chained to a series of Logic systems revealing and subverting their own network for a telematic improvisation on spectres and the spectral.

Participants form the workshop are invited to perform as the Psychic Drift Ensemble bringing their random event generators and personal home appliances further expanding the network of synchronization in the real and the implied.

Alan S. Tofighi
Alan S. Tofighi is an Interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Southern California. Utilizing a background in research, performance, sound, and video; Tofighi’s work deals with analyses of the dispersion, obfuscation, and formation of information to renegotiate narratives of history & power in the present. Tofighi utilizes the infiltration of legal parameters, social structures, myth, (dis)information, and extensive research of these cells as they shift from fringe culture to central in their infiltration/engineering of dominant culture. They have shown work and/or performed at REDCAT, Blum & Poe, The Box, Human Resources, The Horse Dublin, The Bob Baker Marionette Theater, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, MOTOR, and many other sites/spaces throughout the world and internet.

Nowhere Lab
This event is part of a series presented by the Nowhere Lab with interdisciplinary artist Alan S. Tofighi centered around the history of random number generation in Art, science, divination and zones where these histories meet.
Alan S. Tofighi will perform the composition Psychic Hold/Tychic Drift III: Memory Cone & Phantasms of the Living Room for PEAR REG, alpha wave, electronics, and home appliances. Throughout the piece events, musical, electronic, and mechanical will be activated and made visible by the otherwise invisible synchronization between the performer and the random event generator. Modular synths, motors, acoustical phenomena of the space, and other resonances will be performed throughout the space and work. The events will be connected and chained to a series of Logic systems revealing and subverting their own network for a telematic improvisation on spectres and the spectral.

Participants form the workshop are invited to perform as the Psychic Drift Ensemble bringing their random event generators and personal home appliances further expanding the network of synchronization in the real and the implied.

Alan S. Tofighi
Alan S. Tofighi is an Interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Southern California. Utilizing a background in research, performance, sound, and video; Tofighi’s work deals with analyses of the dispersion, obfuscation, and formation of information to renegotiate narratives of history & power in the present. Tofighi utilizes the infiltration of legal parameters, social structures, myth, (dis)information, and extensive research of these cells as they shift from fringe culture to central in their infiltration/engineering of dominant culture. They have shown work and/or performed at REDCAT, Blum & Poe, The Box, Human Resources, The Horse Dublin, The Bob Baker Marionette Theater, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, MOTOR, and many other sites/spaces throughout the world and internet.

Nowhere Lab
This event is part of a series presented by the Nowhere Lab with interdisciplinary artist Alan S. Tofighi centered around the history of random number generation in Art, science, divination and zones where these histories meet.

Also included in this program:

https://www.indexical.org/events/2025-04-11-nowherelab-x-indexical-workshop-ast-pear-enclosed-anomalous-inference-receiver
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