The return of the Return the Gift curated series (Series 3) continues with the second installment of four great shows, with three great performing artists featuring Henna Chou, matt robidoux, and Aine Nakamura.

Doors: 7:30/ Show: 8:00 PM
Donation: $10-25

Henna Chou is a sound artist whose work explores the confluence of environmental listening, experimental practice, and socio-political inquiry. Drawing from the textures and rhythms of the natural and industrial world, their work engages with sound as both material and message - exploring issues of ecology, displacement, and collective memory.

matt robidoux (they/them) is a San Francisco based composer, improviser, and educator interested in the convergence of movement and sound as it relates to free improvisation and accessibility. Their primary instrument is the “corn synth” — (Kinetically Operated Randomness Network) a modular system that interprets physical input from two “ears of corn” sculptures cast in aluminum.

Aine Nakamura is a performer of voice, body and stories, and artist. She focuses on the sensibility and sensitivity in listening to hidden stories and performs using sung and spoken voice and movement across multiple cultural/transcultural sites. She seeks the potentialities of an injured voice and on the listening and sensing bodies. She writes words, some of which become scores, and considers shapes as if her throat itself is a membrane and body or inner is a changing shape or phenomenon among worldly phenomena in relations. Through her practice, while aiming to be a vessel, she understands about herself and pursues meanings of lines, seeing, and connecting. Engaging with sites, memory, and transborder soul work, she works in sounding/voicing, movement, storytelling/poetry, object-making/installation, and site-specific composition/improvisation.
✚gCal  ✚iCal  More...

The return of the Return the Gift curated series (Series 3) continues with the second installment of four great shows, with three great performing artists featuring Fred Frith/Karen Stackpole Duo, Joseph Dee Bradshaw, and NGN.

Doors: 7:30/ Show: 8:00 PM
Donation: $10-25

Fred Frith/Karen Stackpole

Fred Frith is a songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist (bass, keyboards, violin) and an improviser performing mostly on various permutations of the electric and acoustic guitar. Occasionally I use crude home-made string instruments of my own invention. I learned how to compose in rock bands, starting with Henry Cow in 1968. This meant writing for and with people that I knew, and then arriving at the final result through a collective rehearsal process. During the Henry Cow years I fell in love with the recording studio and its endless possibilities. I embrace the idea of the “work” as an unfinished and constantly mutating entity. Collaboration, improvisation, sculpting sound in the studio, and treating composition as an open-ended process remain central to how I make music.

Karen Stackpole is a drummer/percussionist, and has a long-standing passion for gongs, scrap metal, and a range of "ethnic" instruments. She specializes in dynamic soundscapes and textures and has contributed gong sounds to more conventional musical genres as well as providing source material for film soundtracks. In her exploration of metals, she has cultivated some distinctive techniques for drawing harmonics out of tamtams with various implements. In addition to solo work, she has performed and recorded with Machine Shop: Live Amplified Gong Experience (a duo with electronics master, Drew Webster), Sabbaticus Rex, Ghost in the House, Vorticella, Malcolm Mooney and the Tenth Planet, the Francis Wong Unit, and the rock band Steel Hotcakes. Most recently her work has focused on duo performances and recordings with experimental instrument builder Krys Bobrowski (Gliss Glass & Gongs), contrabassist Bill Noertker (Talking Frog), and guitarist extraordinaire Fred Frith.

"It took a long, but worth the wait - after almost twenty years of talking about it and not managing to do it, Fred and Karen finally played as a duo in 2018, making a record that appeared as Nature on the Sub Rosa label in 2025 after many more delays!"

Joseph Dee Bradshaw is a guitarist based in Oakland. His first solo album, The Conversion, released in 2025, features several long-form acoustic fingerstyle compositions. On his second album, The Lavender Promise (released August 2026), he continues the fingerstyle explorations with a more improvisational approach, offering up several spontaneously composed pieces. Aside from his solo work, he is a member of the free improv group Fornax Linteum, whose self titled album was released earlier this year.

NGN is a songwriter, harpist and crooner debuting songs from their upcoming album ‘Tea Horse Road’ (2027). Taking influence from Appalachian folk melodies, Great American Songbook and Chinese tea ceremony, these songs offer a kaleidoscope of feeling, ritual and decolonial sapphic cowboy vibes.
✚gCal  ✚iCal  More...

Leila Abdul-Rauf @leilaabdulrauf brings her new soul quenching/crushing album Andros Insidium to Oakland before heading off to tour the East Coast.
:
Geist and the Sacred Ensemble @geistandthesacredensemble is here on tour from Washington bringing expansive hymnal textures.
:
ASOMC @asomcmusic stratifies frequencies to create a rich realm ranging from ethereal to bone shattering.
:
Domi/Jordan Blankenship/K Francis Messer and Kaitlin McSweeney @earthenergy @jordanblankenship @chlorinearoma @captainmcsweeney merge to form a quartet of chaos and tension breaking into moments of release and levity. They are joined by percussive magician and mystic @mmzblast ,on tour from LA, for a special quintet set.
:
byob and respect the beautiful space that is TAC. Hard cut off at 10pm for the neighbors so don’t be late
✚gCal  ✚iCal  More...

The return of the Return the Gift curated series (Series 3) continues with the third installment of four great shows, with three great performing artists featuring Chuck Johnson, Peaces, and Robert Nance.

Doors: 7:30/ Show: 8:00 PM
Donation: $10-25

Chuck Johnson is an Oakland-based composer, producer, and musician who approaches his work with an ear towards the faults and instabilities that reveal latent beauty. Recordings of his work have been published by Western Vinyl, VDSQ, Thrill Jockey, Temporary Residence, Kompakt, Ghostly, and Three Lobed, among others.


Peaces is the interdisciplinary collaboration between Zekarias Musele Thompson and Joshua Wismans, based in Oakland, CA. The project explores the act and possibilities of sound creation as a unifying space, revealing dimensions of peace within and outside of our individual and collective bodies.


Robert Nance is an American composer and producer creating immersive sonic cocoons through the use of guitars, synthesizers, electronics, and field recordings. His works seek to build lusciously abstract environments that invite listeners to engage as actively or passively as their own experience unfolds, and have graced the stages of Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and SFMOMA. Nance’s second full-length album Do You Believe In Ghosts? released in 2024 as a follow up to his debut album A Musical Offering In Spite Of My Flaws. His first installation work The Spectrum of Dreams’ Resting Light was an acclaimed evening-length meditation opera, and during the lockdown Nance teamed up with long-time dance collaborator Kit McDaniel to present a recurring virtual movement and music event Allow To Realign for participants to enjoy guided movement and ambient music. As a founding member of Mobius Trio, he championed new forms of guitar music from disparate backgrounds. Robert's musical journey began with piano and trumpet lessons, but he never quite felt at home until discovering the guitar and catalogs of post-minimalism composers, pioneers of ambient music, electro-acoustic improvisers, and artful noise. When not making music he can be found loudly screaming at his beloved Pittsburgh Penguins or brewing himself a cup of coffee.
✚gCal  ✚iCal  More...