Performer biographies
Sholeh Asgary (@sholehasgary) is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary and sound artist who creates immersive works, sound performances and audience participatory scores and workshops. Utilizing the parameters of various media, such as photography, video, light, time and sound, she resurfaces the viewer’s relationship to space, in order to address the way objects can create disambiguation and break down representation. In her sound performances, she utilizes the physical properties of everyday objects and boundaries of her own voice, processed through repetitious actions, creating a ritualized feedback loop through which the viewer/listener can travel in and out of, an image of the world through the physical aural realm.
Amma Ateria (@amma_ateria), derived from ‘flammable material’, is a philosophy held through her work, — to give strength to disintegration and fragility, to rebuild from aftermath of destruction, of dust. An electroacoustic composer / sound artist, her work examines psychoacoustics in binaural beats, brainwave entrainment, and equal-loudness contour. With immediacy of tension / release, she navigates between oppositions in search of transcending moments, transforming deafening noise into self-hypnosis and metamorphosis. Compositions developed during her concussion recovery, utilizes brainwave entrainment, time shifts, and changes of neurological responses to DELTA, THETA, ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA waves as materials and focal point. With memories of condensed cities, she gravitates to frequencies of close-ranged airplanes, polyrhythmic occurrences, out-of-body experiences, sustained harmonics intersected with musique concrète, and lost speech.
IDHAZ (@_idhaz_) is a producer/vocalist transporting through dark portals to sounds of undiscovered emotion, past, future, and fractured light. He began performing poetry in 2010, and since then has become a magnetic, multi-disciplinary performance artist in the Bay Area. Combining elements of gameboy, beat machines, synth, and genre fluid vocals, IDHAZ creates visceral soundscapes to immerse into. IDHAZ is also part of the bands pieces indigo, tugboyz and Vio. He teaches local youth various mediums of expression, and has lead a variety of writing workshops for local artists.
Joel St. Julien is a Haitian-American composer, musician, songwriter, and sound artist based in San Francisco. Joel has written music for documentaries, short / feature films, podcasts, and dance. He is a firm believer in experimentation/fusion with acoustic and electronic elements in sound oscillating through escapism and the mysticism of the present tense.
Jerod S. Rivera (@j_srivera) is a musician based in Oakland, California with a focus in electronica and leftfield techno. With a background in drums and experimental electronics, Rivera approaches composing in a do-it-yourself mentality and is completely self-taught. On January 1, 2021, Rivera self-released his debut full-length album Virgo. He also has a monthly show on Internet Public Radio called Adjustment Layer, focusing on forward-thinking electronic music. Rivera is also a designer working for museums and non-profit organizations.
transcriptions01 (@transcriptions01) (they/them) is a nonbinary experimental cellist, composer and multi-instrumentalist. Their compositions are rooted in honoring the essence and spirit of Filipinx/Latinx past, present and future Queer ancestors. Their “expressions” dive into challenging gender by drag, theater and improvisational soundscaping, performing in spaces such as Counterpulse, the STUD, Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, Brava Theater and more. They’re moving towards expanding a youth music program where expression, improvisation and telling your story is necessary.
Gabby Wen (@gabbywen_sound) is an electroacoustic music composer and improviser born in 1995 in Toisan, raised in Shenzhen, and currently living in Oakland, CA. They work with synthesizers, electronics, guqin, field recordings, and miscellaneous instruments/objects to create captivating auditory experiences and narratives. Their works include solo and collaborative live improvisation performances and fixed-media electroacoustic compositions, fueled by spontaneity and uncertainty, reflecting introspective experiences and their relationship to upbringing, memories, desires, impulses, and surroundings.
Catalina Africa (b. 1988, Manila) graduated from the University of the Philippines with a BFA in Painting. Active in showing with various galleries locally, she is an emerging young talent that redefines the way we look at art by way of painting, sculpture, collage and other mixed media to produce ambivalent configurations that unsettle the familiar. Africa currently lives and works in Baler.