Kevin CK Lo
Kevin CK Lo is a composer, choreographer, writer, artist, and arts worker, living on Chochenyo Ohlone land (Oakland). He is currently in the UC Berkeley Music Composition PhD program. In his compositions for live performance and installation, he utilizes instruments, digital sound processing and generative programming environments to examine spatial and auditory sensitivities, topological structure and audience kinesthetic response while seeking to corrupt conventional compositional/performative/installative rationale.
He is also one half of the experimental interdisciplinary duo, DROUGHT SPA, alongside alex cruse. They have performed or presented at Cloaca Projects, Brown University, San Francisco State University's Poetry Center, UC Berkeley's Center for New Media and Audio Technologies, Gray Area (San Francisco), CounterPulse (San Francisco), SOMArts (San Francisco), B4BEL4B Gallery (Oakland), the Oakland Museum of California, H0L0 (NYC), Vaska Emanouilova Gallery (Sofia), Aeromoto (Mexico City), Audio Foundation (Auckland), the International Symposium of Electronic Art (Vancouver), and elsewhere.
https://kevincklo.com
Roco Córdova
Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Roco Córdova is a vocalist, composer, producer and improviser based in the San Francisco Bay Area. They possess a B.Mus. in Composition from the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music and an M.A. in Composition from Mills College in Oakland, California. They have studied under the guidance of Carlos Carrillo, Manuel Ceide, Roscoe Mitchell, Zeena Parkins and James Fei.
Their music has been described as "slow-boiling, apparently timeless" with "an odd momentum of its own" (The Washington Post). Cordova's work fuses diverse influences with electronic media, chance operations, gradual processes, noise, improvisation, and timbral techniques of composition. Voice is at the core of their music making: they incorporate extended techniques like throat singing, overtone singing, falsetto, and vocal clicks and pops into live performances that emphasize the electronic processing of these sounds.
As a touring vocalist and improviser with The Art Ensemble of Chicago, they have performed extensively around the world in cities including but not limited to: Knoxville, Tennessee; Chicago, Illinois; São Paulo, Brazil; Washington D.C.; and Créteil, France. Roco has also recently soloed and performed with the California Bach Society, performing the role of Pilate in this year’s performances of the St. John Passion. They have also collaborated with artists like Monopiece, Dirt and Copper, Theresa Wong, GeraldCaselDance, La Macacoa and Danistha Rivero. A selection of Roco’s work can be found at: https://linktr.ee/rococordova.
Adrian Montufar
Adrian Montufar is an improviser and sound artist currently in the Music Composition PhD program at UC Berkeley. His work often plays with the relationship between the voice and the body or between the musician and their instrument. Adrian’s research focuses on using sensor technology and controller design to build new musical instruments for improvisation and interactive sound installations. Between 2017 and 2019, Adrian completed MMus programs in Composition and Sonic Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London under the supervision of Roger Redgate and Freida Abtan.
adrianmontufar.com
Danishta Rivero
Danishta Rivero is an improviser, performer, and sound artist based in Oakland, California. Through her sound practice, she explores the artifacts resulting from heavy processing of the voice and their relationship to its acoustic resonance. Rivero’s media work expands this exploration of artifact and object/subject in order to recalibrate conceptualizations of self and the world around us.
Danishta’s artistic practice and inquiry are grounded in and woven from the continuums of experimentalism, free improvisation, electro-acoustic music, performance, multimedia, and sound art.
As a soloist, Rivero sometimes performs as Caribay, conjuring the eponymous mountain spirit, whose laments cause avalanches. She is a member of electro-acoustic duo Voicehandler with percussionist Jacob Felix Heule. She is also half of Las Sucias, a feminist tropical noise duo with Alexandra Buschman-Román.
http://www.danishtarivero.com
La Macacoa
La Macacoa is Puerto Rican Bay Area experimental sound artist Alexandra Buschman-Román. As a singer and improviser they use multiple microphones, electronic hardware, body gestures/movement, and spatial acoustics to expand the voice. As a composer and electronic percussionist they draw from afro-caribbean music and Taino (Caribbean indigenous) stories. Performances are mystical rituals, and ancestral channeling.
Part of Alexandra’s roots are in the Puerto Rican classical and electronic music vanguard studying composition at the Music Conservatory with Manuel Ceide (Berio student), and Rafael Aponte Ledée (Ginastera student). They moved to Oakland to study with Fred Frith, Chris Brown, Maggie Payne, and Pauline Oliveros at Mills College.
Alexandra is half of iconic avant-tropical duo LAS SUCIAS, with Danishta Rivero. They also perform and tour under monicker DEMONSLEEPER, singing songs about nightmares and lucid dreams using dark ambient, drone noise, and heavy somnambulist pulses.