Andrew Neumann is an American artist working in a variety of media, including sculpture, film and video installation, and electronic music. He has received numerous awards and residencies a Guggenheim Fellowship and a LEF Foundation Grant. He has had solo shows at bitforms Gallery in NYC and Seoul, Korea, The DeCordova Museum, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Boston Cybverarts Gallery, The Childrens Museum in Boston, as well as solo shows for the Boston Cyberarts Festival. His CD’s are available on Sublingual Records. His videos have been shown on PBS, The Worldwide Video Festival, Artist Space, and elsewhere. He has had solo music/video performances at Issue Project Room, Experimental Intermedia and Roulette, in NYC. During 2001 he was an Artist in Residence at the iEAR Studio at Rensalear Polytech Institute. He has also had residencies at MacDowell, YADDO, Ucross Foundation, Steim, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Art/OMI, Teton ArtLab, iPark and the Experimental Television Center.
Forbes Graham (b. 1977) is a composer, musician, sound artist, and visual artist whose work explores themes of simultaneity, perceptibility, transformation and collage. He was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Silver Spring, MD. He attended American University, studying music composition, in the mid to late 90s and was involved in the DC and Maryland hardcore scenes, playing in a number of bands and releasing music on his label RiceControl. In the early 2000s, he moved to New England, where he got involved with Boston's free jazz and improvised music scenes. His work Encounters I for trumpet, electronics, and voices premiered at Roulette in 2019. In 2020, he was selected to work with the JACK Quartet as a part of JACK Studio. The JACK Quartet premiered String Quartet no. 3 that year, which was dedicated to LaToya Ruby Frazier. The piece For Sam Gilliam I, meant to be a tribute to the pioneering painter as well as a meditation on color, was premiered by loadbang in 2022. Earlier that year, [Switch~ Ensemble] premiered Inflection: Beacon Hill/Roxbury, which was commissioned by a LAB Grant from The Boston Foundation. Inflection: Beacon Hill/Roxbury, was written in honor of the migration of the last African American institution to leave Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood, the Charles Street AME Church. The Overlook Quartet performed his string quartet Crossing in 2021 at Mass MoCA amongst Linda Sormin's installation Stream. He performed with Michael Pisaro at (the) co-incidence festival in 2017 and has appeared at other music festivals including High Zero, Vision, The Thing In The Spring, and The Festival of New Trumpet. Graham has appeared on over 40 albums, primarily on trumpet, but also on electronics. He is a member of Mobius Artists Group, a collective of experimenting artists. Past composition teachers include Chaya Czernowin, Eric Wubbels and Julia Werntz.
Sandy Ewen is a sound artist, visual artist and architect who has recently relocated to NYC from Houston, TX. Ewen’s audio practice focuses on extended guitar techniques, improvisation, graphic scores and interdisciplinary collaboration. Her unique approach to guitar incorporates a wide array of implements – railroad spikes, sidewalk chalk, threaded bolts, steel wool and other items become an arsenal of abstraction. Ewen has worked extensively with film makers, dancers, poets and musicians to create films, audio recording, sound interventions and performance art. Ewen’s musical collaborations include trio Etched in the Eye, duo with Tom Carter called Spiderwebs, the trio Garden medium, and ongoing collaborations with percussionist Weasel Walter and bassist Damon Smith. For nearly ten years, Ewen has been the leader of an all-female large ensemble. The ensemble conceptualizes and performs sound and performance art, utilizing graphic and text based scores and improvisational constraints. The ensemble performed with an amplified bathtub at Diverse Works in 2016, and performed a suite of installation-specific compositions for Francis Alÿs’ Fabiola Project at the Menil. Sandy has spent much of 2017 touring, performing solo sets and in collaboration with Steve Jansen (tapes and electronics) and Maria Chavez (turntables) around Europe. In years past, Ewen has performed alongside Roscoe Mitchell, Keith Rowe, Lydia Lunch and many others, and has performed and recorded with Jaap Blonk, Henry Kaiser and more. In 2014 she performed at San Francisco’s 13th Annual Outsound New Music Summit, and she has made several appearances at Austin’s annual No Idea Festival.
Junko Fujiwara is an innovative cellist who pushes the boundaries of her craft through improvised jazz and traversing genres. She has performed on the East Coast, the Midwest, and in Europe with a number of groups, including Mimi Rabson’s String Theory Trio, Eric Hofbauer Quintet, and BOLT: Adventurous Improvised Music. A member of the Boston College cello faculty, Ms. Fujiwara trains musicians in Jazz and Western classical styles while simultaneously challenging traditions and fostering appreciation for contemporary technique.
The great spiritual masters might view Damon Smith from the perspective of eternity. But perceived, as he often is, in passing time, Damon Smith is a human musician living in New York City, where he was born and raised. Some years ago, he graduated from the New England Conservatory. Since then, there has been a flurry of activity. There have been releases with The Jacobins and, more recently, The Brightmares. There have been acclaimed solo records in which Damon’s own voice has cried out in the darkness of our world, as if from nowhere or from everywhere. These can be accessed on various streaming services and played back at various speeds and in various orders - celebrations of time that nonetheless flaunt time, insisting on and yet boldly rejecting all duration. Meanwhile, a slew of shows have unfolded synchronously, in which Damon has accompanied various people you’ve heard of and people you haven’t and people you should’ve or soon will (including Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes, Dirty Projectors, and Andrew WK), at countless venues like 92nd Street Y and Carnegie Hall as well as festivals like Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits. The activity continues. Life is irreversible and long. From the standpoint of eternity, this has all already happened and will always be happening, all at once. Thankfully, we have the opportunity to experience these events sequentially in time. - Written by William Hazard
Eric Rosenthal is based out of the Boston area. The former student of Ed Blackwell has studied and performed more than American jazz drumming; he has also delved into West African traditional and South Indian classical percussion. Rosenthal has performed and improvised with Anthony Braxton, Mat Maneri, Pandelis Karayorgis, Mario Pavone, and the Either/Orchestra. He has performed all over North America and Europe, and appeared in Greece at the Patras Jazz Festival, at Montreal's North Sea Jazz festival, even at Finland's Pori Festival. Besides producing his own improvised music recordings, he also appears on CDs with the Hypnotic Clambake and the Zairean soukous band Freestyle.The late '90s found Rosenthal busy in the group Naftule's Dream. The band has two releases on John Zorn's Tzadik label, Search for the Golden Dreydl and Smash, Clap!