Bob Ostertag, solo for gamepad controller & modular software synthesizer

Nic Collins, Semi-Conducting, solo compositions for voice, video, dead circuits, live software, and woodpecker

Bob Ostertag began his musical career in 1978, touring Europe with Anthony Braxton, playing a keyboard-less modular analog synthesizer. He was not the first person to take a modular synthesizer on stage, but he was the first to center his musical practice in a scene of free improvisors using a modular synth as his main ax. In 1979 he settled in New York City and became a key part of the late 1970s Downtown scene along with John Zorn and Eugene Chadbourne. He left music for most of the 1980s and immersed himself in the Central American revolutionary movements of the time. His goodbye to the Salvadoran revolution, a composition titled Sooner or Later, is considered a classic of electronic music.

Nic Collins celebrates the release of his new book, Semi-Conducting: Rambles Through the Post-Cagean Thicket (Bloomsbury 2025), with a program of solo compositions. An early adopter of microcomputers for live performance, Collins also makes use of homemade electronic circuitry and conventional acoustic instruments. His book, Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking (Routledge 2006), has influenced emerging electronic music worldwide.

Adam O'Farrill's Stranger Days

Adam O'Farrill (trumpet), Xavier Del Castillo (tenor sax), Walter Stinson (bass) & Zack O'Farrill (drums)

Composer and trumpet player Adam O'Farrill's has released the critically acclaimed albums Stranger Days, El Maquech, and Visions of Your Other. His latest album, Hueso, is the next chapter in the story of his longtime quartet. Produced by Spencer Murphy, the music on Hueso is a departure from the urban landscape, an attempt to channel the pastoral serenity of rural western Maine, where the band participated in a farm residency in the weeks leading up to their recording session. The album primarily features compositions by Adam, among them Gesturing Towards The West, a piece whose structure is inspired by the cadences of jisei, a type of death poem from Japan. It also contains two interpretations of Thom Yorke’s Truth Ray: one in the form of a solo trumpet performance and the other featuring the whole quartet.

Mara (viola & electronics) & Marta Forsberg (electronics) 

Alanas Gurinas & Sholto Dobie, A Hiss of Light (Infant Tree 2025)

Composer and sound artist Mara creates long-form pieces that weave together melodies, spoken word, and textures, exploring the rhythms and melodies contained in natural environments. Marta Forsberg is a sound artist and musician whose work delves into themes of language and human memory, with a strong focus on archival research. Lately, she has been experimenting with the interplay between human and synthetic voices, creating soundscapes that are both intimate and ethereal.  

Sound artists Alanas Gurinas and Sholto Dobie have collaborated to produce their first duo release, A Hiss of Light. Both artists work with acoustic sound sculptures and self-made instruments made with everyday materials. In the case of Gurinas, vibrating and tautx paper objects emit pulsing sine tones, organic chirps and shimmering noises that drift like weather fronts, whilst in Dobie’s work, air is the main material, compressed and channeled through a set of valves, tubes, and timers into pipes of various origins. 

Vanessa Tomlinson (percussion) performs selections from her new release The Edge is a Place (Room40, 2025).

Judith Hamann (cello, voice, electronics) performs selections from their new release Aunes (Shelter Press, 2025), with guests Dina Maccabee and Catherine Lamb (voices).

Vanessa Tomlinson is a percussionist, composer and improviser whose music orbits broadly around extended approaches, site-specific investigations, minimalist reductions, a sense of embodied play, and an exploration of objects. 

Judith Hamann's work encompasses performance, improvisation, electro-acoustic composition, field recording, electronics, site-specific generative work, and microtonal systems. Currently their work is focused on an examination of expressions and manifestations of "shaking" in solo performance practice, a collection of new works for cello and humming, and ongoing research surrounding the collapse and the de-mastering of instrumental practice. 

Iriai Verlag label night

Sebastian von der Heide & Elizabeth Davis, duo for percussion, violin and electronics 

CDNoé, solo electronics

Iriai Verlag presents Sebastian von der Heide of Inner Cop Avoidance in a new duo with Elizabeth Davis, as well as a solo set by CDNoé presenting their new release Ornamental Hermits (Iriai 2025).

Sawt Out presents its new album Sawt Out: Fake Live in America, in the first of two episodes, the first unplugged and the second plugged.

Burkhard Beins (percussion), Mazen Kerbaj (trumpet) & Michael Vorfeld (percussion)

Over its first six years, the trio Sawt Out focused entirely on their unusual acoustic instrumentation, consisting of trumpet and two sets of percussion. They then invented an electro-acoustic version of the group as their second musical leg. Whether acoustic or electronic, Sawt Out creates bewildering sound worlds rich in detail and tight musical interaction.

Okkyung Lee (cello), Emilio Gordoa (percusion) & Isabella Forciniti (modular synthesizer) 

The new trio of Lee, Gordoa & Forciniti pushes the boundaries of sound, blending acoustic and electronic elements in an immersive, improvisational performance.

In March 2025, Magda Mayas and Boris Hauf released GAZA, featuring contributions from 48 artists, all centering around piano, keyboard and organ-based compositions.  Available as a digital-only release on Shameless Records, all proceeds are being donated to the Ghassan Abu Sittah Gaza Children's Fund, which provides critical medical care to children in Gaza and Lebanon.

Tonight's concert features live performances by 10 of the contributing artists: Ernst Surberg, Harri Sjöström, Achim Kaufmann, Andrea Neumann, Anais Tuerlinckx, Volker Meitz, Simon James Phillips, Magda Mayas, Xenia Hauf, and Boris Hauf. All proceeds from the concert directly support the Ghassan Abu Sittah Gaza Children's Fund—and as a thank you, you'll receive a download code for the album.

Quentin Tolimieri (piano) & Eric Wong (guitar, electronics), record relase concert for Tolimieri/Wong, Erasures (Ftarri 2025)

The music of Tolimieri/Wong is a music of erasure. Specifically, they are attempting to remove various syntactical structures from their work, for example melody, harmony, gesture, and formal development. The impetus for this removal is a desire to evade the historical models that these syntactical structures force upon the listener and that serve, in a sense, to obscure the "sound-in-and-of-itself" (if such a thing exists) of the sonic object. The results of this removal is a music that is extremely minimal and reduced, closer to a kind of sound sculpture than to traditional concert music.​

Gabriela Areal (cello) & Adam Asnan (cartridge looper machines, analog machines)

Gabriela Areal designs scores and develop methods that explore instrumental and human group behaviors through basic principles of acoustic phenomena, process-based structures, and interweaving notions of relief. 

Adam Asnan is an electroacoustic musician and location sound recordist whose work promotes the aesthetic potential of sound-capture, amplification, auditory "imaging," and the virtues of both acoustic and synthetic spatialisation. Most recently, he's been concerned with ideas of "phonogeny" (as a parallel to photogeny) in sound recording and tonal works for instrumentalizing reverb.

Making Waves #11

Melanie Schweizer in disussion with jouralist Hanno Hauenstein

Melanie Johanna Schweizer is a lawyer and political scientist specializing in business and human rights. She served as a senior legal advisor at the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs until February 2025, when she was dismissed due to her public statements critical of Israel's actions in Gaza. Schweizer was a Bundestag candidate for the MERA25 party in the 2025 federal elections, representing Berlin-Mitte, and placed fourth on the Berlin state list. Her legal training included placements at the Cottbus District Court, Berlin Police Department, Cottbus Public Prosecutor's Office, a Berlin law firm, and a human rights organization in Jordan. Prior to her government role, she practiced as an attorney. 

Nina Guo (voice) & Joe Houston (piano) perform songs by Charles Ives, Matthew Shlomowitz, Kaija Saariaho, and Rishin Singh.

Program: 

Charles Ives, Songs (selection)

Matthew Shlomowitz, Four Songs (UA) and two songs from Songs about words and the pleasure of misery

Rishin Singh. Love at the Border (UA)

Kaija Saariaho, Saarikoski-laulut

Sawt Out presents its new album Sawt Out: Fake Live in America, in the first of two episodes, the first unplugged and the second plugged.

Burkhard Beins (analog synths, samples, walkie talkies), Mazen Kerbaj (crackle synth, trumpet, toys, radio) & Michael Vorfeld (light bulbs, electric switching devices)

Over its first six years, the trio Sawt Out focused entirely on their unusual acoustic instrumentation, consisting of trumpet and two sets of percussion. They then invented an electro-acoustic version of the group as their second musical leg. Whether acoustic or electronic, Sawt Out creates bewildering sound worlds rich in detail and tight musical interaction.

Gruppo di Improvvisazione Giallo

Hanno Leichtmann (electronics, percussion), Magda Mayas (piano, clavinet), Sara Persico (voice, electronics) & Valerio Tricoli (Revox B77)

Gruppo di Improvvisazione Giallo is a new project initiated by Hanno Leichtmann and is influenced by the musician and sound artist’s love for the soundtracks of the Italian crime and thriller movie genre of the late 1960s and 1970s commonly known as "giallo" (yellow), which was named after the dominant color of the covers of the pulp novels that inspired it. 

The project pays homage to them and the legacy of the composer-performer collective Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza and one of its leading figures, Ennio Morricone, who also composed dozens of giallo scores.