Non-Event Presents: Waterworks 2022: A Festival of Experimental Sounds from Around New England

Non-Event celebrates a return to live programming with a two-day festival of experimental music from around New England. Each night features four sets of music. (NOTE: SET ORDER FOR EACH NIGHT TBD)

Friday, April 29
Lautaro Mantilla
Paulownia
Kelley Sheehan
Tongue Depressor

Saturday, April 30
Nat Baldwin & Stella Silbert
Victoria Cheah
Jake Meginsky
Stan Strickland

Doors: 7pm, Music: 7:30pm
Tickets: $20 gen admission | $30 festival pass for both days | $10/night for students + Non-Event members
Advanced tickets recommended

About the artists
Nat Baldwin & Stella Silbert – Nat Baldwin is a double bassist, composer, improviser, and songwriter from Maine, currently living in Western Mass. He’s released several solo and collaborative works and runs the experimental music label Tripticks Tapes. Stella Silbert is a Western Mass based electroacoustic improviser who plays turntable and no-input mixer. Stella formed the duo Beige with Liam Kramer-White, and currently plays solo as Sweetness the Point of Song, and in groups with Nat Baldwin, Neil Cloaca Young, and Adam Kohl.

Victoria Cheah is a multi-disciplinary composer interested in boundaries, sustained energy, and social/performance rituals. Cheah has taught music, research, and writing related courses as an instructor at Longy School of Music, Brandeis University, and as a teaching fellow at Harvard University while completing her doctorate in music composition & theory at Brandeis University. She currently serves as the production manager of Talea Ensemble and a co-director of Score Follower.

Lautaro Mantilla is a guitarist, composer, and improviser from Bogota, Colombia. In his performances, he typically combines extended vocalization techniques, homebuilt electronics, and guitar to create music that is both viscerally affecting and conceptually rigorous. Based in Boston, Lautaro is active in the NY and Boston music scenes and is a faculty member of the Contemporary Improvisation department at NEC.

Jake Meginsky is an electronic musician, percussionist, composer, and filmmaker. He builds his own customized instruments and electronic circuitry, combining them with percussion, modular drum machines and sampling software. Constantly blurring the boundaries between acoustic and electronic, analogue and digital, Jake floats with similar ease between performing, composing, sound installation, and live scoring. Meginsky studied with percussion master Milford Graves and co-directed the documentary, Milford Graves Full Mantis.

Paulownia is an experimental zither trio. formed at New England Conservatory in 2021, their music explores improvisation, electroacoustics, noise, and tradition. The members include Yoona Kim, (ajaeng), a Boston and South Korea-based performer, composer, and improviser who creates music based on traditional aesthetics inherent in Korean music; Marie Caroll , a composer-improviser, electroacoustic musician, and koto player based in Boston; and Anweh Wang, who seeks new possibilities for the guzheng, a traditional Chinese instrument, through her understanding of world music.

Kelley Sheehan is a composer and computer musician whose work centers on noise, performance, and interaction. She’s an avid improviser on self-made DIY electronics, no-input mixer, her AI-electric guitar hybrid called ‘other machines,’ and/or modular. She’s a PhD Candidate in Composition at Harvard University studying with Chaya Czernowin and Hans Tutschku.

Saxophonist, singer, flutist and actor Stan Strickland has been a mainstay of the Boston jazz scene since the early 1970s, performing and recording here and internationally with musicians including Arthur Brooks, Rakalam Bob Moses, Yusef Lateef, and Pharoah Sanders. Stan is an associate professor of voice at Berklee College of Music and is the executive co-director of Express Yourself, a multicultural arts organization that serves mentally ill youth through the Department of Mental Health.

Tongue Depressor is the New Haven-based duo of Henry Birdsey (fiddle, lap steel) and Zach Rowden (fiddle, upright bass, electronics). They write, improvise, and perform music that draws from the fields of drone, harsh noise, and church music, often using microtonal tunings. Recent projects and releases include Burnish (XKatedral), Tilting Irons (Redscroll), and Volume 7 of their Fiddle Music series.