Tonight performers show off their deep research into experimental music. Jess Keyes brings her project Patien(t/ce), for voice and eurorack synth with handmade wearable controllers. She uses two home-engineered sensor gloves to manipulate her voice in real-time. Khristian Weeks will be improvising on found open-circuitry with a contact mic and objects. Stalwart arts advocate Adam Holofcener will perform with Philadelphia musician Sam Wenc.
Jess Keyes is a Baltimore-based performer and composer exploring interdisciplinary music-making, ecstatic energy, and communion with the audience. She is a recipient of a 2024 Rubys Artist Award for her project Patien(t/ce), which explores the experience of chronic illness and disability through music for voice and synthesizer with wearable handmade controllers. Jess leads a 12-piece punk brass band called Bedlam Brass and co-organizes Mid-Atlantic Wilderness, a series of experimental improvised music. jesskeyes.com
Khristian Weeks is an artist, composer and improviser living in Baltimore. His activities deal in various phenomena-sound, light/shadow, environment, movement, situation, behavior.
Sam Wenc is a composer, improviser, and interdisciplinary artist working with sound, text, performance and installation. Wenc has released music on Longform Editions, Where to Now, Moone Records, Noumenal Loom, Sweet Wreath, and Obsolete Staircases. He has performed throughout the US, Canada, and Peru. He’s been artist-in-residence at Elektronmusikstudion EMS (Stockholm, Sweden) and Art OMI (Ghent, NY). In 2022, he composed the score for artist Sophia Giovannitti’s short film “A Monopoly of Violence” presented at Duplex Gallery NYC. He co-founded Lobby Art Editions, a record label aimed at crafting sincere and thoughtful releases with a delicate eye towards design, packaging, and outreach.
Adam G Holofcener (AGH, He/They) is a composer and performer from Baltimore, MD, USA. Their work ebbs and flows between digital and analog efforts with an emphasis on a synergistic interplay between the two: one informing the other, literally and otherwise, ad infinitum. The theoretical underpinnings for their work come from a variety of sources but have focused as of late on interventions via what they are calling Prefigurative Musics. By making collective works that anticipate imaginaries of better tomorrows, AGH hopes to contribute to the phantom zhuzh of the electorate that has the whole darn body politic stumble toward their collective embrace of a world they deserve to steward. Here’s hoping! They are a proud member of the collective known as MOWDER OYAL.