This occasion marks the first Los Angeles concert of American gamelan composer Daniel Schmidt (b. 1942) in nearly 40 years. Schmidt was central to the development of American Gamelan music: the weaving of traditional Eastern gamelan music together with 20th Century minimalism. First emerging in the 1970s in the San Francisco Bay Area music scene, he notably studied and collaborated with composer Lou Harrison (1917-2003.) To realize his own compositions – and create new possibilities for others – Schmidt built several sets of gamelan instruments in the course of his career, including the Berkeley Gamelan.

In the past decade, the avant garde LA-based record label Recital has published three albums of Daniel Schmidt’s music, most notably the majestic In My Arms, Many Flowers. Featuring archival recordings from 1978 to 1982, the LP garnered critical praise and created a new legion of fans deeply moved and obsessed with Schmidt’s distinctive oeuvre.

This is the inaugural concert of the Berkeley Gamelan in its new home; Earlier this year Schmidt gifted the set of instruments to Recital's Sean McCann and composer Sarah Davachi, herself a former student of Schmidt. The pair intend to carry on its tradition here in Los Angeles.

A professor of gamelan and instrument building, Schmidt taught at Mills College for nearly 20 years. At 81 years old, Daniel is now retired, still composing and building gamelans in every idle hour. Schmidt will attend and introduce the concert.

In addition to several classic Schmidt compositions, new works for gamelan and electronics will be premiered by Sarah Davachi, Cordey Lopez, and Sean McCann.

A night of curious beauty and woven emotions hidden within resonating pieces of metal.

Photo of Deborah Schmidt by Daniel Schmidt, c.1982

On October 4th, Anthony Braxton joins Wolf Eyes’ Nate Young and John Olson in Los Angeles for an evening of epic collaboration

As the Wolf Eyes project itself now passes the quarter century mark, Nate Young and John Olson operate a duo, issuing their singular stew of noise, pulse, reedcraft, murmur, and snarl. Also core to their approach: creating novel contexts to collab with other key players across generations and idioms. To wit, within the past several years they have performed live with Marshall Allen, Kim Gordon, Raven Chacon, and Jaimie Branch, to name a few.

A multivalent creative force for over a half century, Anthony Braxton continues to experiment across genre lines and modes, as a composer, improvisor, educator, and thinker. On saxophone, Braxton has pushed past the boundaries of Jazz – from his groundbreaking solo recording ‘For Alto’, through his innovative work leading various small ensembles, and the highly intuitive playing he brings to unique meetings such as this.

This L.A. date is an auspicious one, though not a debut per se, as these players’ first (and last) encounter on stage went down in the mid-aughts. Come catch the slight return as these ever-curious artists unfurl as-yet-unheard trajectories of sound.

On Friday October 13th, Spanish sound-artist and composer Francisco López returns to L.A. after more than two decades, bringing an intense and immersive audio experience – VirtuAural Electro-Mechanics – to a blindfolded audience in the Theater at 2220 Arts + Archives.

Also, Irish audio-visual artist Barbara Ellison makes her L.A. debut with CyberSongs, a phantasmic, transhuman song cycle for human-like computer voices and computer-like patterns with human voice. And opening the evening is Hive Mind – the seismic, glacial analog devastations of Greh Holger.

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Internationally acclaimed for the intensity, richness, and astonishing audio detail of his live immersive performances, Spanish composer and audio-artist Francisco López has enthralled blindfolded audiences in darkened rooms worldwide for decades. Ceaselessly recording environments both natural and artificial, López has gathered a deep well of raw material ranging from rainforests to decidedly urban architectures.

VirtuAural Electro-Mechanics utilizes his original recordings of electro-mechanical systems and industrial environments: from food factories to manufacturing “white rooms,” from 18th-century automata to computers, from wood and wires to magnetism, from the microscopic to the monumental. Through a massive process of evolution, recombination, and spatialization of these materials, Lopez merges the “real” into a new breed of nonexistent, magnified, dramatically hyper-real machines. The pieces that Lopez constructs – and deftly diffuses in real-time and space – are decidedly not soundscapes but rather non-representational virtual worlds of sound: “not virtual reality but real virtuality.”


Irish artist and composer Barbara Ellison reveals a ghost in the machine within CyberSongs, her new work for live audio-video performance. Simultaneously using computer-generated text-to-speech voices and computer-like patterns with human voices alike, Ellison reveals how these tools and materials can give rise to an odd and fascinating musicality. Words, morphemes, phonemes, phrases and speech particles acquire constantly-shifting new aural meanings, and - through the intensive and extensive use of repetition – turn into the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic patterns of a transhuman song cycle.

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