Vienna Teng
“I was in a long-distance relationship with music for many years,” jokes songwriter Vienna Teng. “Now we’re finally moving back in together.”Long-distance, perhaps, but long-running. In 2002, Vienna released her debut album Waking Hour, landing her on NPR’s Weekend Edition, The Late Show with David Letterman, and the top of Amazon’s music charts. Four more albums followed, most recently Aims in 2013, which became the first album to win four Independent Music Awards. She also composed the music for The Fourth Messenger by playwright Tanya Shaffer, which premiered in 2013 and was a featured production in the 2017 New York Musical Theater Festival. Together with Vienna’s captivating live performances and thoughtful online presence, her work has built a devoted following across generations and continents.Still, other pursuits have always beckoned. A computer science major before she was a recording artist, Vienna is a nerd at heart, as comfortable in spreadsheets as the spotlight. She returned to academia in 2010 to study environmental sustainability, which led to a new career working on climate change, energy and waste issues. She also became a bonus parent to her partner’s two kids, and in early 2020 welcomed a newborn addition to the family – just in time for pandemic lockdown.“I learned a lot about what it means to hold two truths in your head at the same time, as the saying goes,” Vienna says of that period. “The situation can be dire and full of possibility. Both kindness and fierceness are so very necessary.”She wondered: what if two songs, with seemingly contradictory perspectives, were written so they would “mash up” into a duet? The result is her song-pair “We’ve Got You”: one about serving as a beacon for one’s community, the other about leaning on that community in one’s darkest hour. It’s some of the most intricate and impassioned songwriting she’s ever done. When she performs it on stage – solo, live-looping her voice, keyboards and percussion to layer the two songs together – the audience response is electric. “And there are so many ways for songs to be in dialogue with each other,” she notes. “I’d love to keep exploring that idea…hopefully in dialogue with other creators, too.”Fittingly for a piece about reinvigoration and connection, “We’ve Got You” marks the start of a new chapter for Vienna, where her environmental and musical vocations converge. In 2022, she launched a “music x climate action” community on Patreon, combining monthly livestream shows and recording studio updates with Zoom climate action sessions, as well as working one-on-one with patrons on their own climate projects. On the road, she’s started hosting workshops between concerts, bringing members of her audience together to share knowledge and take real steps for climate – events that participants have described as “life-changing,” “rocket fuel,” and “the perfect antidote to despair.”The long-distance phase is over. Now it’s time for communion – and moving forward.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube
Devon Gilfillian
Growing up in Philadelphia on a steady diet of R&B, hip-hop, rock, blues, and soul music, Gilfillian gravitated to records that ignited his mind while making his body move. For him, listening to the towering icons of his musician father’s era—Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding, The Temptations—was just as formative and exciting as discovering the new sounds of his own generation, and the beats and rhymes made by rising rap stars like Wu-Tang Clan, Kanye West, Notorious B.I.G., and Jay-Z inspired him in new ways. He began to recognize a connective thread in the sounds he loved best: from the golden throwbacks sampled by the hip-hop beat makers to the raw, emotional vocal deliveries of the Motown greats, for Gilfillian the key ingredient seemed to be the “soul”—not simply the genre, but the feeling and vibe.Following his electrifying 2016 debut EP with upbeat singles like “High” and “Troublemaker” in 2018, Gilfillian signed to Capitol Records and hit the road––performing with the likes of Anderson East, Keith Urban, Gladys Knight, Kaleo, The Fray, Mavis Staples, and more. In early 2019, Gilfillian traveled to Africa to find healing and inspiration before headlining a tour in Scandinavia and opening for Brothers Osborne on their spring tour. His debut album, “Black Hole Rainbow,” is available now. In early 2020, Gilfillian embarked on a cross-country tour with Grace Potter. After COVID-19, Gilfillian redirected his energy to doing what he does best, making music. He re-recorded Marvin Gaye’s iconic album, “What’s Going On,” releasing it in fall of 2020 around the election. The project raised funds for low-income communities and communities of color, providing resources and education around the democratic process. In November 2020, Gilfillian released “Freedom,” with indie-rockers, Illiterate Light and his debut album, “Black Hole Rainbow,” was nominated for a Grammy – “Best Engineered Album.” In December 2020, Gilfillian performed his top 5 AAA hit, “The Good Life” on Jimmy Kimmel Live. He’s currently writing for LP#2. Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | TikTok
Dopapod
Dopapod access a heightened level of cosmic harmony in their music. The quartet—Eli Winderman [keys, vocals], Rob Compa [guitar, vocals], Chuck Jones [bass], and Neal “Fro” Evans [drums]—present albums as experiences meant to be shared out of your speakers and on stage. After generating millions of streams, packing shows coast-to-coast, and earning acclaim from Rolling Stone, Guitar World, Glide Magazine, and more, the group architect an immersive and expansive vision on their self-titled seventh full-length offering, Dopapod.The group’s hypnotic hybrid of funk, rock, jazz, bluegrass, and electronica bloomed brilliantly on 2009’s Radar, and it continued to blossom on the likes of Never Odd Or Even [2014] and Megagem [2017]. Along the way, fan favorites such as “Present Ghosts” reeled in 2.4 million Spotify streams and counting. 2019’s Emit Time arrived to acclaim from Guitar World, Relix, Glide, Jambase, and more. Simultaneously, they sold out headline gigs and graced the bills of Electric Forest, Summer Camp, High Sierra, and Bonaroo where Rolling Stone named them among the festival’s “best kept secrets.” After a marathon near-decade run, they enjoyed an almost year-long hiatus to realign and reenergize before reuniting with a new fire during 2019 and partaking in something of a “soft return.”After a brief hiatus to regroup and recharge their creative efforts, Dopapod assembled what would become their next album, the self-titled Dopapod, and looked at the loose threads of their catalog to conceptually tie their journey together. They chose to self-title their seventh offering as a totem to the fact they’ve realized their full potential in terms of music and vision. Tackling time travel, balance and symmetry, binary pairs and more, Dopapod’s palindromic existence continues to conjure alchemy nearly fifteen years into their journey.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
black midi
Five facts about black midi“We’d end up in a groove in the rehearsal room for 10 minutes, or an hour. We didn’t really notice time, or that we were supposed to be working.” One. black midi are: Geordie Greep (guitar, vocals), Cameron Picton (bass, vocals), and Morgan Simpson (drums).black midi’s studio albums are Schlagenheim (2019), Cavalcade (2021) and Hellfire (2022). Further recordings include standalone singles Cruising, 7-Eleven and track drops like ded sheeran (ed sheeran send). Other notable releases are Cavalcovers EP, black midi live in the USA and The black midi Anthology Volume 1 – Tales of Suspense and Revenge.Two. Coincidentally, Morgan and Geordie both played in church bands growing up – Morgan in Hertfordshire; Geordie in Walthamstow.Geordie discovered music through:Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Out on Guitar HeroHis dad’s prog rock, folk and hard rock albumsStravinsky’s Rite of Spring. “It’s hypnotic, like a car crash. You want to look away, but you can’t.”The first Star Wars filmThree. The band met at the BRIT School. Fellow pupils were… not in black midi. Geordie and Matt borrowed the name from a Japanese music genre where a MIDI file is stuffed with so many musical notes that its visual representation looks solid black. MIDI files do not contain sound.Four. After leaving school Cameron worked in the Wimbledon branch of stationery store Ryman. Geordie taught music. Morgan briefly toyed with the idea of becoming a professional footballer but eventually chose drumming, also teaching music.Five. black midi got their first gig two weeks after leaving school, in June 2017, at south London’s renowned Windmill venue. It led to a Windmill residency, and a publishing contract, and a record deal, a Mercury nomination for Schlagenheim, and you reading this.“They say, ‘what you’re doing should be bad, how come it’s not?!’”Some myths about black midiSix. black midi don’t expect, or want, you to take themselves or their music too seriously. black midi music can be exuberant, cathartic, theatrical, comic, absurdist, over-abundant, intense, cinematic, brutal, restlessly brilliant. It’s almost always fun.Six. None of black midi’s released music is entirely improvised. They did spend a long time jamming at the start, but would record the jams and select the best bits to replay as part of structured recordings. “It didn’t take as much time to record Schlagenheim as it does to listen to it. We wish it were true! We also say we should swap and play each other’s instruments, but we never get round to it.”Six. The BRIT School’s importance in the black midi story can also be overplayed. Yes, the school was where they met, and their generous facilities afforded the group time and space in their final year to experiment and rehearse until they had a better idea of what they could become. But the school didn’t force anyone to describe black midi as “the best new rock band in Britain”.“Geordie had a dream that we called the album Hellfire, he kept saying it all the time”‘Hellfire’ has long burned in black midi’s world. First, Geordie imagined it was the title of their debut album; Cavalcade was mostly recorded at Hellfire Studio, Dublin; then Cameron dreamed it should be the title of their third.Bandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Bayonne
Since his 2016 debut album Primitives, Bayonne has channeled his vast imagination into an elegant yet wildly experimental form of electronic pop, equal parts meditative and mesmerizing. In the making of his latest body of work, the Austin-based artist/producer/multi-instrumentalist otherwise known as Roger Sellers found himself in even greater need of an outlet for his kinetic creative impulses, thanks to an intense convergence of events in his personal life: his father’s diagnosis with and eventual death from cancer, the end of a significant relationship, and an overwhelming struggle with depression and anxiety. Deeply informed by a deliberate transformation of his musical process, Bayonne’s third full-length Temporary Time ultimately makes for his most expansive work to date—an album of both painfully raw introspection and otherworldly beauty.The follow-up to 2019’s Drastic Measures, Temporary Time intimately documents a period of psychic inertia experienced by Sellers in recent years. “The title of the record refers to that feeling of stagnancy that happens at certain moments in your life, where you’re not sure what the next move is and feel sort of stuck in limbo,” he explains. “I wrote these songs during a long stretch of self-development, mentally and emotionally and creatively, and in a way they’re like a diary of everything I was going through.” Although Sellers began working on Temporary Time in idyllic seclusion during a solo trip to West Texas, he soon immersed himself in close collaboration with a number of musicians and co-producers, including Danny Reisch (HAIM, Local Natives), Jon Joseph (BØRNS, Gothic Tropic), and longtime Bayonne drummer Matt Toman. Along with adding new depth and texture to Bayonne’s signature sound—an immaculately layered and looping-heavy collision of lush guitar tones, frenetic synth lines, organic percussion, and more—that shift in approach led to significant growth in his strengths as a songwriter and lyricist. “Because of everything I was dealing with, especially with my dad’s declining health, I ended up being much more thoughtful with the lyrical content than in previous records,” Sellers points out.Mixed by Sellers and Reisch, Temporary Time opens on the moody splendor of “Must Be True,” a piano-driven and quietly piercing breakup song that instantly sets the tone for the album’s dreamy contemplation. From there, Bayonne veers into the propulsive dark-pop of “Right Thing,” one of several tracks featuring ghostlike samples of audio lifted from his family home movies. “One of the last good times I had with my father was playing him that song and showing him where his voice comes in,” says Sellers, who describes “Right Thing” as a gloomy but upbeat reflection on uncertainty. “He was so excited to hear himself on the record, and that was a really meaningful moment for me.” Next, on “Is It Time,” Temporary Time drifts into a mood of lovely surrender—an effect achieved through the track’s hypnotic arrangement of soaring vocals, gorgeously sprawling textures, and Toman’s powerful full-kit drumming (an element Sellers lovingly refers to as “the best drums ever recorded”). “There’s a point in the middle of the song where it feels flying, which to me represents the idea of freeing yourself from anxiety,” he says. “It’s about allowing yourself to take a dive, and to stop worrying about what’s going to happen next.”Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Cosmic Rays Live AV
Six Seventy-Two Variations by Tomonari NishikawaThis is the second variation of the on-going 16mm film projector performance piece, “Six Seventy-Two Variations.” Nishikawa uses a wood carving knife to scratch off the photographic emulsion of the looped film and produces visual and sound as a live performance.Tomonari Nishikawa’s films explore the idea of documenting situations/phenomena through a chosen medium and technique, often focusing on process itself. His films have been screened at numerous film festivals and art venues, including Berlinale, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Singapore International Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival. In 2010, he presented a series of 8mm and 16mm films at MoMA P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and his film installation a, Building 945, received the 2008 Grant Award from the Museum of Contemporary Cinema in Spain. He served as a juror for the 2010 Ann Arbor Film Festival, the 2012 Big Muddy Film Festival, and the 2013 dresdner schmalfilmtage. He is one of the co-founders of KLEX: Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and Video Festival and Transient Visions: Festival of the Moving Image. He lives in Japan/USA, currently teaching in Cinema Department at Binghamton University.Prepared Desktop by Jon SatromJon Satrom’s Prepared Desktop leverages the digital defaults and mundane functions of our technologies. Scripts, presets, and glitches collide as he tickles the edges of his OS.Jon Satrom is an artist, educator, and organizer who problematizes old and new media structures, interfaces, and conventions. He is a kludge artist and a creative problem creator. By day, he fixes things, interviews folks, and creates digital tools at studiothread. By night, he breaks things in search of the unique blips inherent to the systems we use.Satrom performs realtime audio/video noise and new-media (often w/ XTAL FSCK, I PRESETS, & Magic Missile), develops artware (in partnership w/ PoxParty), and has co-programed and experimented with organizational and curatorial systems w/ dirty new-media && glitch comrades (including GLI.TC/H && r4wb1t5!.)He has performed, workshopped, and lectured across spaceship earth (at places like: STEIM, Amsterdam NL; musicacoustica, Beijing CN; transmediale, Berlin DE; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago US; Centro Multimedia, Mexico City MX; SXSW Interactive, Austin, TX US ).ΔV/ΔT by Jonas BersΔV/ΔT is an ongoing single-channel audiovisual composition performed entirely and exclusively in realtime, primarily with tools designed by the artist and built by hand.Pronounced “DELTA V, DELTA T”, ΔV/ΔT is the formula for acceleration — change in velocity divided by change in time.ΔV/ΔT is concerned with connections between the technological singularity, sensory perception and the physical universe; and phenomenological aspects of intense audiovisual stimulus.Jonas Bers is a New York based media artist working with hand-built and hacked audiovisual systems. Bers’ performances use salvaged scientific apparatus, VHS-era editing machines, surveillance equipment, and military surplus devices as tools to generate both sound and video in real-time.Bers has performed and exhibited at Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), The New Digital Art Biennale (Ghent), Vector Hack (Zagreb, Ljubljana), Hack’N’Act (Modena, Ferrara), La Lumière (Montreal), and in numerous NY cultural institutions, notably, The Film Society of Lincoln Center, La Mama, The Chashama Gala, and the Transient Visions Festival of the Moving Image.
Tay Tay Party – Taylor Swift Inspired DJ Dance Party
2 Hour Taylor Swift Inspired DJ Dance Party featuring merchandise raffles at the end including signed items.
NRBQ
NRBQ is Terry Adams, Scott Ligon, Casey McDonough, and John Perrin. “NRBQ”, which stands for New Rhythm and Blues Quartet, has often been called a national treasure, which may be why the band’s music has attracted legions of devoted fans worldwide, including Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Costello, Penn & Teller, Doc Pomus, R.E.M., SpongeBob SquarePants, Michael J. Pollard, Ian McLagan, Steve Earle, Drew Carey, and Nick Lowe, among many others. NRBQ songs have inspired cover versions by Bonnie Raitt, Los Lobos, Darlene Love, Dave Edmunds, She & Him, Widespread Panic, Yo La Tengo, and more.The group served as the unofficial “house band” for The Simpsons for Seasons 10-12. They appeared as zombies in George Romero’s movie Day of the Dead. They have appeared at the Berlin Jazz Festival, the Grand Ole Opry, and Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival. In their 50+ year career, NRBQ has released almost as many albums, including a series of critically acclaimed titles in the past decade, among them Keep This Love Goin’ (2011), Brass Tacks (2014), and the 5-disc, 50-year retrospective, High Noon (2016). Of the brand-new studio album Dragnet, released at the end of 2021, Bill Bentley in Americana Highways says, “They play with such startling and powerful simplicity, a style that must be earned and not learned,” while Uncut says, “[it’s] as though the history of 20th-century popular and unpopular music has gone through thorough, playful distillation.”Website | Facebook | Soundcloud
The Weight Band feat. Members of The Band & Levon Helm Band
This is a seated show.Performing original songs as well as classics of The Band, The Weight Band is led by Jim Weider, a 15-year former member of The Band and the Levon Helm Band. The Weight Band originated in 2013 inside the famed Woodstock barn of Levon Helm. Weider was inspired by Helm to carry on the musical legacy of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame group.On their new album, Shines Like Gold, The Weight Band presents a dynamic set of classic Americana that draws upon roadhouse rock, funky swamp pop, blues, country soul and folk music. Composed of band leader, renowned guitarist Jim Weider (The Band, Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble Band, Jim Weider Band), keyboardist Brian Mitchell (Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble Band), bassist Albert Rogers (Jim Weider Band, Jimmy Vivino), drummer Michael Bram (Jason Mraz) and keyboardist Matt Zeiner (Dickey Betts), the veteran quintet shares a deep appreciation and knowledge for this music, which Weider describes as the “Woodstock Sound.” The Weight Band continues to serve as its torchbearer, with Shines Like Gold representing a sublime example of these masterful roots musicians at work.The Weight Band recorded Shine Like Gold live at Clubhouse Studios in Rhinebeck, NY, over four days – with minimal rehearsal during the height of the pandemic in 2020. Producer Colin Linden, an award-winning musician and Weider’s longtime collaborator and co-writer on several of the album tracks, was in Nashville. The arrangement, however, worked out perfectly, according to Weider. “He had a big hand and footprint on this record. Weider added, “We go back, so there is a comfortableness working with him.”In 2017, The Weight Band performed on the PBS series Infinity Hall Live. The following year, their self-produced debut, World Gone Mad, was released to strong reviews. Billboard called it “excellent” while Goldmine Magazine hailed World Gone Mad as one of the year’s best indie albums. Most recently, the Weight Band put out Acoustic Live in 2021. This 11-track album features five songs recorded at the Big Pink on October 25, 2019, and six songs recorded the following night in Levon Helm’s barn/studio. Performances include memorable versions of “World Gone Mad,” Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited,” Jerry Garcia’s “Deal,” and several Band covers.The Weight Band’s origins are tied to Woodstock and some of its most famous inhabitants, The Band. Weider, a Woodstock native, served as The Band’s lead guitarist from 1985-2000, following Robbie Robertson’s departure. In the late 00s, he replaced Jimmy Vivino in the Levon Helm Band, which already included Mitchell. The connections extend further, as Rogers shared the stage with Helm and Hudson while in The Jim Weider Band and Bram drummed in the Chris O’Leary Band, an off-shoot of Helm’s band The Barnburners.Following Helm’s death in 2012, Weider performed a few “Songs of The Band” concerts, which included Vivino, Byron Isaacs, Randy Ciarlante and Garth Hudson. The shows were so well received that Weider started the first version of The Weight Band with Ciarlante, Isaacs, Mitchell, and keyboardist Marty Grebb. Over the next several years, the group shifted from playing mainly Band songs to their originals.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud
Joe Pug
A singer-songwriter known for his lyrical acumen and plaintive harmonica style, Joe Pug dropped out of college and moved to Chicago where he worked as a carpenter before breaking into the city’s music scene. Since 2008 he has released a string of critically-acclaimed albums and toured heavily in the U.S. and abroad. Paste Magazine wrote of his music: “Unless your surname is Dylan, Waits, Ritter or Prine, you could face-palm yourself to death trying to pen songs half as inspired”.He has toured with Steve Earle, Levon Helm, The Killers, Justin Townes Earle, Sturgill Simpson, and many others. He has appeared at Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo, and The Newport Folk Festival. His music has appeared on NPR’s “Prairie Home Companion” and “Mountain Stage”. His music has been released by Lightning Rod Records, which features an alumni roster of Jason Isbell, Billy Joe Shaver, and James McMurtry.Additionally, he is the creator and host of the popular podcast The Working Songwriter.Website | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
