Lea Bertucci + Ben Vida + Ric Royer / Charmaine Lee / Wendy Eisenberg

An artist, composer and performer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her longstanding practice with woodwind instruments, her work incorporates multichannel speaker arrays, radical methods of free improvisation and creative misuses of audio technology applied to field recording and sampling/collage techniques. In recent years, her projects have expanded toward site-specific and site-responsive sonic investigations of architecture and acoustics, most notably in 2018’s Acoustic Shadows, a suite of compositions and sound installation that took place as part of the Bruckenmusik Festival, inside the hollow body of the Deutzer bridge in Koln Germany. Her autodidactic and idiosyncratic approach to music is marked by dense masses of sustained dissonance and a fascination with the sonic substance of common experience through eccentric methods of field recording and collage. Tape manipulation and other creative recording techniques push the limits of the recorded medium to elicit a visceral sonic and emotional experience from the listener. 

He holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Bard College. As an artist and composer, he has been an active member of the international experimental music community for two decades with a long list of collaborators, projects and releases to his credit. Vida has performed as a musician in several bands since the mid 1990s. He co-founded the minimalist quartet Town & Country and continued to perform as a guitarist and trumpeter for the band. Vida was also a member of Pillow and Terminal 4 and recorded and performed solo as Bird Show and in the Drag City band Singer. In addition to his musical endeavors, Vida has exhibited his work as a contemporary artist in recent years. His work has been performed and presented in New York at the Guggenheim, Audio Visual Arts, and The Artist’s Institute; in London at The Institute of Contemporary Art and The Royal Festival Hall as part of the Meltdown Festival; in Chicago at The Museum of Contemporary Art; and other locations such as the Sydney Opera House, Leap Gallery, Berlin, and Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. 

Ric Royer writes stories mordant and morbid, stages plays of absurd wonder, and sings songs of hope and disaster. A song and dance man of the avant-vaude, Royer is the founder and artistic director of Psychic Readings Co, a performance collective that has entertained, frightened and confused audiences with their interdisciplinary hysterics since 1999. He is also a curator at Model City Books. Ric studied theatre and writing at University of Buffalo, and Towson University, and Dartington College of Art and Brown University.

A New York-based vocalist from Sydney, Australia. Her music is predominantly improvised, favoring a uniquely personal approach to vocal expression concerned with spontaneity, playfulness, and risk-taking. Beyond extended vocal technique, Charmaine uses amplification, feedback, and microphones to augment and distort the voice. She has performed with leading improvisers id m theft able, Ikue Mori, Sam Pluta, Tyshawn Sorey, Nate Wooley, and C. Spencer Yeh, and maintains ongoing collaborations with Conrad Tao, Victoria Shen, Zach Rowden, and Eric Wubbels. Charmaine has performed at ISSUE Project Room, the Kitchen, Roulette, The Poetry Project, and MoMA PS1, and participated in festivals including Resonant Bodies, Huddersfield Contemporary, and Ende Tymes. She has been featured in group exhibitions including The Moon Represents My Heart: Music, Memory and Belonging at the Museum of Chinese in America (2019). As a composer, Charmaine has been commissioned by the Wet Ink Ensemble (2018) and Spektral Quartet (2018). In 2019, she was an Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room, and is a current 2021 Van Lier Fellow at Roulette. Charmaine is currently a member of the Editorial Board of Sound American.

An improviser and songwriter who uses guitar, pedals, the tenor banjo, the computer, the synthesizer and the voice. Their work spans genres, from jazz to noise to avant-rock to delicate songs; their performances span venues, from international festivals to intimate basements. Though often working solo as both a songwriter and improviser, with acclaimed releases on Tzadik, VDSQ, Out of your Head, and Garden Portal, they also perform in the rock band Editrix, and in endless other combinations of their heroes and peers including Allison Miller, Carla Kihlstedt, John Zorn, Billy Martin, and Caroline Davis. They are also a writer on music and other things, with published essays on music in Sound American, Arcana, and the Contemporary Music Review.