Darcy James Argue
is the ringleader behind Secret Society, an 18-piece steampunk bigband that envisions an alternative musical history -- one in which the dance orchestras that ruled the Swing Era never went extinct, but continued to evolve with the times, remaining a vital part of the musical landscape straight through the present day. Argue’s compositions bring together “a big, broad musical vocabulary” (New York Times), one which invokes “Duke Ellington and minimalism and Tortoise and Funkadelic and Elliott Carter and much else besides melding into one floating, shifting, dodging music” (zoilus.com). Secret Society have performed at a variety of venues around NYC, including Le Poisson Rouge, the Jazz Gallery, the Living Theatre, Makor, Flux Factory, and the Bowery Poetry Club, and recently completed a tour of Eastern Canada. Argue’s awards and commissions include the Jazz Gallery’s Large Ensemble Commissioning Series, the BMI Charlie Parker Composition Prize/Manny Albam Commission, the SOCAN/IAJE Emerging Jazz Composer Award, the SOCAN Award for Composition, the Brooklyn Philharmonic Composer Mentorship Program, the Down Beat Student Music Award, and grants from Meet The Composer, the American Music Center, and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Oscar Bettison
is a composer whose work demonstrates a willingness to work within and outside the confines of concert music. He likes to work with what he calls "cinderella instruments," either by making percussion instruments (in the case of Junk) or by re-imagining other instruments (Krank, Cibola) as well as writing for instruments more common in rock music. More recent pieces have featured some electro-acoustic elements. His
latest work, O Death, is concerned with bringing all these strands together.
Catherine Bloom
is the nom de guerre of a computational neurobiologist currently completing her post-doc at the equally pseudonymous Fornier Institute.
Summer Block
has published essays, short fiction, and poetry in a variety of publications, including McSweeneys, Small Spiral Notebook, Tarpaulin Sky, DIAGRAM, the San Francisco Chronicle, Monkeybicycle, Stirring, ALARM, Identity Theory, and Rain Taxi. Find her work at www.summerblock.com.
Lauren Caldwell
gleefully thieves concepts from mathematics and the sciences and makes poems of the spoils. (She also collaborates with her computer, as both of them have unhealthy obsessions with Markov chains. They live in Chicago.) Her work has been published in DIAGRAM and diode.
Corey Dargel
has waged a gentle assault on the pop idiom: Deadpan and detached vocals reveal heartbreaking
intimacies, awkward and obtrusive drum patterns struggle against
fragile harmonies, vocals and music uneasily opposing each other as
songs stumble to their ends. Dargel has performed on bills with Joanna
Newsom, Final Fantasy (Owen Pallett), Grizzly Bear, Anti-Social Music,
Eve Beglarian, Phil Kline, Nico Muhly, William Brittelle, Margaret
Lancaster, and the American Composers Orchestra. His music-theater
piece about love and voluntary
amputation, Removable Parts, premiered in September 2007 at HERE
Arts Center in NYC and has been nominated for three NY Innovative
Theatre Awards, including Outstanding Solo Performance (Corey Dargel).
In the fall of 2008, New Amsterdam Records will release Dargel's
sophomore album, Other People's Love Songs. In 2009, Dargel
will be writing new pieces for voice and chamber ensemble,
commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), NOW
Ensemble, and Avian Music. Dargel has has performed as a vocalist in
works by composers Eve Beglarian, Nick Brooke, Pauline Oliveros, John
Cage, Phil Kline, Randall Woolf, Brenda Hutchinson, k. terumi
shorb, and Jenny Olivia Johnson. Dargel's writings about music have
been published in Time Out Chicago, ArtsJournal and
New Music Box. He has received awards and residencies from the
American Composers Forum, the American Music Center, the Jerome
Foundation, the Frederick Loewe Foundation, HERE Arts Center, the
MacDowell Colony, New Dramatists, and the Atlantic Center for the
Arts.
Aimee Delong
is twenty-seven. On bad days she feels like a fifty-five year old woman who is obsessed with Scrabble and crafts. Her writing has appeared in Word document, and various personal journals.
Sarah Dzida
is an editor and freelance writer in the greater Los Angeles area where she takes great pleasure in learning about new things. Her creative work has appeared in several creative writing collections. For more on Sarah, please visit: www.dthroughz.com.
Paul Fattaruso
is the author of Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf (Soft Skull Press). His poems have appeared in jubilat, Fence, Volt, Open City, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. He's currently a PhD candidate at the University of Denver.
Chris Forsythe
lives and works in Brooklyn. His work is mainly concerned with exploring the limits and usage of sound as music and the guitar as a sound-generating device. He is a founding member of psi. Other activities include the "small speakers" project Wrasses; a long running collaboration with Ernesto Diaz-Infante; the mysterious and rarely spotted quartet Phantom Limb & Bison; duo with Chris Heenan; and the civil twilight cover band Dirty Pool. He has performed in many corners of the US and Europe in all manner of venue. Also check out: www.evolvingear.com.
Christopher Fritton
is the Head of The Institute for the Advancement of Higher Histrionics, a division of the Performance Thanatology Research Society. He is also a member of BUFFFLUXUS, a group dedicated to the maintenance of ephemera. He lives, breathes, eats, sleeps, and edits the assembling Ferrum Wheel in Buffalo, NY.
Alyson Fox
makes things from paper, fabric, books, ceramics, thread, wallpaper, office supplies, photographs, old tattered things, new polished things, furniture, and cement. She has degrees in photography, sculpture, and installation art. She enjoys designing things for commercial ends and designing things for no end at all. Alyson is currently working on a series of drawings depicting strange half stories and invented family histories. She also just recently launched “ a small collection”, which is a line of sustainable clothing. Alyson lives and works in Austin Tx.
Cullen Goldblatt
is a poet and a translator living in New York. Some of his work has been previously published in the Cape Town-based Pan-African journal Chimurenga. His essay describing his process of researching Aafia Siddiqui's disappearance, and his writing of the resulting poem ("Night Music"), was published in Left Turn magazine in May 2007.
Rama Gottfried
comes from a family with a long history of involvement in the arts: from circus performers and abstract expressionist painters, to rock guitar players, interior decorators and Romanian gypsies. As a child he first studied Indian Bhajan style tabla and harmonium, and later orchestral percussion, turntables, guitar and dismantled electronics which he performs with currently. Interest in visual art and and theater gradually gave way to a holistic composition process.
Paul Griffiths
divides his time between Manorbier (Wales) and New York. Recent projects include A Concise History of Western Music (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and The General (words for music by Beethoven, commissioned by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montr?al, 2007). For more information visit www.disgwylfa.com.
Ben Greenman
is the writer, journalist and editor based in New York. He is the author the short story collections, Superbad and Superworse, and the novel, A Circle Is A Balloon and Compass Both. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, Zoetrope All Story, and Opium Magazine. His bi-monthly humor pieces appear on website, Gawker.
Judd Greenstein
was born and raised in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, where he began his compositional life by writing hip hop beats. He has received degrees from Williams College and the Yale School of Music, has been a Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and the Bang on a Can Summer Institute of Music, and was chosen as an Emerging Composer in last season's ZOOM: Composers Close Up series at Merkin Hall.
Judd's work has most recently been performed by the Seattle Chamber Players, as part of the Kyiv Music Festival in the Ukraine, by the University of Texas at Austin New Music Ensemble, and by cellist Jody Redhage and pianist David Hanlon, as part of the Yes Is a World Recital Series and at the 2006 Tribeca New Music Festival. He is currently working on commissions from Present Music, as part of their 25th Anniversary celebration, percussionist Sam Solomon, soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird, and the REWIND orchestra project, with Paul Haas, Anne-Akiko Meyers, Colin Jacobsen, and The Knights. Judd is the Artistic Director of NOW Ensemble, the co-Director of Free Speech Zone Productions, and is a doctoral Fellow in Composition and Taplin Scholar at Princeton University.
Jessica Grindstaff
is an artist based in New York.
Garth Risk Hallberg
is the author of A Field Guide to the North American Family. His writing has appeared most recently in Glimmer Train, Canteen, The Pinch, Slate, and in the anthology Best New American Voices 2008.
Case Q. Kerns and Eric D. Smith
carry out their experiments and collaborations in the state of Massachusetts. They serve as editors - at-large for the Blowfellow Institute and the Harmony Archives; these samples are excerpted from the upcoming book, The Blowfellow Institute for Practical Engineering, Project Report Volume 1. Further information on the book and the Institute can be found at www.blowfellow.org. Mr. Kerns and Mr. Smith began their work together as young school chums in Ithaca with a research project that involved tying birds' wings securely to their bodies to observe the behavioral changes that take place in species that spontaneously lose the ability to fly. Many of the birds ran off of cliffs, probably thinking they could still fly. But, they could not.
Ted Hearne
s a composer and performer in New York and Chicago. He is the artistic director of Yes is a World, a nonprofit organization working to promote peace and social change through new music, the resident conductor of New York's Red Light New Music, and the composer-in-residence of the Chicago Children's Choir. Recent performances of his music include premieres by Newspeak, and by Charleston's New Music Collective. This November, the Minnesota Orchestra will perform his rousing Patriot. Ted directed the premiere of David Lang's opera Anatomy Theatre and the UK production of The Carbon Copy Building, the Obie-winning comic book opera by Julia Wolfe, David Lang and Michael Gordon. He has worked with ICE, Ridge Theatre and Australia's Opera IHOS, conducted premieres by Beat Furrer, Fabien Levy, Anna Clyne and Jenny Olivia Johnson, and will be seen as music director of Michael Gordon's Lightning At Our Feet this December at BAM. He recently premiered the role of Justin in Jacob Cooper's mind-altering Timberbrit. Ted's newest album Katrina Ballads was digitally released on New Amsterdam in August 2008 in honor of the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Scored for 16 musicians and singers, the hour-long work is a genre-defying call to remembrance and homage to American music, featuring some of new music's finest performers.
Michael Hearst
has had stories published in such journals as Post Road, Parenthetical Note, McSweeney's, and In Our Own Words. He is also a founding member of the band One Ring Zero, which has released seven CDs, including their acclaimed lit-rock album, As Smart As We Are. Most recently, Hearst released a solo album called Songs For Ice Cream Trucks.
Monika Heidemann
is a fiercely independent, exhilaratingly eclectic artist trying to make
her way through a sea of bland, single genre performers. Her critically acclaimed 2006 indie debut Bright,
which was chosen one of the Top Ten albums of the year by the
Boston Phoenix, earned her praise from many corners of the
indie music community, but she has long preferred to think
compositionally in forms and shapes rather than styles. Plus, she's
always evolving, always digging deeper into her upbringing that also
included folk and classical music. All of which brings us to
Disguised As Umbrella, We Slept, her latest project, to be
released in September, a collection of tracks we can tentatively call
bizarre rock. Or avant-garde rock. Even dreamy psychedelic avant rock
with jazz fringes. Someone once described the sensation of listening
to Heidemann's music as being perched on a high cliff at a perfect
angle of repose, where the fall is visible but not inevitable, sitting
just outside of dissonance, barely safe from chaos.
James Iredell
lives in Atlanta and designs books for C&R Press. He was a founding editor of New South. His chapbook, When I Moved to Nevada, is forthcoming from The Greying Ghost Press. Other writing has appeared in many magazines, including elimae, SUB-LIT, Lamination Colony, The Chattahoochee Review, The Literary Review, and Descant, among others.
Jac Jemc
writes, sells books and makes monsters in Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Sleepingfish, A Handsome Journal, Bird Dog, Circumference, Tarpaulin Sky, Zoland Poetry, 5_trope, No Posit, The Denver Quarterly, Lark Magazine, Prick of the Spindle and elimae. She completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. You can view a blog of her recent rejections at jacjemc.wordpress.com.
David Lang
fuses the tradition of classical music with urban aggressiveness, where melodies are accompanied by noise and subtle harmonies are pulled apart by pounding rhythms. He has been commissioned by such organizations as the Santa Fe Opera, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the BBC Singers, the Netherlands Wind Ensemble, and the American Composers Orchestra. His works are performed with regularity throughout the world by such organizations as the Kronos Quartet, the New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; at Tanglewood, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Almeida, Holland, Berlin and Huddersfield Festivals; in theater productions in New York, San Francisco and London; in the choreography of Twyla Tharp and Margaret Jenkins; and at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and the South Bank Center.
Recent projects include the dark and meditative amplified orchestra piece The Passing Measures; Writing on Water for the London Sinfonietta, with visuals by English filmmaker Peter Greenaway; Shelter for trio medaeival and musikFabrik, with co-composers Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe; The Difficulty of Crossing a Field - an opera for the Kronos Quartet; Grind to a Halt for the San Francisco Symphony; World to Come, a commission for cellist Maya Beiser from Carnegie Hall, and loud love songs, a concerto for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie and orchestra. Lang is co-founder and co-artistic director of Bang on a Can, an organization dedicated to adventurous new music, with presentations in New York and around the world. His work is recorded on Sony Classical, Argo/Decca, CRI, and Cantaloupe.
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Paul Lansky
is one of the most prominent and accessible of modern American composers. Until the mid-1990s, the bulk of Lansky’s work was in computer music and he has long been recognized as one of the pioneers in the field, developing computer music languages for algorithmic composition in addition to his own music. During the mid-1990s he began to turn more intensively toward the writing of instrumental music, using a fresh approach toward tonality and harmony that references musical traditions of various kinds, from Machaut to Stravinsky. In 2002 he was the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from SEAMUS (the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States) and in 2000 he was the subject of a documentary made for European Television’s ARTE network, My Cinema for the Ears, directed by Uli Aumueller (now available on DVD). He has received awards and commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim, Koussevitsky and Fromm Foundations, Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest, ASCAP and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. His music is well-represented on recordings (including eleven all-Lansky albums on Bridge Records) and is performed and broadcast widely throughout the world. Currently at work on a double piano concerto for Quattro Mani and the Alabama Symphony, Lansky has been on the faculty at Princeton University since 1969, where he is now William Shubael Conant Professor of Music.
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Rebecca Layton
is a Brooklyn-based fine artist whose work encompasses drawing, textile design, wallpaper, and architecture. She has apprenticed at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, and studied textiles in India, London, and New York. For more information, please visit www.rebeccalayton.net.
Andrew McKenna Lee
began his musical studies on the guitar at age twelve, going on to pursue composition in his late teens. His music has been performed by such ensembles as the Brentano String Quartet, ensemble ereprijs, the New Jersey Symphony, Kroumata, and eighth blackbird. As a guitarist, he has performed in New York's Symphony Space, BAM Cafe, Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, Princeton University's Richardson Auditorium, the Royal University College of Music in Stockholm, The Annenberg Center in Philadelphia, and in conjunction with the Aspen Music Festival. An upcoming CD release on the New Amsterdam Records label will feature Lee's own performances of solo and chamber works for nylon string and electric guitar.
Patrick Leonard
attends the MFA Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives in Houston, TX. He has one wife and one son. Read more of his work here.
David T. Little
is a two-time BMI Student Composer Award Winner (2002 for hope in the proles and 2004 for Piano Trio). Little’s composition Screamer! was chosen by Maestro David Zinman as the winner of the 2004 Jacob Druckman Award for Orchestral Composition from the Aspen Music Festival, where Little was a Schumann Fellow during the summer of 2003. He is a 2003 recipient of the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and served as the 2001 ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Fellow in Composition at the Tanglewood Music Center. Awarded the 2004 Harvey Gaul Composition Prize from the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Little was most recently awarded a 2006 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award for his Red Scare Sketchbook. Currently a Ph.D candidate at Princeton University, Little is the founder and artistic director of The Newspeak Ensemble and co-founder/co-director of Free Speech Zone Productions.
Gary Lucas
is a world class guitarist, a Grammy-nominated songwriter, an international recording artist with over a dozen acclaimed solo albums to date, and a soundtrack composer for film and television. He has been hailed as "The Thinking Man's Guitar Hero" by The New Yorker, "the legendary leftfield guitarist" by The Guardian, "Guitarist of 1000 Ideas" by The New York Times, and "a true axe God" by Melody Maker. The British world music magazine Roots described Lucas as "without question, the most innovative and challenging guitarist playing today," and Rolling Stone called him "one of the best and most original guitarists in America." A past collaborator with Jeff Buckley and members of Captain Beefheart, Lucas currently tours and records both solo and with several different ensembles, including his longtime band Gods and Monsters.
Steven. Mackey
was born in 1956. His first musical passion was playing the electric guitar in rock bands based in northern California. He later discovered concert music and has composed for orchestras, chamber ensembles, dance and opera. Since the mid 1980's he has resumed his interest in the electric guitar and regularly performs his own work, including two concertos as well as numerous solo and chamber works. Mackey is Professor of Music at Princeton University where he teaches composition, theory, twentieth century music, improvisation and a variety of special topics.
Joseph Mattson
was, for years, a rambler, playing in punk rock bands and working as a farmer, dishwasher, short-order cook, health care worker for developmentally disabled adults and the clinically mentally ill, and too much more. His fiction and poetry has been published in the Chiron Review, Two Letters, Slipstream,, the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, the Lummox Journal, the One Paycheck Away Anthology, and others. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
Missy Mazzoli
weaves hypnotic textures and nostalgic melodies intoevocative and unpredictable musical landscapes. She writes for everything
from (intentionally) out-of-tune guitars, wheezing melodicas and pulsing
electronics to orchestras and string quartets. Upcoming projects include
performances of her work by the Minnesota Orchestra, the Albany Symphony and
pianist Kathy Supove, as well as the creation of a new multi-media work with
New York-based NOW Ensemble.
Seth Monahan
is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale, where he studies and teaches music theory and analysis. Excerpts from his dissertation on Mahler will appear in the forthcoming issue of Nineteenth Century Music. He recently pinched a nerve from excessive pull-ups.
Nico Muhly
graduated from Columbia University in 2003 with a degree in English Literature, and graduated in 2004 with a Masters in Music from the Juilliard School for composition, where he studied with Christopher Rouse & John Corigliano. In 2004, he orchestrated the movie The Manchurian Candidate for composer Rachel Portman, and played on Björk's album Medülla. He has collaborated with Antony, of Antony and the Johnsons, and composed a series of nine songs, in collaboration with illustrator Maira Kalman, based on Strunk & White's The Elements of Style. For the past six years, Muhly has worked extensively with Philip Glass as an editor and keyboard player for numerous stage works & film scores.
Erik Niemi
spent his formative years in Portland, OR, and to this day enjoys the rain. After over seven years of study and travel, he achieved a degree in English Literature from Portland State University. In 2002 he earned an MFA in Visual Arts from UNC-Chapel Hill, and worked for four years as an Assistant Professor of Art at St. Augustine's College in Raleigh, NC. He now lives in New York City and makes a mean guacamole.
Nick Peterson
graduated from California Institute of the Arts where he studied experimental film and the art of stop-motion animation. Peterson worked on first ever stop-motion IMAX film "MORE," which was nominated for a 1998 Academy Award® for Best Animated Short Film. He has since made several short films which have collectively played in over 40 festivals worldwide. Peterson's first feature length film, Intellectual Property, starring Christopher Masterson ("Malcolm in the Middle") has recently been completed. Peterson currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son.
Helen Phillips
teaches literature and creative writing at Brooklyn College. Her work has appeared in the Yale Literary Magazine, the L Magazine and the Brooklyn Review. She lives in Brooklyn.
Pedro Ponce
teaches fiction writing, contemporary American literature, and literary theory at St. Lawrence University. His fiction has appeared recently in Sleeping Fish, Caketrain, Redivider, and Small Spiral Notebook.
Buzz Poole
is the managing editor for Mark Batty Publisher. He has written about books, art and music for an array of outlets, including the Village Voice, PRINT, Swindle, The Believer and The Millions. He is the author of Madonna of the Toast, a look at the unexpected visual manifestations of religious and secular icons. Keep up with his adventures in surprising iconography at www.madonnaofthetoast.blogspot.com.
Mike Pride
was born and raised in the Portland, Maine area. He has been playing and composing music since he was a child. Pride studied with Les Harris, Jr., Bill Street & Matt Wilson, performed with legendary composer & jazz educator David Baker, was involved with experimental, shock-rockers Ned Muffleburger and the DSL's, and co-lead the new music ensemble IMAGINARY QUARTET with guitarist/composer Stik Fortier. Pride moved to New York City in the year 2000 where he studied briefly with drum & bass master, Amir Ziv. Mike then began studying with the legendary percussionist/healer/teacher, Professor, Milford Graves.
Alec K. Redfearn
is a composer and performer living in Providence, Rhode Island. While he is fond of Kurt Weill and Shostakovich, he secretly prefers Slayer.
Rick Reid
asks you pin this page to another page till taut.
Nicole Reinert
has recently been published in Nerve Lantern, The Ledge Magazine, and Phoebe: a Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Theory and Aesthetics. In June of 2006, she was awarded a grant from the Rhode Island Council of the Arts. She has been living with Chronic Fatigue Immune Deficiency Syndrome for ten years.
Tom Roberge
is the Managing Editor at A Public Space. He insists that you rent Funny Games before the American remake is released next year.
Sara Rosenbaum
is a staff reporter for the St. Petersburg Times in Florida and in her spare time illustrates comics. She totally has a boyfriend.
Sam Sadigursky
is a saxaphonist and multi-reedist who has played and recorded with artists as diverse as Ray Brown and Brad Mehldau. He is the winner of the ASCAP Young Jazz Composer Award, the NFAA/IAJE Clifford Brown/Stan Getz Fellowship, and the John Coltrane Young Artist Award. Currently residing in Brooklyn, New York, he performs in many top jazz and world music venues, Broadway pits and has toured the U.S., Europe, Canada, and Japan. He has also played in the Monterey, JVC, Aspen, Ravinia, and CMJ festivals and is featured on saxophone and flute on the score to the film Seeing Other People, starring Jay Mohr and Julianne Nicholson and directed by famed Simpsons writer Wally Wolodarsky. As a composer, he has been commissioned by vocal groups, film directors, and has collaborated with modern dance choreographers in live performance of their works. He can be heard in New York with the Mingus Orchestra, Gabe Kahane, Lucia Pulido, Edmar Castaneda, Folklore Urbano, La Cumbiamba e Neye, and others. In 2007, a collection of his vocal compositions based on poetry, entitled The Words Project, was released to critical acclaim on New Amsterdam Records, hailed as “an impressive debut” by the New York Times and given a four star review in Time Out New York. Noted music critic Steve Smith called it “that rare anomaly: a jazz-and-poetry record that sounds utterly natural and convincing.” Sadigursky has also appears as a sideman on numerous recordings for labels such as Fresh Sound/New Talent, Playscape Recordings, Chonta Records, and World Culture Music. For more information, visit www.samsadigursky.com.
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Kamala Sankaram
has written music for concert, theater
and film. She is currently bandleader and composer for the multi-media
ensemble, Squeezebox. Her multi-media song cycle "Noir" was featured as
part of the Composer's Collaborative Serial Underground Series. Her
most recent song cycle, "Bloodletting" was chosen for the Music with a
View series at the Flea Theater and featured as part of Spaceworks at
the Tank. She composed the score for Signe Baumane's award-winning
short film "Dentist". She is currently an artist-in-residence with the
Flexible Orchestra, commissioned to write a symphony for 12 flutes.
Kamala was featured in the article "More Song, Less Art(ifice): The
New Breed of Art Song" in New Music Box magazine. As a singer and
multi-instrumentalist, Kamala Sankaram has collaborated with artists
as diverse as the Philip Glass Ensemble (Einstein on the Beach), the
Wooster Group (La Didone), Dan Zanes and Friends, Phil Kline, and Eve
Beglarian, among others. She is featured as a singer on Around the
World in a Daze, available from Starkland Records, and as a sitar
player on The Sick Generation, from Hymen Records. Upcoming, she'll
reprise her roles as Juno, Anna, and Ascanius with the Wooster Group,
and will create the role of Ming Song in Fred Ho's new opera Mr.
Mystery: The Return of Sun Ra to Save the Earth!
Jeremy Schmall
edits The Agriculture Reader and is the author of a chapbook, Underneath an Obnoxious Moon, and an artist book, The Slapdown. His poems have been in Juked, Pilot Poetry, and Forklift, OH: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, and Light Industrial Safety. He lives in Brooklyn.
Ben Segal
is the author of '78 Stories' (No Record Press, 2008), a series of interlinked short stories in the form of a crossword puzzle and printed on a single large sheet of paper. His short work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in elimae, Pequin, Acappella Zoo, and several other magazines. He also maintains a blog at www.butttub.wordpress.com, helps run the Leisure Class Records label, and can be contacted at benbensegal@gmail.com. He's moving to Philadelphia and would like to hang out.
Brian Selznick
sold books and painted windows at a children's bookstore in New York City after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design. This became his education in children's books and his first book, The Houdini Box (1991), was published while he was still working at the bookstore. His book The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins (Scholastic, 2001) was named a 2002 Caldecott Honor Book and his most recent book is The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic, 2007). Mr. Selznick lives in Brooklyn, New York and San Diego, California.
Skip Shirey
grew up in Athens County, Ohio, where he listened to old-time and Appalachian gospel music with his grandmother on Sundays, and dreamed of becoming a folk musician. Then one day he stuck paper clips on his guitar-strings and they bonged like gamelan bells. That was the beginning of Sxip's journey into his own unique music, evoked on a variety of traditional and re-imagined instruments, such as Mutant Harmonicas, the Industrial Flute, and the Obnoxiophone. He has appeared as a solo artist in NYC at Joe's Pub, the Knitting Factory, Washington Square Church, HERE Theaters, and numerous underground parties, as well as at the Odeon in San Francisco.
Sxip's Romanian-gypsy-tango-klezmer-hip-hop-punk quintet The Luminescent Orchestrii features three violins, a big Mexican bass and resophonic guitar. They have already completed tours of the US and Eastern Europe last year and are returning to Europe this summer.
Scott Schrader
lives in Bodfish, California. His work has appeared in The Advocate, Glimmer Train, The Wisconsin Review, and The Gettysburg Review. He is at work on his second novel.
Douglas Singleton
is a contributing writer for The Brooklyn Rail and Nat Creole. He has written for New York Foundation for the Arts Current, Focus, Independent Film & Video, L Magazine, as well as on-air reviews for WNYC and WBAI radio. A staged script reading of his theater piece Kurnst Soul Folk was presented at 65 Hope Street Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2004. He is currently working on a film script and co-adapting a new translation of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. Douglas curates journals and magazines for McNally Robinson Booksellers in Soho. His website, www.dispactke.com, features photography, prose, and multi-media.
James Sizemore
has provided his sound production services to a wide variety of international artists such as legendary Jazz musician Branford Marsalis, pop sensation Maroon 5, and Hip-Hop pioneers Wu-Tang Clan. He holds a Masters degree in Music from NYU and has studied composition and orchestration from Justin Dello-Joio, orchestrator Sonny Kompanek, and film composer, Ira Newborn. He has also worked and studied with American composer Philip Glass. Sizemore's works for orchestra have been performed by members of the Colorado Springs Symphony and at The Lincoln Center in New York City, where they received great acclaim. Sizemore has also released albums of abstract electronic music, solo piano, and other styles. He currently lives in New York City where he continues to work as a composer and an audio engineer while also teaching courses in Music Production and Sound for Multimedia at NYU and the CUNY College of Technology.
Tim Sparks
is an American acoustic guitar virtuoso and composer. Raised in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he was given his first guitar when a bout of encephalitis kept him out of school for a year. He grew up playing traditional country blues, jazz, and gospel, studied classical guitar at the North Carolina School of the Arts, and later immersed himself in the study of various ethnic musical styles including Greek, Klezmer, Portuguese, and Russian folk. In 2000, Sparks came to the attention of American composer John Zorn, an association which inspired him to create a cycle of compositions based on traditional Jewish melodies. He recorded three highly acclaimed CDs of Jewish Klezmer music adapted for acoustic fingerstyle guitar on Zorn's Tzadik Records label. Sparks continues to perform in concert and is currently a faculty member at the University of Minnesota—Morris.
Greg Spears
writes concert music that combines elements of early
music, nineteenth-century romanticism, minimalism and ambient music.
He uses memory and process to create elegiac landscapes inspired by
the collapsing monumentality of Gustav Mahler, and the entropic
structures of Morton Feldman. His music has been described by the
Philadelphia Inquirer as "remarkable" and "a glistening sonic soup."
The New York Times called Eighth Blackbird's account of his piece
Soar-Stop "scintillating" and the Yale Daily News has called his
music "truly memorable...a rare and rewarding experience."
David Stromberg
was born in Ashdod, Israel, and at the age of nine moved to downtown Los Angeles. He holds a BS in Mathematics from UCLA, and an MFA in Critical Writing from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). His publications include three collections of cartoons, Saddies (www.saddies.com), Confusies, and Desperaddies; and fiction excerpts in Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture (www.zeek.net) and Ambit (http://www.ambitmagazine.co.uk/). He lives in New York City.
Glenn Thomas
was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1944. He lived in Essex County, the same as Paul Auster. Thomas lived in the town of Irvington, a place Auster refers to in one of his books as "a crummy little town in N.J."
After realizing he wanted to be an artist, Thomas applied to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) in 1962, where he was accepted. The teacher Hobson Pitman often spoke of Europe's cache of art treasures, so in 1964 Thomas caught a freighter and traveled for 3 months, going from Paris to Rome. Thomas considers this trip one of the most important periods of his art studies; it was also when he realized that he wanted to live in Europe.
While at PAFA, Thomas attended a Karlheinz Stockhausen lecture and tape concert, which eventually led him to becoming friendly with Stockhausen and his wife, the artist Mary Bauermeister. From 1965 to 1970 Thomas had a studio in Philadelphia, working and having occasional shows. In 1970 he left for Europe with all of his belongings, initially staying in Germany with Bauermeister, who helped sell the work he had brought along. Thomas later moved to Amsterdam, where he has been ever since. His work has been shown internationally.
Adam Thompson
is an artist and art critic who lives and works in Brooklyn.
He exhibits annually at a Massachussetts gallery and has participated in
various group exhibitions in New York City. His art reviews appear
regularly in Art Papers Magazine and Flavorpill.
Jason Treuting
performs with SO Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, Alligator Eats Fish, D.E.R.T., neitherMusic, and QQQ. He also improvises with composer/performer Cenk Ergun and in a duo setting with composer/guitarist Steve Mackey. His compositions are featured on So’s latest album Amid the Noise from Cantaloupe Music. Treuting received his Bachelor in Music at the Eastman School of Music where he studied percussion with John Beck and drum set and improvisation with Ralph Alessi, Michael Cain and Steve Gadd. He received his Master in Music along with an Artist Diploma from Yale University where he studied percussion with Robert Van Sice. He has also traveled to Japan to study marimba with Keiko Abe and Bali to study gamelan with Pac I Nyoman Suadin.
Gabriel Judet-Weinshel
has had his films and music videos have screened at many festivals in the US, as well as in a few random countries like Egypt, Hungary, and Croatia (these countries did not fly him there, so he had to take their word for it that the movies actually played). Nickelodeon, the Trio Network, FOX, CMT, and MTV have also shown his work, to his dismay. He had the terrifying experience of directing Martin Scorsese in a short piece giving tribute to actor Victor Argo that screened at Lincoln Center. When he's totally out of money, Judet-Weinshel juggles machetes and fruit at the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park – that is if the tumblers aren't there first
Brian Willems
is an American teaching literature at the University of Split, Croatia. He has been or will be published in The Antioch Review, Identity Theory, Milk Magazine, Eyeshot, Pindeldyboz, 42opus, Opium, Salzburg Poetry Review, Prague Literary Review, Things Magazine, Science Creative Quarterly, Yankee Pot Roast, Uber and others. He is currently finishing a book on Heidegger and Gerard Manley Hopkins and revising a novel.
Matvei Yankelevich
edited and translated Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings Of Daniil Kharms (Overlook, 2007). He is a co-translator of Oberiu: An Anthology Of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern, 2006). His translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem "A Cloud in Pants" is included in Night Wraps The Sky: Writings By And About Mayakovsky (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008). His writing has appeared in various literary journals, and his long poem, The Present Work, is a chapbook available from Palm Press. He teaches Russian Literature at Hunter College in NYC and serves as an editor at Ugly Duckling Press in Brooklyn.
