Waterworks 2023 – A Festival of Experimental Sound (April 27, 28, & 29)
Poster by Joe Bastardo
Non-Event and the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum present
Waterworks 2023 – Festival of Experimental Sound
Thursday, April 27, 2023 | Doors at 7:30pm, music at 8pm
friday, April 28, 2023 | Doors at 7:30pm, music at 8pm
Saturday, April 29, 2023 | Doors at 7:30pm, music at 8pm
Metropolitan Waterworks Museum
2450 Beacon Street, Boston
Doors: 7:30pm, Music: 8pm
Tickets: $20 gen admission | $50 festival pass for all three days | $10/night for students + Non-Event members
Advanced tickets on sale now
There is limited parking at the museum. Please use the T (Reservoir or Cleveland Circle stops on the Green line), if possible!
Please note: masks are strongly encouraged
Non-Event is pleased to present three nights of experimental music in the extraordinary acoustics of the Great Engines Hall of the Waterworks Museum. Each night features three sets of music.
Night One: Thursday, April 27
Luke Stewart
Greg Kelley
Rhea
Night Two: Friday, April 28
Claire Rousay
Retribution Body
Staubitz and Waterhouse
Night Three: Saturday, April 29
Charmaine Lee
Asha Tamirisa
Joe Bastardo
About the artists
Asha Tamirisa [she/her/hers] is an intermedia artist and researcher. She primarily works with sound and video in performance and installation. Asha holds a Ph.D. in Computer Music and Multimedia and an M.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and is currently an Assistant Professor at Bates College.
Charmaine Lee is 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, Sam Pluta, Tyshawn Sorey, Nate Wooley, and C. Spencer Yeh, and maintains ongoing collaborations with Ikue Mori, Conrad Tao, Victoria Shen, and Eric Wubbels.
Claire Rousay is a musician based in Los Angeles. Her music zeroes in on personal emotions and the minutiae of everyday life – voicemails, haptics, environmental recordings, stopwatches, whispers and conversations – exploding their significance. She has released recordings on labels such as Shelter Press, Orange Milk Records, Takuroku, and her own Mended Dreams label.
Greg Kelley is a Medford-based trumpet player and musician, who has performed throughout North America, Europe, Japan, Argentina & Mexico at numerous festivals, in clubs, outdoors, in living rooms, in a bank, and at least once on a vibrating floor. He has collaborated with a number of musicians across the globe performing experimental music, free jazz and noise, appearing on over 100 recordings in the process. He constantly seeks to push the boundaries of the trumpet and of “music.”
Joseph Bastardo, who also performs as Bastian Void, is an artist and musician living in the uncanny valley. He uses analog and digital electronics (including vintage and modular synthesizers) to document his findings. Simulated landscapes, endless skyboxes, and impossible architecture are evoked, reflecting reality as a foil to the digital expanse. Bastardo has released albums on Orange Milk, Digitalis, Muzan Editions, Oxtail Recordings and many more. Since 2009 he has operated the Moss Archive label out of Worcester, MA.
Luke Stewart is a DC/NYC-based musician and organizer and has a strong presence in the national and international Improvised Music community. He is noted in Downbeat Magazine in 2020 as one of “25 most influential jazz artists” of his generation. His regular ensembles include Irreversible Entanglements, Heroes are Gang Leaders, and Ancestral Duo, Six Six featuring guitarist Anthony Pirog, and experimental rock duo Blacks’ Myths. As a solo artist, he has been compiling a series of improvisational sound structures for Upright Bass and Amplifier, utilizing the resonant qualities of the instrument to explore real-time harmonic and melodic possibilities.
M Azevedo (b. 1977) is a Providence, RI based composer, mastering engineer, and acoustician. Their work as Retribution Body uses custom subwoofers and modular synthesizers auralizing the architecture of performance spaces though dense fields of standing waves, crafting work that is simultaneously minimalist and overwhelming.
Rhea Burdick is a composer, violinist, and violin maker based in Boston. Originally from Northern Virginia she began playing violin and fiddle at the age of 5. Fascinated by figuring out how things work, she began to try to create music. This led her to pursue classical composition at New England Conservatory. During this time, she simultaneously played fiddle in an old-time folk band called “Sasquatch and the Jackalope,” with her friend and banjo player Aisling Carroll. Reticent at first to combine the worlds of classical and folk music, she began answering this question immediately following school. She self-produced 5 albums of experimental folk music ranging from found sound collages to recompositions of traditional tunes with all manner of compositional innovation and improvisations. Heavily influenced by free improvisation, her most recent work explores the improvisatory elements of folk music to their greatest extremes, without sacrificing the inherent folkiness of the source material.
Staubitz and Waterhouse is the Rhode Island-based duo of improviser Mary Staubitz and composer Russ Waterhouse. Their mutual interests in stealth field recording, post-minimalism, and tragicomedy manifest in works that collapse boundaries between high and low culture. As a performing unit they are known for generating tension, bewilderment, and belly laughs. Staubitz and Waterhouse's new LP Out and About will be released shortly on Gertrude Tapes.
Waterworks 2023 is presented with the support of a Live Arts Boston grant from The Boston Foundation, a Festivals Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and a local cultural council grant from the Brookline Commission for the Arts.
Non-Event would also like to thank the sponsors for Waterworks 2023:
