Waterworks 2024 – A Festival of Experimental Sound (April 26 & 27)
Poster by Jeff DiPerna
Non-Event and the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum present
Waterworks 2024 – Festival of Experimental Sound
friday, April 26, 2024 | Doors at 7:30pm, music at 8pm — SOLD OUT
saturday, April 27, 2024 | Doors at 7pm, music at 7:30pm — Advanced tickets SOLD OUt. a limited number of tickets will be available at the door.
Metropolitan Waterworks Museum
2450 Beacon Street, Boston
Doors: 7:30pm, Music: 8pm
$25 general admission each day
$18 students or members each day
$40 2-day passes (limited availability)
Pay what you can / No one turned away for lack of funds
There is limited parking at the museum. Please use the T (Reservoir or Cleveland Circle stops on the Green line), if possible!
The museum is fully accessible to people with disabilities. If you have questions, call the museum at 617-277-0065 or email susanna@nonevent.org.
Non-Event is pleased to present two nights of experimental music in the extraordinary acoustics of the Great Engines Hall of the Waterworks Museum.
Night 1: Doors 7:30pm, Music 8pm — SOLD OUT
Alex Bernhardt (Cryptwarbler)
Isabella Koen & Rachel Devorah (duo)
Arnold Dreyblatt
Night 2: Doors 7pm, Music 7:30pm — Advanced tickets sold out. A limited number of tickets will be available at the door.
Lemuel Marc
sadnoise
Lea Bertucci & Henry Fraser (duo)
Neil Leonard performing Phill Niblock
About the artists
Alex Bernhardt is the circuit bender and electronic improviser of Cryptwarbler. Since 2019, he has been exploring the limits of circuit-bent improvisation using a modified Casio MT-240 synthesizer. His experimental research in controlling aleatoric behavior from abnormal use of ROM led to a system of hybrid electrical-musical notation, which Alex uses to improvise with. His pieces are often negotiations between man and machine; he seeks to explore and develop an intriguing sound, but heeds to the synthesizer's electrical idiosyncrasies.
Lea Bertucci is an experimental musician, 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 spatialized speaker arrays, radical methods of free improvisation and creative misuses of audio technology. She’ll perform with bassist Henry Fraser, whose work spans jazz, long-from drone, noise, and spectral music, in a duo set of spectral, improvised music for voice, tape, woodwinds, electronics and double bass.
Rachel Devorah is a sonic artist, technologist, educator, and labor organizer. She is interested in superhuman prolongation, opaque complexity, the re-signification of archaic tools and materials, and parallels between the physical properties and social meanings of spaces. Her improvisations utilize bespoke electronics and the French horn.
Arnold Dreyblatt is an American media artist and composer who has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. One of the second generation of New York minimal composers, Dreyblatt studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier and media art with Woody and Steina Vasulka. He has charted his own unique course in composition and music performance, inventing a set of new and original instruments, performance techniques, and a system of tuning. Often characterized as one of the more rock-oriented of the American minimalists, Dreyblatt has cultivated a strong underground base of fans for his transcendental and ecstatic music with his "Orchestra of Excited Strings".
Isabella Koen is a sound artist, DJ, and composer based in Providence, RI. She is best known for her hard-driving, all-hardware live sets and off kilter releases. Her practice incorporates the dual role of artist and researcher rooted in broad-ranging experimentation, while simultaneously extracting sonic signifiers from rave, hard techno, trance, and drum ‘n’ bass.
Neil Leonard is a composer, saxophonist, and transdisciplinary artist. Leonard's work includes concerts for ensembles with live electronics, audio/visual installation, and multimedia performance. He maintains active collaborations globally and across the US. Leonard works with artists from film, video, installation, dance, and theater to create and perform music, often using immersive multichannel audio configurations. He was a frequent collaborator with the late composer Phill Niblock and will perform Niblock’s “Ronette.”
Lemuel Marc is composer and trumpet player, who is studying at the New England Conservatory. He plays regularly around New England with improvisers including Evan Palmer, Yoona Kim, Brittany Karlson, Michael Larocca and the Hivemind Brass Quintet.
sadnoise is Femi Shonuga-Fleming, an architect and sound artist from New York with a heavy emphasis on experimental sound synthesis and live coding languages. Femi works with modular synthesizers, DIY electronics and various coding languages to explore the intersections of sound and space though spatial audio and architectural design. He’s most interested in generative systems, chance, ambiance and texture within sonic soundscapes. Femi’s architectural work explores minimalism and sustainability, with a focus on aperture, light and sound.
Waterworks 2024 is presented with the support of the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum, WZBC 90.3 FM, the Newton Cultural Council, and the Mass Cultural Council, Goethe-Institut Boston, Streetcar Wine & Beer, Café Fixe, Digital Soup, and The Oedipus Foundation.
