Experimental Music Night

Thomas Darksmith (b. 1978) is a California-based multidisciplinary artist who has been producing crude audio collage and similarly rudimentary line drawings since the early ‘00s. Since 2007, his work has been released at a slow but steady pace by multiple well-regarded experimental music labels—including Hanson, Chocolate Monk and No Rent—as well as his own small Mom Costume imprint. Darksmith’s vaguely musical and often claustrophobic sound work is largely built around “domestic recordings,” reflecting the anxiety and isolation of personal experience. Working in the visual field, Darksmith’s minimalistic portraitures explore the psychological and physical impositions experienced in dysfunctional relationships. His often ridiculous and disturbing ink pen drawings present the frailty and weakness inherent in the human condition with both cruel humor and empathic understanding.

S•Glass’s hybrid of musique concrete and electroacoustic sound collage combines tape music, electronic processing, voice, found sound, and chance operations. Every show uses a different batch of curated audio, mixed live, while the self-produced studio albums are more refined assemblages. The playing of non-musical objects is sometimes incorporated (dental floss, aluminum foil, wind-up toys, metal lunch box, cabbage). Self-shot video is screened during sets, which is mostly textures made with multiple layers that slowly wobble out of sync, jump cuts, and a smattering of primitive animation. The overall effect is one of surreal disorientation.

S•Glass is a founder of Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble (a large non-musical music group begun in the early 1980s), and Glands of External Secretion (a duo with rock musician Barbara Manning since the early ’90s). From the late ’80s until 2004, he was the main driver behind Bananafish. Since 2017, he’s  performed as a solo artist and completed U.S. tours of the West Coast, New England, part of the South and Midwest, England and Scotland, a handful of places in Canada.