"Guitarist Chris Forsyth's hypnotic instrumentals assimilate art-rock textures with vernacular American influences culled from a lauded career as a composer, improviser, and inveterate collaborator. Long active in the international improv/experimental underground, he's released a series of acclaimed records as a solo artist that demonstrate a resolute engagement in making corporeal/cerebral music that transcends such subterranean realms, reaching instead for a bleeding-edge physicality and lyricism that he deems "cosmic Americana." The fascinating tension manifest in Forsyth's playing between often long-form, rarefied abstraction and percolating rhythms and rock/roots structures animates notable recent works such as his 2011 LP Paranoid Cat on Family Vineyard and Early Astral, a 2012 duo LP with Koen Holtkamp (Mountains) on Blackest Rainbow.

His 2012 Kenzo Deluxe LP/CD on Northern Spy, which features "The First Ten Minutes of Cocksucker Blues," a stunning conceptual soundtrack piece for Robert Frank's banned Rolling Stones documentary film, has been described as "resonant [and] incisive... a cosmic abstraction of the American guitar tradition, reducing blues, rock, folk and improvisation into their spare, hypnotic base elements." Aptly, Forsyth credits a Keith Richards interview in a 1988 issue of Guitar World with introducing his teenage self to the banjo-derived open G tuning, which Forsyth now employs almost exclusively. The Wire has praised him as "an erudite and farsighted guitar stylist, mapping a path that's hip and scholarly in equal measure." Uncut calls him "an emergent master."

Forsyth has toured throughout Europe and the U.S., sharing stages with such like-minded travellers as fellow PoB artist Steve Gunn, Bill Orcutt, Rhys Chatham, Sic Alps, Grouper, Loren Connors, Mind Over Mirrors, PG Six, and Träd Gräs och Stenar, and, from 2002 to 2011, as a member of Peeesseye. He studied with guitarist Richard Lloyd of Television and has also collaborated with diverse artists including Meg Baird, Tetuzi Akiyama, Nate Wooley, and choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and RoseAnne Spradlin. Forsyth was awarded a 2011 Pew Fellowship in the Arts and resides in Philadelphia."

"Nate Wooley was born in 1974 in Clatskanie, Oregon, a town of 2,000 people in the timber country of the Pacific Northwestern corner of the U.S. He began playing trumpet professionally with his father, a big band saxophonist, at the age of 13. His time in Oregon, a place of relative quiet and slow time reference, instilled in Nate a musical aesthetic that has informed all of his music making for the past 20 years, but in no situation more than his solo trumpet performances.

Nate moved to New York in 2001, and has since become one of the most in-demand trumpet players in the burgeoning Brooklyn jazz, improv, noise, and new music scenes. He has performed regularly with such icons as John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Eliane Radigue, Ken Vandermark, Fred Frith, Evan Parker, and Yoshi Wada, as well as being a collaborator with some of the brightest lights of his generation like Chris Corsano, C. Spencer Yeh, Peter Evans, and Mary Halvorson.

Wooley's solo playing has often been cited as being a part of an international revolution in improvised trumpet. Along with Peter Evans and Greg Kelley, Wooley is considered one of the leading lights of the American movement to redefine the physical boundaries of the horn, as well as demolishing the way trumpet is perceived in a historical context still overshadowed by Louis Armstrong. A combination of vocalization, extreme extended technique, noise and drone aesthetics, amplification and feedback, and compositional rigor has led one reviewer to call his solo recordings "exquisitely hostile".

In the past three years, Wooley has been gathering international acclaim for his idiosyncratic trumpet language. Time Out New York has called him "an iconoclastic trumpeter", and Downbeat's Jazz Musician of the Year, Dave Douglas has said, "Nate Wooley is one of the most interesting and unusual trumpet players living today, and that is without hyperbole". His work has been featured at the SWR JazzNow stage at Donaueschingen, the WRO Media Arts Biennial in Poland, Kongsberg, North Sea, Music Unlimited, and Copenhagen Jazz Festivals, and the New York New Darmstadt Festivals. In 2011 he was an artist in residence at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, NY and Cafe Oto in London, England. In 2013 he performed at the Walker Art Center as a featured solo artist.

Nate is the curator of the Database of Recorded American Music (www.dramonline.org) and the editor-in-chief of their online quarterly journal Sound American (www.soundamerican.org) both of which are dedicated to broadening the definition of American music through their online presence and the physical distribution of music through Sound American Records. He also runs Pleasure of the Text which releases music by composers of experimental music at the beginnings of their careers in rough and ready mediums."