"My name is Ava Mendoza. I play guitars and stompboxes and write music. Currently I'm based out of Brooklyn, NY. I have played guitar for most of my life and been active for the last decade playing my own music and in many different groups. In any context I try to bring expressivity, energy and a wide sonic range to the music I play. I've toured throughout the U.S. and Europe and recorded or performed with a broad spectrum of musicians including singer Carla Bozulich (The Geraldine Fibbers, Evangelista), Fred Frith (Massacre, Henry Cow, Art Bears), Nels Cline, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Weasel Walter, Tune-Yards, and more. I've played on recordings released by labels Weird Forest, Tzadik, Clean Feed, NotTwo, ugEXPLODE, Resipiscent, New Atlantis, and others.

Friendly critics have called me "Oakland's avant-jazz virtuoso" (Brad Cohan, Village Voice), "a versatile and virtuosic guitarist" (The San Francisco Film Society), "a wizard on a semi-circle of effects pedals, butÉ equally adept with FX-less technique," (Lars Gotrich, A Blog Supreme/NPR Jazz). I was recently named one of Guitar WorldÔs Ò10 Female Guitarists You Should KnowÓ.

My main project these days is UNNATURAL WAYS .

PERFORMED/RECORDED WITH:

Scott Amendola (Nels Cline Singers, Charlie Hunter Quartet), Liz Allbee, Vijay Anderson, Bran(...)pos, Carla Bozulich (The Geraldine Fibbers, Evangelista), Sheldon Brown, Tony Buck (The Necks), members of Caroliner, Nels Cline (Wilco), George Cremaschi, Tim Dahl (Child Abuse, Lydia Lunch), J.A. Deane, Marco Di Gasbarro (Squartet), John Dikeman (Cactus Truck), Thomas Dimuzio, Shayna Dunkleman, Marco Eneidi, Luc Ex, Ben Goldberg, Fred Frith (Henry Cow, Art Bears, Massacre), Vinny Golia, Phillip Greenlief, Franz Hautzinger, Jacob Felix Heule, Devin Hoff (Good for Cows), Gerri Jager (Knaalpot), Darren Johnston, Henry Kaiser (Crazy Backwards Alphabet), Annette Krebs, Thollem McDonas, Lisa Mezzacappa, Butch Morris, Matt Nelson, Hexlove aka Zac Nelson, Kanoko Nishi, Nick Podgurski (Extra Life), Porest aka Mark Gergis, Gino Robair, Aram Shelton, John Shiurba, SF Sound, Damon Smith, Moe! Staiano, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Raphael Vanoli (Knaalpot), Weasel Walter (The Flying Luttenbachers), Mike Watt (Minutemen, fIREHOSE), Wobbly (Negativland), Tune-yards, William Winant (Mr. Bungle), Kenny Wollesen (Sex Mob), Theater of Yugen, dancers Leyya Mona Tawil, Yuko Kaseki, and Manuela Tessi."

On Ka'a Davis, aka John Davis, is an American jazz, reggae and avant-garde guitarist and composer.

"Born in 1968 and raised in New Jersey, I took guitar lessons at the age of ten and went on to play in typical high school cover bands and to study jazz guitar privately with Buck Brown. In my late teens, as my interests expanded to the avant-garde, I attended a seminar on improvisation given by noted west coast guitarist Henry Kaiser. Enrolling at Vassar College, I studied electronic music with Linda Fisher and composition with Annea Lockwood and Richard Wilson. By the time I graduated in 1990, I had already published articles on Minimalist composers La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, Rhys Chatham, and Charlemagne Palestine, and had recorded with former John Coltrane drummer Rashied Ali (on Rudolph Grey's Mask of Light LP).

Relocating to New York City, I focused on pursuing free improvisation (with Rudolph Grey's group the Blue Humans and guitarist Loren Mazzacane Connors) as well as indie rock (the bands Love Child and Run On, as well as a brief stint with legendary 60s psychedelic rock band Arthur Lee & Love). I also began developing a repertoire of structured improvisation pieces for solo electric guitar, documented on a series of albums starting with 1994's Sink the Aging Process. These brought together my interests in reharmonization (from jazz and classical music), process, repetition, and extended duration (from Minimalism), and the textural vocabularies of rock and noise music. The albums also include tape pieces and organ works. In 1998 I began writing frequently for the British experimental music magazine The WIRE, doing several cover stories and other features. In 2000 I started handling bookings at Tonic, the estimable New York venue dedicated to showcasing a wide range of alternative music, from free improvisation to underground rock to electronica to the jazz and classical avant-gardes. This brought me into contact with numerous musicians, and I performed at Tonic myself countless times. In 2001 I co-founded the ensemble Text of Light with Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo, a project that brings together free improvisation with screenings of historic examples of experimental cinema. Text of Light emphasizes the chance correspondences between what is happening onscreen and what is happening in the music, as a kind of live, real-time mixed-media collage. Subsequently I have made audiovisual collaborations with video artist and long-time Merce Cunningham associate Charles Atlas and Emmy-winning painter, designer and comics artist Gary Panter, which operated under similar principles. 2002 saw the publication of my first book, An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn, an extended personal essay about coming of age as a rock fan and musician. In 2007 my second book, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories was published - significant as the first full-length study of sound installations and sound sculpture to be published in English, and the first to examine the genre mainly from an art historical, rather than a quasi-philosophical, viewpoint.

Any free improviser is also an audience member, as he or she is hearing the music for the first time. I brought this idea to performances I organized under the name the Digger Choir at Issue Project Room in 2003-2004 that conflated the roles of audience member and performer. Everyone who attended was responsible for performing the music-singing John Stevens' Sustained Piece and Yoko Ono's John Let's Hope For Piece as well as my own pieces like Subway Piece, in which they were instructed to read a magazine or book they would ordinarily read to themselves in transit out loud. The idea of speaking texts aloud that are meant to be read silently also occurs in two of my recent sound installations: On Deaf Ears (2009), in which an article about the possible hearing loss incurred by listening to music on iPod earbuds at high volume was recorded being read aloud, and played as a loop on AVA Gallery's outdoor speakers; and Cross Promotion (2010), in which the proprietors of both AVA and Diapason read aloud their press releases for coming exhibitions, the recordings were then installed in each other's gallery space. These pieces play not only on sound art's investigations of latent sounds, but on my dual work practice as a musician and a writer.

In 2010 I started a project called Title TK with media artist Cory Archangel and curator Howie Chen. Cory, Howie and I are all guitarists. Considering ourselves a band, in live appearances we walk onstage with guitars but never plug them in or play; instead we simply talk to each other (mostly about music). These talks are improvised, and to me represent a negotiation between spoken and musical languages, underlining the linguistic implications of musical vocabularies and the conversational aspects of group improvisation. They also represent an application of "post- studio art" ideas to music, in removing what would be expected as essential content from the rock band format. Finally, they build upon my personal history, making a conceptual accommodation between my parallel existences in the 90s as a rock band member and free improviser. More recent activities include recording and touring with Lee Ranaldo & the Dust, an improv trio with Aki Onda and artist/filmmaker Michael Snow, a duo with Yeah Yeah Yeahs drummer Brian Chase, and a book-length interview with Will Oldham, Will Oldham on Bonnie "Prince" Billy (Faber & Faber (UK), W.W. Norton (US), Contra (Spain), 2012)."

"David Grubbs (born September 21, 1967), composer, guitarist, pianist, and vocalist, was a founding member of Squirrel Bait, Bastro, and Gastr del Sol. He has also played in Codeine, The Red Krayola, Bitch Magnet and The Wingdale Community Singers.

Grubbs' first band was a brief-lived punk/new wave group called The Happy Cadavers that released the four-song 7" record With Illustrations in 1982. Grubbs then formed a hardcore punk band called Squirrelbait Youth that later evolved into the influential Louisville, Kentucky group Squirrel Bait, releasing a 12" EP and an album on Homestead Records. Grubbs's next group was the post-punk power trio Bastro, which released and EP and two albums on Homestead.[1] In 1991 Bastro morphed into the more avant-garde Gastr del Sol.[1] This project soon became essentially a partnership between Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke after the band's first album.[1] The albums released by the duo include Crookt, Crackt, or Fly, Upgrade & Afterlife, and Camoufleur. In this period, Grubbs also contributed to other projects, including guitar for two tracks on Codeine's 1994 album The White Birch[2] and guitar, piano, and harmonium on recordings by Palace Music, Will Oldham, Royal Trux, Dirty Three, Matmos, Richard Buckner, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Arnold Dreyblatt, and many others.

Since the breakup of Gastr del Sol in 1997, Grubbs has released numerous solo and collaborative records, mostly on the Drag City label, for which he co-directed the Dexter's Cigar sub-label.[3] In 2000, his album The Spectrum Between was named "Album of the Year" in the Sunday Times.

His 2017 album Creep Mission was described by The Quietus as "a typically playful and intellectually ambitious set - and is as good an entry into the world of Grubbs as any."

In 2018, Grubbs released Failed Celestial Creatures, a collaboration with Japanese guitarist and electronic musician Taku Unami. According to Pitchfork, the album "feels of a piece with Grubbs' last two records under his own name, Creep Mission and Prismrose, both nominal solo releases that each features a handful of guests. On all three albums, Grubbs uses the presence of collaborators to play with drones, repetition, and improvisatory interplay, taking his style to a more intuitive place."[4]

He operates his own label, Blue Chopsticks, which has released new and archival recordings from Luc Ferrari, Derek Bailey and Noël Akchoté, Workshop, Van Oehlen, and Mats Gustafsson. Grubbs is also known for his collaborations with writers Susan Howe, Rick Moody, and Kenneth Goldsmith, and with visual artists including Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, Stephen Prina, and Cosima von Bonin. He has composed the soundtracks for Angela Bulloch's installations Z Point, Horizontal Technicolour, and Hybrid Song Box.4, and his music appears in two installations by Doug Aitken. Grubbs's sound installation "Between a Raven and a Writing Desk" was included in the 1999 group exhibition Elysian Fields at the Centre Pompidou.

Grubbs's soundtrack work includes music with Matmos for Thierry Jousse's feature film Les Invisibles. Grubbs has also contributed music to the Red Krayola's soundtrack to Norman and Bruce Yonemoto's film Japan in Paris in LA and to three films by Augusto Contento (Parallax Sounds, Strade Trasparenti, and Onibus), to Braden King and Laura Moya's film Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks its Back, and to John Boskovich's film North. Music by Gastr del Sol appears in the PBS television series The United States of Poetry, Hal Hartley's film The Book of Life, and Doug Aitken's film The Diamond Sea. Grubbs composed the score for Karl Bruckmaier's radio adaptation of Peter Weiss's Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (Hessischer Rundfunk Hörbuch des Jahres 2007) and contributed music to Bruckmaier's adaptation of Alexander Kluge's Chronik der Gefühle (Deutscher Hörbuchpreis 2010, "Best Fiction").Grubbs solo in 2009.

From 1997 to 1999, Grubbs was a part-time instructor in the Liberal Arts and Sound departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently Professor of Music in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, CUNY.[5] He teaches in Brooklyn College's MFA program in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Brooklyn College's MFA program in Creative Writing, and is a member of the faculty of the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music (BC-CCM).

Grubbs received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago. His criticism has appeared in Texte zur Kunst, Chicago Review, TDR, Conjunctions, Bookforum, and Purple, and from 1999-2007 he regularly contributed music criticism to the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Grubbs received a 2005-2006 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.

Grubbs is the author of two books for Duke University Press: Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (2014) and Now That the Audience Is Assembled (2018). Now That the Audience Is Assembled was described by The Washington Post as "a new book-length poem [that] reminds us that listening can feel stranger than dreaming."[6]

He is one of five musicians (with Steve Albini, Ken Vandermark, Damon Locks, and Ian Williams) profiled in Augusto Contento's 2012 documentary film Parallax Sounds.

Grubbs lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Cathy Bowman, and their son Emmett Bowman-Grubbs."

"Hans Tammen likes to set sounds in motion, and then sit back to watch the movements unfold. Using textures, timbre and dynamics as primary elements, his music is continuously shifting, with different layers floating into the foreground while others disappear. This flows like clockwork, "transforming a sequence of instrumental gestures into a wide territory of semi-hostile discontinuity; percussive, droning, intricately colorful, or simply blowing your socks off" (Touching Extremes).

He currently plays guitar, Buchla Music Easel, a Blippoo Box chaos synthesizer plus other small electronics devices. He also performs with various pieces of software of his own design, i.e. the "Endangered Guitar" (a hybrid software/guitar instrument), and "Prozesshansl" (made to process the sounds of other instruments). He regularly writes for large ensembles, notably his 18-piece chamber-jazz ensemble Third Eye Orchestra, and the all-electronic Dark Circuits Orchestra, both founded in 2005. In 2021 FLUX String Quartet commissioned him to write a large work for string quartet and live electronics.

His works have been presented at festivals in the US, Canada, Mexico, Russia, Ukraine, India, South Africa, the Middle East and all over Europe. He has recorded on labels such as Clang, Innova, ESP-DISK, Nur/Nicht/Nur, Gold Bolus, Nachtstück, Creative Sources, Leo Records, Potlatch and Outnow.

Hans Tammen received grants and composer commissions from NewMusicUSA, Chamber Music America, MAPFund, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, American Music Center, Lucas Artists Residencies Montalvo, New York State Council On The Arts (NYSCA), New York Foundation For The Arts (NYFA), American Composers Forum w/ Jerome Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Funds, New York State Music Fund, Goethe Institute w/ Foreign Affairs Office, among others.

Hans Tammen is currently teaching at School of Visual Arts, Hunter College and NYU. From 2001 to 2014 he worked at Harvestworks Digital Media Art Center in NYC, where he was responsible for the Client Services, Education and Artist In Residence program, helping countless digital media artists through completion of their works. As an arbitrator at BTQ in the 1990s, he spent a decade advising unions about electronic monitoring and surveillance at the workplace, and negotiating contracts and agreements to minimize surveillance aspects. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Kassel, studying on a stipend from Friedrich Ebert Foundation."

"Richard Carrick, a Guggenheim fellow, writes music of spatial depth and robust stasis, characterized by continual development and the evocation of profound human experiences. Described both as "charming, with exoticism and sheer infectiousness" and "organic and restless" by The New York Times, Carrick's music is influenced by his multicultural background and experiences as well as his commitment to inspire professionals, audiences and youth through composition and live performance.

Carrick is co-founder and co-artistic director of the contemporary music ensemble Either/Or, declared 'first rate' and 'a trustworthy purveyor of fresh sounds' by The New York Times, and winner of the 2015 Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming. As conductor and pianist, Carrick has worked with many celebrated composers including Helmut Lachenmann, Jonny Greenwood, Chaya Czernowin, Elliott Sharp, George Lewis, Alvin Lucier, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Iancu Dumitrescu and Rebecca Saunders. Carrick conducting E/O's ambitious presentation of John Cage's Party Pieces brought together 125 renowned composers from around the world.

Carrick started as Chair of Composition at Berklee College of Music in September 2016, after living a year in Kigali Rwanda composing and developing teaching programs, including a new arrangement of the Rwandan National Anthem. He has presented masterclasses and lectures throughout the US, Europe, and Asia. Former posts include composition faculty at New York and Columbia Universities, and teaching artist for the New York Philharmonic through which he has mentored hundreds of young composers internationally.

A US citizen born in Paris of French-Algerian and British descent, Carrick received his BA from Columbia University, PhD from the University of California-San Diego with Brian Ferneyhough, and pursued further studies at IRCAM and the Koninklijk Conservatorium in The Hague. Works distributed by Project Schott New York."

"Manuel Mota (born October 22, 1970) is an experimental jazz and blues guitarist from Lisbon, Portugal.

Mota started playing guitar at 15. In the late 1980s his discovery of experimental music, jazz and all the underground activity of that period inspired him to turn his work public, which happened in 1989. Between 1989 and 1997 he studied and experimented with prepared guitar, mainly acoustic, and focused his work on drone music, influenced by Phill Niblock and La Monte Young. Since then his interests shifted to the development of a personal language for fingerstyle guitar and started working in a regular basis with bassist Margarida Garcia.

He collaborated closely with Sei Miguel from 1997 to 2005. In 1998 he founded Headlights, a record label. Artists whom Mota has played and recorded with include Tetuzi Akiyama, Chris Corsano, Lukas Ligeti, Mattin, Donald Miller (of Borbetomagus), Phill Niblock, Gino Robair, and Ernesto Rodrigues."