November 13th 7PM $10
Bobbie Johnston
Dani Dobkin and Matt Sargent are traveling in support of their new album, Bend (Waveform Alphabet). The New York duo began in 2020 as a weekly Zoom call between the two artists at the height of the global pandemic. In 2021, they gave their first in-person show in Brooklyn and have since continued a musical conversation across many concerts and tours.
Beginning with a phrase from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, “Act so that there is no use in a center,” the improvising duo delights in the exploration of their contrasting sensibilities. Their music has been described as “strangely emotional, gossamer-like tapestry of sounds, from barely audible phrases to saturating swells of noise. It all sounds almost like an American primitive guitar record retrieved from far in the future.” (Antonio Poscic, Future Music)
Dani Dobkin is a New York City based artist, composer and educator currently working with sound, ceramics and modular synthesis. Recently their work has engaged with ideas of grief, decay and ephemerality. Past and recent collaborators include Yarn/Wire, International Contemporary Ensemble, CT::SWaM, Qubit and Women in Sound.
As an artist and composer, their work has been showcased at a variety of venues and galleries including ISSUE Project Room (NYC), Dimenna Center for the Arts (NYC), The Clay Studio (Philadelphia), Spectrum (NYC), Fridman Gallery (NYC), Mom’s Gallery (NYC), The Wallach Gallery (NYC), The Rubin Museum (NYC), Public Records (NYC), Chronos Art Center (Shanghai), NextSunday (Tokyo) and Little Berlin (Philadelphia).
Dobkin received a BFA from Bard College, both an MFA in Sound Art and a DMA in Music Composition from Columbia University. They are currently serving as an early career fellow at Columbia University and teaching electronic music at Bard College.
Matt Sargent is a composer, guitarist, and recording engineer based in upstate New York. His music has been described as “bringing a sharpened sense of the transcendental into the 21st century.” (Paul Muller, Sequenza21) Writing about his 2018 album Ghost Music, Bill Meyer states, “this music isn’t about following in anyone’s footsteps; it uses bare resources to establish a bounded and essential place.” (The Wire Magazine)
His albums include Illuminations (Sawyer Editions, 2024), Bend (Waveform Alphabet, 2023), Between Time and After (Chen Li Music, 2023), Tide (A Wave Press, 2020), Separation Songs (Cold Blue Music, 2019), Tide (for ten basses) (Marginal Frequency, 2019), and Ghost Music (Weighter Recordings, 2018).
Matt is currently engaged with expanding available repertoire for the pedal steel and electric guitar. In 2022, he commissioned new music for solo pedal steel from Michael Pisaro-Liu, Carl Stone, and Nomi Epstein. This season, his guitar collaborations with Robert Carl for just intonation guitar and electronics were released on Carl’s Infinity Avenue (Neuma Records, 2024). Most recently, his recording of James Romig’s hour-length piece for electric guitar, The Fragility of Time, was released by A Wave Press.
In demand as an audio engineer for contemporary music, Matt’s recent production credits include Alvin Lucier’s One Arm Bandits (Important Records), Ricochet Lady (Black Truffle), and Works for the Ever Present Orchestra II (Black Truffle), Richard Teitelbaum’s Asparagus (Black Truffle), Musica Elettronica Viva’s Symphony No. 107 – The Bard (Black Truffle), Michael Ranta’s Transits: Volume I (Important Records), and Sarah Hennies’s Spectral Malsconcities (New World Records), among many others. Praising his work on Robert Carl’s album, Splectra (Cold Blue Music), Fanfare Magazine writes, “he could find no better collaborator than composer and sound designer Matt Sargent.”
Matt is an assistant professor of music at Bard College.
Sacred Canopy are Corey Salts and Matt Bahnsen. Formed initially as Bahnsen’s solo project Salts joined in 2022. Their latest release “We Do In All Honesty Hate This World” is their first recording as a duo and features both prepared and improvisational elements. The goal of this project is to create worlds we would rather inhabit than our own.
Bobbie Johnston is a multidisciplinary artist and multi-instrumentlist, composer, improviser, and regular pollinator to the contemporary avant-garden. Bobbie is a Glass City native, though has been primarily working and living in NYC for nearly a dozen years now. Bobbie has had the privilege to share the stage and collaborate with some of the music’s brightest lumineers; including Reggie Workman, William Parker, Daniel Carter, and Jose Castellar. Bobbie’s music is primarily inspired by the nature of sound, as well the sound of nature. Considering how sound has been traveling long before us humans have been able to organize it, let alone call it music. Bobbie feels less a musician and more of a conduit for sound, creativity, and the energy that allows for music to speak as our universal language. Bobbie’s sound has been supportive to theater productions, television shows and commercials, film, performance art, hip-hop sampling, as well as supporting and performing with local, emerging and seasoned artists in various musical groups and contexts. Bobbie is also a bandleader and organizer for the underground creative music collective, Ear Yoga Ensemble; an ever-evolving cast of musicians and artists using spontaneous composition and improvisation as a means for creating harmony, both on and off stage.
Toledo Bellows 