Join your host, Jeffrey Wengrofsky, for an evening of avant-garde text and music, featuring Free Jazz, Angular Atonality, Surrealist Storytelling, Poetry, Glitter, and the Absurd.
Text/Vocal Performance: JENNIFER ROBIN, NIKOLA PEPERA, JEFFREY WENGROFSKY, and CHRIS TANNER
Music: REG BLOOR, AYUMI ISHITO with DANIEL CARTER
The Musicians:
Legendary New York Avant-Metal guitarist Reg Bloor has released three instrumental solo records: “Viewer Discretion Is Not Advised,” “Sensory Irritation Chamber,” and “Theme from an Imaginary Slasher.” Bloor has performed at the Red Bull Music Academy New York Festival, the OFF Festival, and Basilica Drone. She has been a long-time member of the Glenn Branca Ensemble and founder of the Paranoid Critical Revolution. Bloor’s work features an innovative mix of frantic No Wave, Out Jazz, and screechy Metal. Her inventive chords, angular atonality, and groundbreaking techniques—not to mention her impish sense of humor—have been an unsung influence on two generations of New York experimental guitarists. Her work can be explored at https://regbloor.com/
Ayumi Ishito was born and raised in Ishikawa, Japan. At the age of 19, she began playing tenor saxophone in a college big band at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. She went on to study performance and composition at Berkee College of Music in Boston and moved to New York in 2010. Ishito’s project, The Spacemen, was selected for the “Best Jazz of 2021” on Bandcamp. As a composer, Ishito has been leading her quintet since 2011 and performing her compositions. The band released two albums, “View From A Little Cave” in 2016, and “Midnite Cinema” in 2019.
Daniel Carter is an American Free Jazz musician who plays saxophone, trumpet, and flute. He has recorded and performed with William Parker, Federico Ughi, DJ Logic, The Negatones, Thurston Moore, Yo La Tengo, Soul-Junk, Anne Waldman, Cooper-Moore, Matthew Shipp and scientist/musician Matthew Putman, among others. He is a member of the groups Test, Other Dimensions In Music, odon, Ghost Moth and Dissipated Face. In 2007, the Pendu Sound compilation album, “Getting Rid of the Glue,” with Excepter and Daniel Carter, was listed as number 70 in Thurston Moore’s “Top 80 of 2006.” In 2015, the New York Forward Festival was created to celebrate Carter’s 70th birthday.
WORD MANIA AND THE UNCLASSIFIABLE:
Jennifer Robin is RAW POWER. She has been performing at open mics and with experimental musicians since she was 17, including collaborations with the Dead Air Fresheners and Spirit Duplicator. Her work has been published by PLAZM, Hobart, Five2One, Vlad Mag, Counterpunch, Ladybox, and King Shot. She is author of the ‘stand-up tragedy’ Death Confetti (Feral House), a book of American self-immolation, Earthquakes in Candyland (Fungasm), and the dream reportage of You Only Bend Once with a Spoonful of Mercury (Far West). Vignettes about nuns, French swingers, and her mother feature in There Must Be an Invisible Leash, out on Future Tense in late 2024. Robin’s 2025 Oblique Strategies release—The Ballad of Ecto-Five—is an ‘erotic novel of mad science’ featuring Mother Earth’s Avenger and his girl gang.
Nikola Pepera, the last of the Haight Ashbury Butterflies. A former peach farmer and a former lithium dealer. A degenerate beatnik who once smoked tree moss. A notorious recluse who hid her surrealist paintings of psychedelic prostitutes and acid poetry under her bed until last summer. After hitchhiking her way down the Pacific Coast Highway from Santa Cruz, she landed in Hollywood around the corner from Jim Morrison's last American home. She is the singer and lyricist of her ‘supergroupe’ Chippy & Thee Psychedelic Dirtbags. Lay Down & Get Lost is her first book.
Jeffrey Wengrofsky is the author of The Wolfboy of Rego Park (Far West) and is the host of The Metropolis Literary Salon, a monthly event at TV Eye. He is curator of the Secrets Film Festivals, an annual, thematic festival at Film Noir Cinema in Brooklyn. Wengrofsky’s short documentaries have screened at many festivals and will next be on exhibit at the Eastside Cinema in Austin, Texas.
New antics: http://www.humansyndicate.com/futurology/
Chris Tanner is a New York City-based artist and performer, best known for his assemblages made from glitter, palettes, jewels, sterling silver leaf and found objects. Tanner’s work is a celebration of beauty and remembrance, expressed through all that sparkles, shimmers, or flickers. Covering surfaces with materials that clash, crash, and finally cohere, creating a glamorous order out of chaos. This process embodies layers of meaning: The magnificence of a powerful feminine, cascading, dream-like impulses of shame, desire, ecstasy, defiant optimism in dark times. Tanner’s visual art and storytelling can be seen here: https://www.instagram.com/christannerart/