Working since the late 1970s, Lewis Klahr is known for an extensive body of collage films which probe the American unconscious through the filmmaker’s intimate animation of mid-century ephemera. In Klahr’s films, fugitive fragments of forgotten material culture—including advertisements, comics, found photos and other figments—combine with poignant song selections to explore unique lonelinesses lurking within the American experience. However, in Circumstantial Pleasures Klahr abandons his signature use of mid-20th century source materials and “looks at the raw material of contemporary life and distills them into a demanding and powerful work of anxiety, alienation, agitation and abrasion... that conveys the experience of being alive in the 21st century in ways that few other films have.” (Chris Stults, Film Curator, Wexner Center for the Arts.)

All ages

The Lab SF

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Lewis Klahr: Circumstantial Pleasures

film

Film

San Francisco

The Lab

For the winter solstice, Christopher Robin Duncan assembles a group of Bay Area musicians for a live performance in his series of works SEASONS, as a five-pointed star. Chuck Johnson, Patrick Shelley, Zekarias Musele Thompson, Josh Wismans, and Duncan perform at the points of the star surrounding the audience at The Lab.

Danishta Rivero opens the evening with an incantory solo voice performance. Danishta Rivero is an improviser, performer, sound artist, and multimedia artist based in Oakland, California. Her artistic practice is characterized by a deep exploration of sound, particularly focusing on the human voice and its transformation through technology. Of special interest are the ways that technology and the body come up against each other in the reconfiguration of identity. Rivero's practice focuses on the friction at the edges of these encounters and the resulting recalibration of our concepts of the world and ourselves in it. She is a member of electro-acoustic duo Voicehandler with percussionist Jacob Felix Heule. She is also half of Las Sucias, a tropical noise duo with Alexandra Buschman-Román.

Christopher Robin Duncan: Seasons + Danishta Rivero

Danishta Rivero

Gigs

In the spirit of bygone 70’s comedy albums, *The Bored Identity* is a collection of characters and songs by the underground’s most beloved subversive comedic performance artist. **Dynasty Handbag** takes on the self care industrial complex, murderous misogyny and the horrors of heteronormativity by deftly moving in and out of a crackpot slew of characters in ridiculously imaginative scenarios.

Song’s include ode to male privilege When A Man Has an Idea and the consumer driven climate disaster electro banger Vat Do U Vant for Bwekfas? For The Lab performance, Dynasty Handbag will be performing all the tracks on The Bored Identity along with her signature mean spirited stand up and social commentary.

Jibz Cameron is a writer, performer, visual artist and actor. She is most well known for her multi-media performance work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag, which has spanned over 20 years and has been presented at arts venues such as The New Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA, The Hammer Museum, REDCAT, BAM, Centre Pompidou among others. Jibz is a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, a 2021 United States Artist Award recipient and a 2020 Creative Capital Grant awardee. Her film Weirdo Night, directed by Mariah Garnett is an official 2021 Sundance Film Festival selection. In May of 2023 she premiered a new theater piece called Titanic Depression. She released her fist comedy record, *The Bored Identity*, on Wacky Wacko records in November 2023.

Dynasty Handbag: The Bored Identity 

Dynasty Handbag - When a Man Has an Idea

Dynasty Handbag

Dynasty Handbag: The Bored Identity (Night 2)

Armed with two new records, Berlin's **Mary Ocher** returns to the US for the first time in 5 years. She's been pushing the boundaries between pop and avant-garde for almost two decades, with playful and colorful form, and clever content that winks at everyone who recognizes its cultural and historical references. Ocher is a self-taught punk poet, sound artist, director and visual artist, who toured the whole world and counts artists such as Animal Collective, Sean Lennon, Karen O (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), and Nan Goldin among her admirers. Her new album joins a series of apocalyptic and politically charged concept albums.

The new recordings feature collaborations with post-rock giants Mogwai, psych-rock guru King Khan, electronic moguls Red Axes, Mary's drummer duo Your Government, pieces by fusion harpist Dorothy Ashby and 12th century Persian poet Omar Khayyam, a homage to electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire and much more.

As Flung, Oakland-based multi-instrumentalist Kashika Kollaikal creates channels for feeling. Flung's immersive world of experimental pop explores intimate sentiments like love, place, and transness. Studded with found sounds - car horns, hand-punched music boxes, foil buzzing on piano strings - Flung's music encourages a deeper way of listening to all that is around, and within.

Mary Ocher + Flung

Mary Ocher - The Irrevocable Temple of Knowledge

Mary Ocher - The Irrevocable Temple Of Knowledge

Flung

Mary Ocher

For his first show at the Lab in twelve years, **Gregg Kowalsky** will be performing one piece that contains material from his most recent album, *Eso Es* (Mexican Summer), which is a percussive experiment using patches exclusively from the DX7. The long-form piece will feature an opening movement of new material that highlights two decades of composition, including his work with Date Palms, which emphasized American Minimalism that was heavily influenced by classical Indian music. Minimalism and Maximalism in one performance.

**Blevin Blectum** (born Bevin Kelley) performs a live mash-up iteration of her two most recent albums - 'OMNII' and 'Multitudes of Venom' (both released on the piquant and storied DeathBomb Arc label). BUT... that's not all - added to the a/v mash will be a premonition-glimpse into the third (and final) piece of this universe, a fast-follow-up album due in early 2025. This will be the first performance of this triad of sonic planetary madness! Accompanied by fabtastical, drippingly psychedelic video animations created by Alexander P Dupuis, the OMNII soundtrack requests that you saddle up for a vermillion adventure on the back of a plutonian frombork.

Gregg Kowalsky + Blevin Blectum

Gregg Kowalsky - Fragile Water

Blevin Blectum

Gregg Kowalsky

We usher in the Arab.AMP 2025 season at The Lab with Strider—the longtime duo of Joanna Mattrey and Steve Long. The group’s alchemical procedures fuse together field recordings, found objects, derelict instruments, keyboards, bowed strings, to create ambient soundscapes in miniature. Our evening opens with St Celfer, the folk, glitch, improvisational project of john macdougall parker who asserts, "There is a lot of noise today—we just need to hear the music within it."

Directed by Leyya Mona Tawil, Arab.AMP is a platform for experimental live art, music and ideas by artists of the SWANA diaspora, the region, and our allied communities. The Arab.AMP 2025 season highlights practices of listening and action; through sound, performance and conversation.

Strider + St Celfer

Joanna Mattrey & Steven Long - Regent

The Lab and Noise Pop Festival 2025 present **Byron Westbrook's** *Translucents* (Shelter Press, 2024), in an expanded immersive, multi-channel audio configuration. Inspired by the color panels of abstract painter Blinky Palermo, *Translucents* explores the concept of "audio after-image". It presents a series of audio scenes, with the intention of imprinting on the listener's mind in order to influence the way each consecutive scene appears. *Translucents* is a play with memory, with presence, and with time, experimenting with a dynamic between perceiving presence in the space where one is listening vs the perception of an external space or place.

“Byron Westbrook’s Shelter Press debut is his most mesmerizing album to date – a set of electroacoustic pieces that advances the rough blueprints laid out by legends like Maryanne Amacher, Bernard Parmegiani and Luc Ferrari.. if you’re at all interested in electroacoustic music, ‘Translucents’ is just about as good as it gets.” (*Boomkat*)

San Francisco-based musician Thomas Dimuzio opens with an immersive surround sound performance featuring the Buchla 200e modular synthesizer, live looping, real-time processing, and field recordings. Thomas Dimuzio is a San Francisco-based musician, composer, improviser, sound designer, mastering engineer, and music technologist. Known for his immersive sonic explorations, Dimuzio creates music that transports listeners to otherworldly soundscapes.

Byron Westbrook + Thomas Dimuzio

Byron Westbrook - Dance in Free Fall

Thomas Dimuzio

Byron Westbrook

Catalan duo **Tarta Relena** make their San Francisco debut at The Lab, after a standout performance at Unsound 2024 and on their way to Big Ears 2025.

The project was born in 2016 by two singers who explore *a cappella* the sounds of the different styles in vocal music. Tarta Relena wants to build a repertoire that goes from traditional music to original songs that are related to the geographical area of ​​the Mediterranean. They do not fear to widen the limits of the sacred and the profane. Experimentation is the core of their identity, and the blend of vocal techniques is their creative engine. In the arrangements, the two very different timbres live together with the synthetic sounds and electronic samples. Always looking for complexity in simplicity and maximum expression with the minimum of elements.

Tarta Relena presents a new album that flirts with the notion of tragic thinking: diverse characters who find themselves facing unstoppable consequences, known and unknown at the same time. A conceptual mix of what fate has ready for us, our thirst for knowledge and the inability to integrate future versions of ourselves. They try to capture in music and lyrics the tension and mystery of what we do not understand, coming from logics that escape our usual ways of existing.

Tarta Relena

Tarta Relena - Si veriash a la rana

Upcoming events

Established in 1984, The Lab provides significant funding, time, and space to traditionally underrepresented artists. Located in the historic Redstone Labor Temple in the Mission District of San Francisco, The Lab presents hundreds of artists, with thousands of visitors annually for events and exhibitions ranging from experimental music and sound practices, poetry and literary arts, theater, visual arts, film and expanded cinema, and multidisciplinary work.

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