- Board of Regents (Jean-François Charles, Ritwik Banerji, Will Yager)
From DEI to AI
(20 mins) (2) - Ása and Ana (Ása Önnu Ólafsdóttir, Ana Luisa Diaz de Cossio)
dissonance~resonance
(15 mins) (4) - Magnet Massage (Cade Patterson)
The Quest of Joshua Gilgamesh
(9 mins) (2) - Without Borders (Will Alderman, Kathryn Irwin, Yun Ju ‘Alice’ Pan, and Alex Smith)
Symphony No. Bird
(16 mins) (4) - in^set (David Aguila, Teresa Díaz de Cossio, and Ilana Waniuk)
Drēamscape I
(20 mins) (4) - (Total: 80 mins)
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Board of Regents
From DEI to AI
double bass, tenor sax, clarinet, electronics
The Board of Regents deepen their work in service of the public.
Ritwik Banerji is an experimental ethnographer, interactive media artist, and saxophonist. His work focuses on the development of artificial intelligence as a technology for ethnographic depiction, performance, and elicitation. He is currently writing a monograph on the relationship between freedom and knowledge in the contemporary musical practice of free improvisation drawing on several years of ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Through his creative work, he has collaborated with Tony Malaby, Axel Dörner, Rob Frye, Ben Lamar Gay, Theresa Wong, Liz Allbee, Joel Grip, Matthias Müller, and Tritha Sinha.
Will Yager is a double bassist committed to experimental music, improvisation, and collaborating with artists in the creation of new solo and chamber repertoire for the double bass. He is a founding member of both LIGAMENT, a duo with soprano Anika Kildegaard, and the trio Wombat with Justin Comer and Carlos Cotallo Solares. Performance highlights include Bang on a Can’s Long Play Festival, Big Ears Festival, High Zero Festival, Omaha Under the Radar, SPLICE Festival, SEAMUS, University of Iowa Center for New Music, Experimental Sound Studios’ Quarantine Concerts, Oh My Ears Festival, and the International Society of Bassists Convention.
Jean-François Charles is a composer, clarinetist, electronic musician, and a Max Certified Trainer. Creating at the crossroads of music and technology, he has performed dozens of concerts with his Spectral DJ instrument. His 2024 album Tenebrae was reviewed as “Five stars: A fascinating excursion into Charles’ mind, superbly engineered.” in Fanfare Magazine.
Dr. Banerji teaches at Iowa State University, Dr. Charles at the University of Iowa, and Dr. Yager at the University of Northern Iowa.
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Ana Luisa Diaz de Cossio
Ása and Ana
dissonance~resonance
Dissonance – the absence of harmony among musical material – quite literally embodies what it means to be in this world right now. It does not gloss things over, nor does it simply represent chaos. Rather, dissonance can be an act of sincerity and a productive impulse – the sound of the unresolved and irreconcilable, tension seeking resolution, and difference demanding dialogue.
In music, dissonance serves a purpose: it generates movement, refuses the false comfort of premature harmony, and makes space for transformation. Beyond the musical, dissonance becomes the lived experience of existing in multiple, often contradictory realities at once. To live within dissonance is to learn to honour both the cacophony and the search for connection.
From this place, resonance emerges – not as the opposite of dissonance, but as its companion.
Resonance happens when one vibrating system sets another into motion: an act of relation, recognition, and shared vibration. In human and social terms, resonance is about attunement – being moved, listening deeply, and standing together in unease. It is an act of vulnerability and co-presence.
The performance explores this complex dynamic – dissonance and resonance as intertwined processes.
Asalaus (Ása Önnu Ólafsdóttir) and Ana [Surname] are experimental musicians and performer-composers whose collaborative work explores the intersections of resonance, dissonance, and collective experience through sound. Their practice engages with the physical and cultural dimensions of listening — sound as vibration, resistance, and relation — and traverses the boundaries between structure and spontaneity, composition and improvisation.
Emerging from Iceland’s underground scene, Asalaus creates raw and intricate soundscapes that blur genres and expand the possibilities of modern music. Her work draws from ambient, post-rock, and classical influences, weaving them into evolving textures that are both intimate and expansive. She has released two full-length albums and one EP (her debut nominated for the Kraumur Awards), and performs as part of Ateria, winners of Músíktilraunir (The Icelandic Music Experiments) in 2018, and the Gaffer Ensemble.
Ana’s work traverses the spaces between social structures, individuality, and spontaneity, exploring resonance as both a sonic and political state. Through extended techniques and unconventional performance practices, she challenges instrumental boundaries while interrogating the cultural systems that shape sound and perception. Her work has been presented in international contexts including Manifesté–IRCAM (FR), Darmstadt Summer Course (DE), OneBeat Taiwan (TW), and Dark Music Days (IS), among others. She holds degrees from Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and the Iceland University of the Arts, and is currently based at UC San Diego.
Together, Asalaus and Ana create performances that blur the line between composition and encounter — sound as both confrontation and connection. Their collaboration reflects a shared commitment to exploring the politics of resonance: how listening, dissonance, and collective vibration can become acts of resistance, and shared renewal.
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Cade Patterson
Magnet Massage
The Quest of Joshua Gilgamesh
live coding, guitar
The Quest of Joshua Gilgamesh features Cade Patterson, Josh Upchurch, and John Thompson using the live coding program Strudel alongside improvisation using physical instrumentation.
Magnet Massage is the creative collaboration of students in the Music Technology program at Georgia Southern University. The group’s live coding-centric performances aim to produce a pleasing atmosphere for listeners regardless of their understanding of what goes into the performance.
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Without Borders
Symphony No. Bird
For percussion quartet and electronics
Bird is a piece for percussion quartet and music technology.
Without Borders Percussion Quartet, formed in 2016, features four musicians from the United States and Taiwan. The members include Will Alderman, Kathryn Irwin, Yun Ju (Alice) Pan, and Alex Smith. They have performed in Taiwan, Michigan, Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, New York, as the invited guest artists at the 2020 McCormick Marimba Festival in Tampa, Florida, at PASIC 2024, and for Keiko Abe and her students at Toho Gakuen School of Music in Japan. Their first album was released in 2023 with Chorphilia of Yun Ju Pan’s transcription of String Quartet No. 5 by Béla Bartók. They perform works composed and arranged by members of the group for percussion, technology, and mixed instrumentation.
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in^set
Drēamscape I
‘Drēamscape I’ is a 20 minute audiovisual performance inspired by the ways our subconscious takes bits of everyday life – memory, emotions, desires, thoughts, fears, dreams/wishes – and reassembles/ recontextualizes them into something completely new. In dreams, we find ourselves repeating familiar behaviours, manifesting deep-seated desires, even speaking to loved ones from beyond the grave. Time becomes fluid, a liminal space where mundane and impossible scenarios play out side by side. In waking life, the various underlying threads/themes of our dreams can seem disjunct and bewildering, nevertheless, as we dream, these disparate elements become integrated into a complex but complete whole. ‘Drēamscape I’ explores this phenomenon through weaving together field recordings, graphic notation, audio processing, acoustic instruments, synthesizers, fixed media and audio reactive visuals. As improvisers, using graphic notation allows us to express multiple sonic viewpoints as we collectively explore ideas of memory, place and the surreal.
in^set is a flexible chamber ensemble dedicated to creation, improvisation and experimentation. Founded in 2018 by David Aguila (trumpet), Teresa Díaz de Cossio (flute), and Ilana Waniuk (violin), in^set is committed to commissioning and performing existing compositions which extends our respective instrumental practices beyond the confines of contemporary classical music. Collaboration is a foundational part of our creative practice. We seek to explore the sonic and visual possibilities of everyday objects, digital and analog visual components and hacked electronics. As advocates for music of the present, we aim to foster artistic partnerships and alternative modes of concert presentation. Our activities include outreach workshops and performances geared towards sharing our passion for expanded methods of sound production. In 2023, in^set were recipients of the University of California San Diego Arts and Community Engagement Fellowship in partnership with MOAASER a free non-profit online music academy that provides annual workshops and courses on contemporary music for Persian-speaking students, in^set performed a concert of MOAASER student works as part of Neofonía, Festival de Música Nueva, Ensenada. in^set has performed on concert stages across the U.S., Mexico and Iceland and were featured guest performers as part of Line Upon Line Percussion’s Winter Composer Festival (Austin, TX Jan 2024), the California Festival with Project [BLANK] (San Diego, November, 2023), San Diego New Music (San Diego, CA, May 2025) High Desert Soundings (Wonder Valley, CA 2025) . Recently, in^set were visiting guest artists at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (April, 2025) and collaborated with composer Nathan Haering and visual artist Mingyong Cheng as performers in Sonoluminescence, part of UC San Diego’s IDEAS festival (May, 2025).
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