Hopefully, at least some readers may recall that most of the activity at The Lab will take place at the end of the last full week of September. This will be the 25th Annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival with three performances at 8 p.m. on Thursday, September 24, Friday, September 25, and Saturday, September 26. The only other offerings at the venue will take place about two weeks earlier. There will be two performances, each beginning at a different time.
My guess is that regular readers know by now that The Lab is located in the Mission at 2948 16th Street. This is particularly convenient for those using public transportation, since it is a short walk to the corner of 16th Street and Mission Street. Busses stop at that corner for both north-south and east-west travel, and downstairs there is a station for the BART line running under Mission Street. Doors open half an hour in advance of the performance; and specific information for each event provides a hyperlink to the Web page that accounts for both background material and a hyperlink for ticket purchases as follows:
Friday, September 11, 8 p.m.: Heart Trio consists of three musicians (of course), whose debut album, also called Heart Trio, was released in 2024. All three of them are multi-instrumentalists, and it is likely that at least some of those instruments will be unfamiliar to some of the listeners. William Parker covers the “front line,” performing a diversity of instruments in the flute family: guembri, shakuhachi, bass duduk, Serbian flute, and ney flute. Cooper-Moore plays the first instrument he built for himself, an eleven-tone xylophone called the ashimba. Hamid Drake provides a diversity of percussion instruments with a preference for the frame drum.
Michelle Lou at the controls of her electronic gear with Stefan Maier standing in the shadows behind her (from the Web page for their performance)
Saturday, September 12, 8:30 p.m.: The second program will consist of two sets, both of which will be duo performances. The first set will be a multichannel project with electroacoustic composition and performance by Michelle Lou and Stefan Maier. The second set will be taken by 100,000,000 Unread Messages. This is also an electroacoustic duo, whose performers are Connor Tomaka and Isabelle Waldner Kalb.
