Moira Smiley
Singer / Composer, Moira Smiley travels the world creating new works for voices and accompanying her performances with her banjo, accordion, piano, and percussive movement. Her recordings feature spare, vocally-driven collections of warped traditional songs and original polyphony. A vocal polyglot, her voice and compositions have been featured in TED conferences, on BBC Radio and TV, NPR, ABC Australia, and live at countless venues from Lincoln Center to Royal Festival Hall. When she’s not leading her own vocal group, moira smiley & VOCO, Moira has toured with pop artist, tUnE-yArDs; Irish super-group, SOLAS; The Lomax and Folklife Projects; and Billy Childs’ “Laura Nyro Re-Imagined”. Moira premiered her solo album ‘Unzip The Horizon’ at the Savannah Music Festival in 2018, and published it’s companion choral Songbook in 2019.
Recent recording video and session with Tune-Yards for Jimmy Kimmel Live TV show - with Tune-Yards
Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere
Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere are interdisciplinary artists whose practice spans over eighteen years of projects that actuate music and sound, radio, dissent, and the cultural complexities of the public sphere. The artists have produced works in video installation, lyric writing, and performance. Their research interests lie in the intersection between music, civic action, and historical moments that resonate through distinct musical instrumentation and sonorous traditions. Nevarez and Tevere have exhibited and screened their work at The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, Creative Time, New Museum, and Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York; Manifesta 8/Spain; Museo Raúl Anguiano, Guadalajara, Mexico; Casino Luxembourg, LU; Henie Onstad Art Centre, Høvikodden, Norway; Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria, and elsewhere. The first US survey of their work was exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2016. Their fellowships and grants include a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital fellowship, an Art Matters grant, a National Endowment for the Arts project grant, and a Franklin Furnace Performance Art fellowship. Both Nevarez and Tevere were Studio Fellows at The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, artists-in-residence at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden, and recently at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, and Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, California. Nevarez currently teaches at Parsons School of Design, New York. Tevere is Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.
http://www.nevareztevere.info/
https://vimeo.com/nevareztevere/video
Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere Layers of the City (installation view – interior), 2019 4K video, sound, scaffolding, window graphics commissioned by Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, CA.
Sam Torres
Sam Torres performing Canticle live in surround sound at The Linda in Albany, NY, December 2019
Sam Torres is a Troy, NY based composer, multi-instrumentalist, and audio engineer. His ongoing collaborations with pianist Sophia Vastek include a duo called Tilted Arc, and Organ Colossal, a performing, concert presenting, and musical-community-building collective. Sam has written music for saxophone and live electronics, orchestra, solo piano, and various chamber ensembles. His composition, “Ritual: Breath of a Poem” for percussion quartet and interactive multichannel electronics won the first prize in the Peabody Institute Prix d’Eté in 2018. Sam has been commissioned by Sopriola, The Witches, the Peabody Community Chorus, the public school district of Bedford, NY, Music of Reality, bassist Sam Zagnit, choir director Sonya Sutton, and Sophia Vastek. Sam’s music has been heard in house concerts and coffee shops from Washington, DC to New York’s Hudson Valley, as well as at the Thalia Theater at Symphony Space, the National Cathedral, Spectrum NYC, Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, Arts Letters & Numbers, Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Manhattan School of Music, and internationally in South Africa, Germany, the UK, and after June of 2020, Latvia and the Netherlands as well. Performing woodwinds, electronics, and working as an audio engineer has brought Sam to venues across the US, including EMPAC, Town Hall Seattle, University of Chicago, SMOKE, Spectrum NYC, MIT, and others. Sam holds a B.Mus from Manhattan School of Music, and a M.Mus in from the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
https://samtorresmusic.com
Sophia Vastek
Sophia Vastek_Histories_Album_2017_Innova Recordings
Pianist and keyboardist Sophia Subbayya Vastek, described as playing with "passion and profound tenderness” (Second Inversion) and with “serene strokes and lyrical beauty” (Brooklyn Rail), maintains a multifaceted life as a performer, educator, organizer, and event producer and curator. She dedicates her musical life to cultivating accessible spaces in which shared listening experiences can help build stronger communities. Sophia’s debut album “Histories” was released on innova Recordings with music by Michael Harrison, Donnacha Dennehy, and John Cage. It was produced by multiple Grammy-winning engineer Adam Abeshouse. In addition to her work as a solo pianist, collaborative projects include Organ Colossal, a nonprofit and musicians’ collective committed to producing accessible concerts that are safe and available to any musician who wishes to perform; Tilted Arc, a synth and piano-based electronic duo with Sam Torres; and The Lift Series, a series dedicated to bringing a diverse range of local and regional artists to the historic Troy Savings Bank Music Hall. Performing has taken Sophia across three continents, including tours to South Africa, Mexico, and France. In the United States, she has performed at diverse venues/series such as the Kennedy Center, the United States State Department, The Apollo Theatre, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, An Die Musik, The Linda (Albany), National Sawdust (Brooklyn), Evolution Series (Baltimore), The NoiseGate Festival (NYC), Queens New Music Festival, and Arts Letters & Numbers (NY). Sophia is based in Troy, NY, a community she loves dearly.
www.sophiavastek.com
