TICKETS ARE VERY LIMITED FOR THIS EVENT! $15 advance tickets, $20 day of show — PAY WHAT YOU WISH option also available! Advance tickets available online at TicketLeap; Physical tickets on sale Friday October 16th for in-person purchase at Surface Noise (cash only), 600 Baxter Avenue, Louisville KY 40204
ALL AGES 7:00 PM Doors 8:00 PM Music
Magic Tuber Stringband by Libby Rodenbough
MAGIC TUBER STRINGBAND, hailing from North Carolina, probes the undercurrents of the landscapes around them. Highly skilled players and writers, the trio are leaders within the burgeoning avant composition world utilizing folk instrumentation. Their music appears to weave in and out of the fabric of their surroundings, reflecting their time spent living across the Southeast and studying its regional folk traditions and natural histories. Having performed recently at Big Ears, Hopscotch, Sound & Gravity (and many other places along the way) the group’s music resonates well beyond their regional roots. Their newest record, Heavy Water, was released May 22, 2026 on the venerable Thrill Jockey Records. The ensemble continues to stretch the parameters of acoustic instrumental expression with masterful flourishes of dense, textural arrangements, subtle minimalist gestures and deft improvisation.
MAN EATER (performing as the duo of Grace Rogers and Nadia Ramlagan for this concert) has built a unique repertoire and a following both inside of and outside of the old-time scene, having played in every setting from dive bars and house shows to old time festivals including the Celebration of Women in Old Time Music in Knoxville and the Cowan Creek Mountain Music School. They’ve shared stages with acts like the Local Honeys, and Leo Shannon & Sarah Kate Morgan. MAN EATER is committed to deep connection and study in the old-time music world, and meaningful connection with the broader music community.
TICKETS ARE VERY LIMITED FOR THIS EVENT! $15 advance tickets, $20 day of show — PAY WHAT YOU WISH option also available! Advance tickets available online at TicketLeap; Physical tickets on sale Friday August 21st for in-person purchase at Surface Noise (cash only), 600 Baxter Avenue, Louisville KY 40204
ALL AGES 7:00 PM Doors 8:00 PM Music
Photo by by Mike Belleme
TASHI DORJI is a Bhutanese-born, Asheville-based experimental guitarist whose fiercely intuitive improvisations have carved out a unique space in the contemporary avant-garde. His expansive discography includes deeply felt solo works like Stateless (2020) and we will be wherever the fires are lit (2024), and his most recent electric album low clouds hang, this land is on fire (2026) on Drag City. TASHI DORJI is one half of Manas, the dynamic duo with drummer Thom Nguyen, and a founding member of the free jazz trio KUZU, alongside saxophonist Dave Rempis and drummer Tyler Damon. His collaborators span a wide spectrum: from Mette Rasmussen, Susie Ibarra, Efrim Manuel Menuck, Alex Zhang Hungtai, John Dieterich, Audrey Chen and Joe McPhee to more recent partnerships with Tony Buck, Terrie Ex, Andy Moor, bassist John Edwards, and drummer Steve Noble. Across his solo and group projects, DORJI’s playing, rooted in alternate tunings, prepared guitar, and spontaneous gesture, articulates an aesthetic of resistance, deep listening, and collective transformation.
TASHI DORJI turns to the electric guitar. After the furious acoustic improvisations that drove [his previous two albums] —Stateless and we will be wherever the fires are lit — it’s easy to imagine [his new] album of electric guitar improvisations as an encompassingly incendiary essay. Especially when titled low clouds hang, this land is on fire. After all, this is a man capable of tearing up the place with the tactile musical violence of Bill Orcutt and Derek Bailey! And yet, this knowledge serves to set up a greater shock: the album’s disarmingly gentle musical drift. When asked why he turned the knob down from 11 for this album, TASHI says simply, “To find the silence.” As ever with TASHI, this is a political statement. Even the search for silence takes intention and happens for a reason. In this time of such institutional inhumanity, what is there to feel but exhaustion? When seeing the faces of the deprived, what is there to feel other than hopelessness? In the face of such grief, what words are there to say? So, TASHI got a couple amps, moved from the shed where he’d done his first two [Drag City] titles, set up in a room in the family home with high ceilings and dialed in the reverb. Once the sound was in the space, reflecting in a manner that he felt congenial with his mood, he taped it. It’s a striking signal, meditative and melancholy, with a delicacy comparable to the lineage of Loren Connors or Bill Frisell, the songs at times developed with the deliberate exposition of themes in raga’s alap form. It’s a sound that lives within silence. Once he’d laid down the sound, TASHI went back and listened to the composition of each piece. Then the words came easily. They’re the titles of these songs, they provide the narrative — or a prism, to allow us to gaze unblinking upon the awesome rot of empire. These are TASHI DORJI‘s punk anthems for the year 2026… for all the years, really— to be thrown to the people outside the walls, to aid them in their quest to be allowed in.
Currently FLANGER MAGAZINE is the trio of Chris Bush (Caboladies, Equipment Pointed Ankh, Sapat), Ben Traughber (Sapat, Equipment Pointed Ankh), and Leidner (Sapat, YLEM) with occasionally Jim Marlowe (Equipment Pointed Ankh, Tropical Trash, Sapat), “Gathering samples, a River Doctor Limnologist inspecting the properties of [FLANGER MAGAZINE‘s 2022 album] After the Bend might note the specter of Leroy Jenkin’s free-violin heat-light deep in the water’s thermal stratification. Or mortgage the late-Maestro’s time with Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza to pay down the growing river heat budget. Or take one’s dirty buckets to the banks of the 19th laundromat where Walt Dickerson plays his vibraphone parts from Divine Gemini with dowsing rods. Or excavate the bedrock in the drainage basin, noting skeletal remains of a Shostakovich string quartet attempting to tune up a Kentucky Fiddle’s subsequent influence on the chemical composition of the water. Or consult the historical revisionist reenactment troupe’s episode of Fishing with John (Fahey) in which Codona, The Sea Ensemble and Nuno Canavarro guest host as their fleet of paddle boats churn river water into a regal lager, and all the fish get drunk in their quest for the leaner enamel Hosianna Mantra GPS coordinates of the Fattened Herb.” – Kris Abplanalp.
Special thanks to Ella Lumpkins, Kris Abplanalp, and MaybeIt’sFate.
UPDATE 8/29/2026: DUE TOEVENTS BEYOND OUR (AND ANYONE’S) CONTROL THE JOE MCPHEE/KEN VANDERMARK/CHRIS CORSANO TRIO PERFORMANCE ATRoots 101 African-American MuseumON FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 4TH 2026 HAS BEEN CANCELLED.
Refunds for advance online tickets purchased through TicketLeap will be available shortly.
For refunds for advance physical tickets, bring your ticket (and credit/debit card you purchased the ticket with, if applicable) to the following locations:
We apologize for the cancellation, and the inconvenience. We were looking forward not only to seeing Joe, Ken, and Chris play, but also to seeing all of you! Our massive thanks to Joe, Ken, Chris, Lamont Collins and Roots 101, Robert Beatty, Kris Abplanalp, Better Days, and Surface Noise.
Here’s a clip of JOE MCPHEE, in conversation at the Counterflows Festival in 2014, telling his incredible story of Ornette Coleman inviting him, then unknown in the greater jazz world, to play at John Coltrane’s grave the day of Coltrane’s funeral in 1967.
Joe McPhee (Photo by Žiga Koritnik)
JOE MCPHEE (b. 1939, USA) is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser, known for his pioneering work in avant-garde jazz and experimental music. Primarily recognized for his virtuosic saxophone playing, MCPHEE also performs on trumpet, pocket trumpet, and a variety of other instruments. His career spans over five decades, during which he has collaborated with leading figures in the free jazz and experimental music scenes, including William Hooker, KEN VANDERMARK, Pauline Oliveros, and Roscoe Mitchell, among many others. MCPHEE’s work blends elements of jazz, free improvisation, and contemporary classical music, marked by emotional depth and innovative approaches to sound. Throughout his career, he has maintained a commitment to pushing the boundaries of music, both in solo performances and collaborative projects.
KEN VANDERMARK (b. 1964, USA) is an avant-garde composer, improviser, saxophonist/clarinetist, curator, and writer whose unique history has given him the opportunity to perform extensively and record with key figures of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), New York’s Downtown scene, Free Music Productions (Germany), the English improvisation scene, post-punk, Ethiopian music, and Japanese free jazz. He’s been the director of the Catalytic Sound musician cooperative since 2012, has run Audiographic Records since 2014, in 1999 was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in music, and in 2024 he curated the Music Unlimited Festival in Wels, Austria. VANDERMARK moved to Chicago from Boston in 1989 and has worked continuously from the early 1990s onward, both as a performer and organizer in North America, Europe, Latin America, Japan, and Ethiopia, recording in a large array of contexts, with many internationally renowned musicians. kenvandermark.com Instagram Facebook
CHRIS CORSANO (b. 1975, USA) is a drummer who’s been active at the intersections of collective improvisation, free jazz, avant-rock, and noise music since the late 1990’s. He’s worked with JOE MCPHEE, Bill Orcutt, Björk, and many others — appearing on over 200 albums and touring constantly in an ultra-wide array of collaborations. CORSANO has built an inventive and highly personal musical language through extended percussion techniques and creative augmentations to his kit, with circular-breathed reeds, bowed strings, and resonant materials expanding the drums’ melodic and textural possibilities in addition to their rhythmic ones. cor-sano.com Instagram Facebook
The trio of JOE MCPHEE (sax/voice), KEN VANDERMARK (reeds), and CHRIS CORSANO (drums/percussion) will be performing together for the first time in a limited series of concerts in Louisville, Cincinnati, and Lexington, concluding their tour at the Sound & Gravity Festival in Chicago on September 6th. Though this is their initial music as a group, there have been a number of previous collaborations from these musicians, some of them longstanding: JOE and KEN first played together at the recording session for A Meeting in Chicago in 1996. Since then, they have worked together many times, most notably in the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet. Their latest album performances together are as a duo and documented on Musings of a Bahamian Son: Poems and Other Words by Joe McPhee, released by Corbett vs. Dempsey in 2024.
JOE and CHRIS have worked together extensively for more than 15 years, with many recordings and concerts as a duo and in groups with important figures in the music like Eddie Prévost, Evan Parker, Lol Coxhill, and Steve Swell. KEN and CHRIS have also played together in many configurations, beginning with a trio concert at the Festival Germinal in Mexico City with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier during November of 2014 and, since then, they have continued to develop a special musical rapport.
Though the music from this new trio by MCPHEE, VANDERMARK, and CORSANO will be completely improvised and spontaneous, it will be informed by their collective histories, a background which includes decades of work with a variety of musical aesthetics and artists that has taken place during hundreds of concerts and dozens of recordings, at home and abroad.
Founded by Lamont Collins in 2020, the ROOTS 101 AFRICAN-AMERICAN MUSEUM is a place where visitors can see themselves in history, explore the African-American story in its entirety, and gain a greater understanding of the achievements, cultural contributions, and experiences of our community.
Thursday, April 9th, 2026 at MaybeIt’sFate (Music in the Attic) 1425 Story Avenue Louisville, KY 40206
SOLD OUT!
Thanks to Surface Noise for selling physical tickets.
7:00 PM doors 8:00 PM music
(Photo by Julien Sitruk)
DAVID GRUBBS is Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Good night the pleasure was ours, The Voice in the Headphones, Now that the audience is assembled, and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (all published by Duke University Press) as well as the collaborative artists’ books Simultaneous Soloists (with Anthony McCall, Pioneer Works Press) and Projectile (with Reto Geiser and John Sparagana, Drag City). DAVID GRUBBS has released sixteen solo albums and appeared on more than 200 releases. In 2000, his The Spectrum Between (Drag City) was named “Album of the Year” in the London Sunday Times. He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, and Josiah McElheny, and his work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. Louisville native DAVID GRUBBS was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Luc Ferrari, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, Jan St. Werner, the Red Krayola, and many others. He is a recipient of the Berlin Prize and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts award in Music/Sound, a member of the board of directors of Blank Forms, and director of the Blue Chopsticks record label. 2025’s Whistle from Above is the first solo collection David’s released since 2017’s Creep Mission. During the 2020 shutdown, David played what he precisely quantified as “a shit-ton of guitar,” more than he could recall playing ever previously. Reinvigorated by this period of enforced woodshedding, he produced a series of new pieces, mostly for guitar, but also a piano composition and an exceptionally eerie bit of musique concrète. These seemed to imply a solo set that would tour marvelously when the time was right again. Whistle from Above is a colorful, compulsive set of instrumental pieces in which David and his chosen collaborators interact amid the steady roll of an expansive landscape based in the hypnosis of David’s immediately recognizable guitar style.
(Photo by The Other Side of Life)
KEN BROWN is a founding member of Tortoise and Pullman, and former member of Bastro, Gastr del Sol, and Directions. In 2025 three solo albums credited to Louisville drummer and percussionist Tim Barnes were released with production, mixing, and performances by Brown: Lost Words, Noumena, and Inside Energy. Also in 2025 Brown released Cease and Desist by Jungle Boogie, recordings of his duo with Slint drummer Britt Walford. January 2026 saw the return of Pullman, Brown’s group featuring Tim Barnes, Chris Brokaw (Come/Codeine), Curtis Harvey (Rex), and Doug McCombs (Tortoise/Eleventh Dream Day) with their third album, III, released by Western Vinyl.
KEN BROWN will have live visuals created by SEETHINGS, Louisville’s own Tim Furnish, a multi-faceted musician, graphic designer, photographer, and VJ. Furnish is a founding member of classic Louisville bands Parlour, Cerebellum, and Crain and has been a member of The For Carnation and Aerial M. As SEETHINGS he has provided visuals for Old Baby, Shedding, Flanger Magazine, Jungle Boogie, Jaye Jayle, and many others. SEE MORE of SEETHINGS: https://www.youtube.com/user/timfurnish https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkgHn6E1QjNRWEOET_tQttXBn-Gkddv1y&si=_-7s4BwvNf1CCDaL
The first 20 pairs of tickets sold at GUESTROOM RECORDS will come with a FREE cassette of COLISEUM‘s Anxiety’s Kiss!
Founded by Louisville musician Ryan Patterson and including Kayhan Vaziri and Carter Wilson, power trio COLISEUM have grown to become one of today’s quintessential contemporary punk bands. Successfully melding progressive musicianship, hardcore fervor, and vital social awareness into one constantly evolving artistic vision. Over the last decade COLISEUM have released music on a host of labels including; Temporary Residence, Relapse, Level Plane, Auxiliary (Ryan’s own label), and Deathwish. Anxiety’s Kiss is the new album from COLISEUM, recorded at The Magpie Cage by producer/engineer J. Robbins (Jawbox, Burning Airlines). Anxiety’s Kiss is a hook-laden maturation of the COLISEUM sound. Nods to their early D-Beat leanings are there, but it is their willingness to embrace Post-Punk melody and explore the space between notes that make Anxiety’s Kiss so alluring. Confidently growing within the punk world, without ever leaving it behind. A flawless, yin and yang pairing that is Coliseum at the peak of their experimental and anthemic powers.
Louisville’s creatively restless dark-rock auteurs YOUNG WIDOWS feature guitars that are enormous, drums that are pummeling, and trademark gut-churning bass that is more jaw-dropping than ever. Disregarding all boundaries and pushing forward with a masterful command of post-punk, noise rock, pseudo industrial, experimental doom, and goth, YOUNG WIDOWS emit the intimidating force of a 10-piece with the heart and soul of a classic power trio.
CHILD BITE is a Detroit-based punk/metal/noise rock band formed in 2005. Currently signed to Phil Anselmo’s Housecore Records as well as Indianapolis-based Joyful Noise Recordings, their music consists of atonal guitar melodies, distorted bass, frequent rhythmic shifts, and frenzied, howling vocals. Their most easily identifiable influences include ’80s hardcore (Black Flag, Dead Kennedys) and ’90s alternative (The Jesus Lizard, Faith No More). Their sound has been described as “enormous and predatory, from the baleful rhythm section to Shawn Knight’s [frightening vocals]” (Fine Print Mag, 2013). CHILD BITE has over a dozen releases of varying lengths, including a triple split 7″ with David Yow & Thurston Moore, as well as a 5″ EP of Anal Cunt songs featuring Phil Anselmo on vocals.
Wednesday, April 1st, 2076 at the KFC YUM! CENTER (provided it’s still standing)
Doors open at 8 PM, ALL AGES! $6,000,000 Spacebucks
Advance online tickets available shortly!
Recommended if you like: Holograms, Cartoons, The Future
BLACK GOD is comprised of Rob Pennington (Endpoint, Minnow), Ryan Patterson (Coliseum, Blood Moon Rail), Nick Thieneman (Young Widows), and Ben Sears (Mountain Asleep, Xerxes).
From the barren streets of middle-America come SHAVED WOMEN. Reigning as the supreme harbingers of chaos in Saint Louis, Missouri, this nihilistic quartet has risen to the top through an effective mix of brutal noise rock and self-destructive hardcore punk. Informed by the caustic nature of small city-towns, the band focuses its feedback-drenched dirge into a cross-section of existential anxiety and landlocked depression. With the ability to simultaneously smolder and combust, SHAVED WOMEN seamlessly blend the warring guitar riffs of Black Flag, the rabid mania of The Jesus Lizard, and Drunks With Guns’ reckless abandon. Singer Ben Salyers’ animalistic vocal approach barrels in the red with self-loathing rage over guitarist Chris Eck’s grinding walls of feedback. Referencing the buzz-saw warp of Black Flag’s Greg Ginn, Eck weaves through a maze of discordant riffs while maintaining total control of the band’s uncompromising progression. Anchored by the dialed-in rhythm section of bassist John Birkner and drummer Tom Valli, the band easily transitions from erratic breakneck speeds to a headstomping trench crawl with metronomic vitality. The band’s unmatched tenacity results in a bevy of AmRep-style breakdowns hinged on unforgettable mid-tempo hooks and complete brainwave annihilation. This will be their second-to-last ever show!
TRAUMA HARNESS hails from the surrounding area of Saint Louis, Missouri and fling back and forth on a bipolar emotional spectrum of dark hopelessness dirges to uplifting noisy pop.
SCUZZ MASTER are a relatively new Louisville band, full of rock n’ roll abandon. You might have seen them open for White Reaper and Anwar Sadat at Zanzabar recently, but if you missed it, here’s your next chance to see them destroy!
ATIVIN formed in Bloomington, Indiana in the winter of 1994 after Chris Carothers (guitar) and Rory Leitch (drums) met at Indiana University. Guitarist Dan Burton joined the group the following spring, cementing the band’s loud, instrumental rock sound. Steve Albini and Carl Saff recorded the band’s debut EP, Pills vs. Planes, which was released in December 1996. The spring of 1997 saw the release of the “Modern Gang Reader”/”Larkin” single, the first of several releases for Secretly Canadian Records. The band worked with Andy Bryant at King Size on German Water, its debut album for Secretly Canadian, releasing it in March 1998. A return to Albini’s Chicago studio, Electrical Audio, yielded the four-song EP Summing the Approach, which was released in the fall of 1998. Taking a break while Carothers moved out west and Burton worked in the band Early Day Miners, ATIVIN reconvened in 2001 with drummer Kevin Duneman, to record Interiors, which added sparse, minimalist vocals to their sound; it was released in early 2002 to critical acclaim. Continuing on in the same vein, ATIVIN recorded their last release Night Mute in both Bloomington and Portland, using drummers Mark Rice (John Wilkes Booze) and Joey Ficken (The Swords Project) in early 2004. After a lengthy hiatus, ATIVIN are now playing select shows when and if they feel it’s right.
ANWAR SADAT “sound totally Boston circa 1982: aggressively shouted vocals, aggressive rhythms, jaggedly distorted guitars and just enough melody above the noise to make them catchy as hell.” – New York Music Daily. ANWAR SADAT has released two albums and an EP, and is currently working on their third album.
Louisville, Kentucky’s KARASS uses live loops, chimey guitars, interstellar electronics, driving bass, pulsing synths, thunderous drums, and weepy cello to create sprawling soundscapes that drive forward towards an epic climax in a quirky, odd-metered fashion.
A Bhutanese guitarist now residing in Asheville, North Carolina, TASHI DORJI makes meticulously crafted sounds that conjure spirits, wrestle demons, and tame wild beasts. As beautiful as they are cerebral, his acoustic works are reminiscent of Derek Bailey’s free improvisations, flamenco and John Fahey’s Americana. His new album, Appa, will be released by Bathetic on March 31st: http://batheticrecords.com/release/appa/.
THE SHONDES (rhymes with “Hondas” and Yiddish for “shames” or “disgraces”) are a rock band from Brooklyn, NY, who play Bikini Kill-meets-Bruce Springsteen-style sing-along anthems for you. Formed by best friends Louisa Rachel Solomon and Elijah Oberman back in 2006, the band has released four albums, including 2013′s critically-acclaimed The Garden (praised by Rolling Stone, Billboard, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, etc.). The band has toured the U.S. with Against Me! and headlined U.S. and European tours, including shows with Uh Huh Her, Electrelane, Rasputina, MEN, Caithlin De Marrais (Rainer Maria), Franz Nicolay (The Hold Steady), Mary Timony (Helium, Wild Flag), Erase Errata, Amy Ray (The Indigo Girls), Joe Lally (Fugazi), Mecca Normal, Bonfire Madigan, Party Line (Bratmobile), Lesbians on Ecstasy, Kaia Wilson (Team Dresch) and many more; and performed at festivals including CMJ Music Festival in New York, South By Southwest in Austin, and North By Northeast in Toronto.
JULIE OF THE WOLVES is comprised of vocalist/guitarist Carrie Neumayer (Second Story Man, Early Age), Stephanie Gary (Venus Trap, The Frequent Sea), Salena Filichia (Madame Machine, Venus Trap) and Becca Lindsay (The Red Nails, Minnow). Those are only a partial listing of the bands these people have been in. This lineup has a lot of Louisville musical history running through it. The name of the band comes from the 1972 book by Jean Craighead George, in which the title character must face changes and dangerous challenges forced upon her from culture, the elements and humankind. “These are challenging tunes that do not shy from pushing and pulling simultaneously, a teaming between catchy melodies and a pounding aggression.” — American Gloam.
HAILEY WOJCIK’s darkly witty lyrics and fierce aesthetic have earned her the title of “the Wednesday Addams of her genre” (The Deli Magazine), and My Old Kentucky Blog notes that she “sounds mighty fine at volumes that may disturb others who may be in the room with you.” Her music and videos have caught the attention of Magnet, After Ellen, MTV, Logo, and Girls Get Busy Zine. She has co-directed several music videos, many of which included her own stop-motion animation. Her debut album, Diorama, was produced by Dan Romer in 2010 (Beasts of the Southern Wild, Jenny Owen Youngs, Jukebox the Ghost). In the intervening years since releasing Diorama, Hailey pursued a side project, the garage rock two-piece, WOJCIK, which released an eponymous EP and an LP entitled Wise Blood, in 2012 and 2013, respectively. The Book of Beasts EP comes out on March 3rd, 2015 on cassette with Wiener Records.
