Tag Archives: Louisville Experimental Music

SOLD OUT! Music in the Attic: DAVID GRUBBS and KEN BROWN at MAYBEIT’SFATE, Thursday April 9th

David Grubbs and Ken Brown at MaybeItsFate, Louisville, KY on Thursday April 9, 2026. Poster designed by Robert Beatty.
Poster designed by Robert Beatty.

The Other Side of Life is proud to present:

DAVID GRUBBS

and

KEN BROWN
KEN BROWN live visuals by SEETHINGS

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

Live music events in Louisville, KY. Show announcements, music and news, and other ephemera at: https://bsky.app/profile/theothersideoflife.bsky.social.

SARAH HENNIES and SAPAT at ART SANCTUARY, Friday March 6th

Poster for Sarah Hennies and Sapat at Art Sanctuary, Louisville, KY on Friday March 6th, 2026.
(Poster designed by Ella Lumpkins)

The Other Side of Life is proud to present:

SARAH HENNIES

and

SAPAT

Friday, March 6th, 2026
Art Sanctuary (back room)
1433 S. Shelby Street
Louisville, KY 40217

$15 advance tickets, $20 day of show
Advance tickets available online at Art Sanctuary;
Physical tickets available for in-person purchase on Wednesday February 4th at Surface Noise (cash only), 600 Baxter Avenue, Louisville KY 40204

18+
7:00 PM doors
8:00 PM music

Photo of Sarah Hennies in performance by GlassHertzzPhoto.
(Photo of Sarah Hennies by GlassHertzzPhoto)

SARAH HENNIES (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic ensemble music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at MoMA PS1 (NYC), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Warsaw Autumn, Ruhrtriennale (Essen), Archipel Festival (Geneva), Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Time:Spans (NYC), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has received commissions across a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Ensemble Dedalus, The Living Earth Show, Mivos String Quartet, Sarah Saviet/Joe Houston, Talea Ensemble, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire.

Her ground breaking audio-visual work Contralto (2017) explores transfeminine identity through the elements of “voice feminization” therapy, featuring a cast of transgender women accompanied by a dense and varied musical score for string quartet and three percussionists. The work has been in high demand since its premiere, with numerous performances taking place around North America, Europe, and Australia and was one of four finalists for the 2019 Queer|Art Prize.

She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, fellowships in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2025 and 2016, a participant in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, and the Composer In Residence at the 2025 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. She has received additional support from the Fromm Foundation, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Creative Work Fund.

She works collaboratively in a duo with double bassist Tristan Kasten-Krause and in the percussion trio Meridian. As a scholar and performer she is engaged with ongoing research about the percussion music of Iannis Xenakis and a recording project to document music by the American percussionist and composer Michael Ranta. Sarah is currently Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.

Hear more:
https://reinventionofromance.bandcamp.com/album/the-reinvention-of-romance
https://reinventionofromance.bandcamp.com/album/casts
https://tles.bandcamp.com/album/a-kind-of-ache
https://elsewheremusic.bandcamp.com/album/sovt

UPDATE: In addition to SARAH HENNIES‘s solo performance at Art Sanctuary on Friday March 6th, a world premiere of her piece “Blindsight” (2025) is taking place at Comstock Hall in the University of Louisville’s School of Music at 7:30 PM on Thursday, March 5th. More information below:
https://www.switchensemble.com/performance/2026/03/05/louisville.html
https://frommfoundation.fas.harvard.edu/people/sarah-hennies

For 25 years, SAPAT has operated as a Louisville-based large-group ensemble, shaping slow-moving architectures of sound across drone, minimalist composition, and experiments in rock, jazz, and folk idioms. The work drifts between extended environments and tighter, song-shaped forms, allowing time, density, and volume to act as compositional forces. More recordings circulate under affiliated names and alternative identities than under SAPAT itself, and even so, the catalog only gestures toward a much larger body of work. Each performance becomes a new room to enter: a site where resonance is risked rather than managed, and where sound answers back through the interplay of players, space, and duration.

Special thanks to Kris Abplanalp.

Live music events in Louisville, KY. Show announcements, music and news, and other ephemera at: https://bsky.app/profile/theothersideoflife.bsky.social.