Monday, October 16, 2017 | 7:30pm  10:30pm

AvantNOIR: San Francisco Bay Area bassist and composer Lisa Mezzacappa brings her lush and layered avantNOIR ensemble to Richmond in its first East Coast tour. avantNOIR is a suite of compositions for jazz sextet inspired by noir genre fiction set in New York City (where Mezzacappa was born and raised) and the San Francisco Bay Area (where she has lived for the past 16 years). avant-NOIR is a musical companion to Paul Auster’s abstract “soft-boiled” crime stories from his New York Trilogy of the 1980s, set in conversation with the West Coast classic hard-boiled 1920s-era detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett. The music progresses like a detective’s case, using clues and imagery from the crime novels such as maps, letters, messages and relationships between characters and places, to create compositions with acoustic and electric sounds, and composed and improvised material. The result is a contemporary jazz gem influenced as much by Charles Ives and Pierre Boulez as by Eric Dolphy and Henry Threadgill.

CGI Jesus: Local punk free jazz trio will be opening the night with a blast of double bass, sax and drums

Doors 730pm | Show 8pm | $6 - $10 | Cash Bar

Saturday, October 21, 2017 | 7:30pm  10:30pm

Black Iris will be presenting a fresh collaboration between genre-evading guitarist Tashi Dorji and literary lyricist James Jackson Toth in the intimate setting of the Tiny Bar at Black Iris on October 21st.  This performance brings together Dorji and Toth's disparate styles to find commonalities informed by intimate experiences of life on the road as well as the stories and impulses that define the characters that populate the country surrounding it. 

Tashi Dorji: grew up in Bhutan, on the eastern side of the Himalayas. Residing in Asheville since 2000 and soaking up a vast array of music. Along the way, Dorji developed a playing style unbound by tradition, yet with a direct line to intuitive artistry. His recordings feature improvisations that spasmodically grow along tangential, surprising paths. All references break loose during a composition, as Dorji keys into his own inner world.

James Jackson Toth: Swans frontman and head of Young God Records Michael Gira stated, James Jackson Toth's “got that picaresque quality that Dylan had in his heyday, wherein the shambolic narrator undergoes various travails and epiphanies — harrowing, bleak and darkly comical — in the course of a narrative, then leaves you mystified, both smiling and sad.

Doors 730pm | Show 8pm | $6 - $10 | Cash Bar

Wednesday, October 25, 2017 | 7:30pm  10:30pm

Lean Year: is Virginia-based singer Emilie Rex and filmmaker/musician Rick Alverson. Together the two co-wrote the minimalist folk gem over the course of a year at their home in Richmond. They note Karen Dalton, Brian Eno, Fred Neil as their influences and examine their experiences in the aspirational worlds of the occult, Catechism education, the cloistered world of figure skating, hierarchical academia and the parasitic culture of the film industry throughout a series of powerfully restrained and meticulously crafted vignettes.

Robert Donne: is a musician and film composer from Richmond, VA. He has recorded works with a variety of groups and individuals including Labradford (Kranky), Aix Em Klemm (Kranky), Spokane (Jagjaguwar), Gregor Samsa, Cristal (Flingco Sound System, Entr'acte), Pan.American (Kranky), Stephen Vitiello, and most recently Anjou (Kranky). His work as a composer includes Rick Alverson's Entertainment, which premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, and New Jerusalem (2011 Film Festival Rotterdam), as well as Daniel Carbone's Hide Your Smiling Faces (2013 Berlinale).

Doors 730pm | Show 8pm | $6 - $10 | Cash Bar

Thursday, October 26, 2017 | 7:30pm  10:30pm

(Voice and 16mm film projection)

The collaboration between Audrey Chen and Margaret Rorison works inside the intimate worlds of their maternal lines, as experienced through the myriad sounds of the human voice and 16mm film projection. Images and sounds captured in spaces brought together by their individual experiences of mother, daughter, granddaughter and how that affects their identities- and channels towards decision making, touch, habit, memory and language. 

Margaret Rorison: Margaret Rorison is a curator and filmmaker from Baltimore, Maryland. Her works often develop from explorations through rural and urban landscapes, combining language, sound and imagery to create installations, films and live 16mm projections. She is interested in the visceral nature of experience and the potentials of storytelling through the use of 16mm projection and sound, often sharing bills and collaborating with sound artists to explore new ways in which the image and machine can converse with sound and performance.

Audrey Chen: using the cello, voice and occasional analog electronics, Chen’s work delves deeply into her own version of narrative and non-linear storytelling. A large component of her music is improvised and her approach to this is extremely personal and visceral. Her playing explores the combination and layering of the homemade analog synthesizer, preparations and traditional and extended techniques in both the voice and cello. She works to join these elements into a singular ecstatic personal language. Over the past decade, her predominant focus has been her solo work with the cello, voice and electronics, but she has more recently begun to shift back towards the exploration of the voice as a primary instrument.

Doors 730pm | Show 8pm | $6 - $10 | Cash Bar

Dir. Hanns Walter Kornblum, Germany, 1925, 91 min., NR, Digital

In 1925, German director Hanns Walter Kornblum set out to create a film unlike any that had come before. His aim was a film that would serve as both a summation of all the astronomical knowledge available at the time and a dreamy investigation of what wonders might await humanity at the advent of space travel. With the help of 15 special effects technicians and nine cameramen, Kornblum's film is a technical marvel, one that revels in the beauty and mysteries of the universe, reminiscent of Carl Sagan's COSMOS more than 50 years later. Digital Restoration by Filmmuseum München.

About Coupler: Coupler is less a band than a creative organization.  Founded in 2011 by Lambchop veteran Ryan Norris, its core is Norris along with Rodrigo Avendaño and Rollum Haas though its membership has at points swelled to as many as eight.  At its root the project is an exercise in mutual cooperation of creative individuals and is an exploration of the intersections of man and machine, live and recorded, composed and improvised, stasis and flux.

November 16th | Doors 730pm | Show 8pm | $6 - $10

Friday, November 17, 2017 | 7:30pm  10:30pm

Jon Collin: is a guitar player from Lancashire, UK, currently based in Sweden. On record he plays either improvised freeform abstract blues or through-composed minimalistic utilitarian drone music. His live shows are improvisations using a system of body, mind, breath, strings and electricity. His most recent LP is The Nature (Early Music; 2017).

"Acoustic string improvs of great abstraction, clanger and depth, recalling a certain vibe that Loren Connors once called his own, although there's no aping here. Lots of dizzy inventions of clustered strings that manage to maintain a certain melodic beauty for all their weirdness. There are even bits of wobbled slide and sustain that recall Fahey at his loosest. Totally boss." – Byron Coley

“This spine-tingling album by Jon Collin is six-string primitivism taken to a whole other level of wildness and intuition.” – Derek Walmsley, The Wire

Doors 730pm | Show 8pm | $6 - $10 | Cash Bar