a weekly new music and experimental sound series every sunday
presented by new performance traditions and sfSound
DRESHER ENSEMBLE STUDIO
2201 poplar street :: oakland california
ample parking! please park perpendicular when past the trees on poplar
$10-$25 sliding scale (cash & venmo accepted at door - order advance here)
concerts start promptly at 7:15
:: late arrivals follow instructions on door to get buzzed in ::
MAY 17 2026 7:15pm
$20 click here to purchase advance tickets online
(FREE for students and financially challenged)

NEIL ROLNICK performs So Many Me's, with choreographer and dancer ALEX OLIVA (and her 8 foot ladder). measuring ... selling ... falling apart ... acting out ... surrender ... Neil also performs the score to Barbara Hammer's 1990 experimental film Sanctus, featuring a host of x-ray skeletons playing trumpets, drinking, shaking hands, shaving, putting on lipstick, all to the live mashup of Sanctus movements from masses by Machaut, Bach, Beethoven & Verdi.
“Plonsey Scheme” has nothing to do with finding suckers to invest in this “music” thing which promises to be such a hot commodity, with the fraudster paying off older investors with the funds provided by the younger ones -- but as we get older it is admittedly a little more like it: what experiences, revelations and revolutions can we promise you? MANTRA PLONSEY writes the words while DAN PLONSEY writes the music, but it comes together for the first (and last) time during performance. The music is written to accommodate improvisations utilizing various constraints, miniature compositions within compositions, fragments of songs from Eastern Europe and Northern El Cerrito. The band includes bagpipes virtuoso MATTHEW WELCH (also accordion and Balinese suling), clarinet/saxophone/flutist CORY WRIGHT (also trombone), guitarist TOMEK SINCLAIR, and MIC GENDREAU on turntables, electronics and percussion (and perhaps clarinet). Mantra sings and speaks, Dan plays reeds, brass, melodica, and bits of cheap percussion. And KATTT ATCHLEY provides a backdrop of projected tableaux of dolls among art: in movement along with their lighting on a system of turntables and lazy susans. PLONSEY SCHEME is eery, majestic, lost, mysterious, ceremonial, and more/less than just there.

MAY 24 2026 7:15pm
$20 click here to purchase advance tickets online
(FREE for students and financially challenged)
ANTIMATTER (xopher Davidson, analog / digital electronics) and JACOB FELIX HEULE (percussion): Wave Function Collapse, resting upon the threshold between a state of limitless potentials and one of decoherence-that which cannot be measured, quantified, simulated or collected as data. Forever drifting over time, a spectral bass-relief sculpted by entropy.
MEERENAI SHIM and DIANE GRUBBE team up to perform composed and improvised music for a variety of flutes, including glissando and contrabass flutes. The program includes Salvatore Sciarrino’s Il pomeriggio di un allarme al parcheggio for glissando flute, Pathways for two flutes by Efraín Amaya, Matthew Joseph Payne’s Etude for contrabass flute and TI83+ calculator and the premiere of a duo for two glissando flutes by Diane Grubbe.


MAY 31 2026 7:15pm
$20 click here to purchase advance tickets online
(FREE for students and financially challenged)
WEST OAKLAND SOUND SERIES' house new music ensemble, sfSoundGroup, presents a program traversing over 100 years of the avant-garde. The evening is anchored by ERIK SATIE'S minimalistic CINEMA (1926), performed live to RENÉ CLAIR’S landmark silent short Dada film, Entr’acte.
The concert features a trio of works by LARRY POLANSKY (1954 - 2024) that showcase his unique formal processes. The World’s Longest Melody employs a generative "morphing" technique to weave a single, continuous thread of sound through ever-shifting musical terrain. Approaching the Azimuth..., a short solo clarinet work written for Matt Ingalls, is a computer generated form with various distributions of the instrument's natural harmonics. freeHorn concludes the set with shimmering, resonant textures that invite an ensemble of improvisers to explore the natural physics of the harmonic series.
TOM DAMBLY premieres La trompette concrète 2, a new work for trumpet and multichannel electronics while MATT INGALLS reimagines the very first work written for the group, Fences (2001), a hybrid score of graphical and traditional notation with a heavy dose of improvisation.
PROGRAM
Erik Satie - CINEMA (1926)
with René Clair’s silent Dada short film, Entr’acte (1924)
Larry Polansky - The World’s Longest Melody (1993)
Larry Polansky - Approaching the Azimuth... (1998)
Larry Polansky - freeHorn (2004)
Tom Dambly - La trompette concrète 2 (2026)
Matt Ingalls - Fences (2001/2026)
MUSICIANS
Diane Grubbe, flute
Matt Ingalls, clarinet
John Ingle, saxophone
Tom Dambly, trumpet
Brendan Lai-Tong, trombone
Giacomo Fiore, guitar
Hadley McCarroll, piano
Kjell Nordeson, percussion
Monica Scott, cello
Lisa Mezzacappa, bass

June 7 2026 7:15pm
$20 click here to purchase advance tickets online
(FREE for students and financially challenged)
ROVA SAXOPHONE QUARTET presents two sets of original compositions.
First, commissioned works and recent Rova compositions for the quartet, including Music for Mouths by MIYA MASAOKA, The Knot Gallery by JOHN BUTCHER, I, Norton by GINO ROBAIR and pieces by quartet members.
In the second half, Rova joins by KAREN STACKPOLE (Gongwoman) for a set of Rova works adapted for saxophone quartet plus gongs and percussion. First streamed live in March of 2022, the works are presented to a live audience for the first time.
