San Francisco Tape Music Festival
Saturday January 10, 2026 7:00pm
utility frequency (for choir and combined cycle thermal power plant) (2024)
9’47” Ambisonic
Besòs V is a combined cycle thermal power plant built on the southern bank of the river Besòs, northeast of Barcelona, Spain, right where the river flows into the Mediterranean sea. Day in, day out, this power plant emits a buzzing sound, caused by its different components vibrating and resonating with each other. The main audible sound is a 50Hz vibration, which is the standard utility frequency throughout the European Union and in many other countries in the world.
For this piece, I made some field recordings of the station and later recreated the different audible frequencies with my own voice, which resulted in an almost consonant, almost beautiful major chord, a sort of om chant. Through this process, I want to reflect on the technological systems that form the basis of our society. Though unseen and often incomprehensible to us, they play a huge role in our daily lives, almost becoming part of our bodies.
Renán Zelada Cisneros (b. 1993) is a Dutch-Venezuelan composer currently living in Barcelona, Spain. He studied at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, and the Amsterdam Conservatoire, in the Netherlands. His music is frequently inspired by other art forms such as literature, visual arts, and architecture, often relating to social and environmental themes. Together with writing music for the concert stage, Renán also collaborates regularly with filmmakers internationally in both fiction and documentary films.
Par une belle fin d'apres-midi (2024)
8’20” Ambisonic
This work contrasts aural places of intimacy and enclosure with expansive spaces, propagating through their interaction. The title is borrowed from a painting by René Magritte, depicting two coffins seated in a mountainous landscape. The source materials for the work were recorded with 18-channel microphones arranged in a globe shape, encoded in Higher Order Ambisonics. Generous support lent by Musiques & Recherches at the Métamorhose d'Orphée Studio allowed completion of the work during the summer of 2024.
Nikos Stavropoulos (Athens, Greece, 1975) is a member of the Music, Sound & Performance Group at Leeds Beckett University (Leeds, England, UK), where he is a Professor in Composition and lecturer on Electroacoustic Music. He is a founding member of the Echochroma New Music Research Group, a member of the British ElectroAcoustic Network (BEAN) and the Hellenic Electroacoustic Music Composers Association (HELMCA). His music is primarily concerned with notions of tangibility and immersivity in acousmatic experiences, and the articulation of acoustic space in the pursuit of probable aural impossibilities. His works have been performed and broadcast around the world; he is the recipient of several international awards.
Detachment (2026)
6’50” 16 Channels
Detachment is a study on the cohesiveness of a particular musical phrase, multiplied in precise fuguing layers, each slowly decoupling from every other, until the original form becomes something new.
Cliff Caruthers is a San Francisco-based sound designer and composer with over 300 theatre production credits, including Born with Teeth for Alley Theatre, Frankenstein for Guthrie Theater, Caucasian Chalk Circle for ACT, TRAGEDY: A Tragedy for Berkeley Rep, Sweat for Center Rep, Man in Love for KC Rep, and Fun Home for TheatreWorks, where he was Resident Sound Designer for seven years. He is co-curator of the San Franciscto Tape Music Festival and a proud member of United Scenic Artists. He is currently teaching sound design at TAPS (Theater Arts and Performance Studies department) at Stanford University.
Culverts (Bushy Dell Creek) (2025)
5’08” Stereo
This piece was created as a part of a course I took in my final semester at UC Berkeley: Sonic Geographies. Every week, we would follow the path of a Bay Area creek and construct a "soundwalk" that represented our journey. When creeks were routed underground or entirely removed from the landscape, we followed old maps and histories, superimposing the movement of water on our journey. Following the creek from Piedmont Park to Lake Merritt requires traversing stark contrasts and suburban spread. In Piedmont Park, the creek bubbles greedily through a redwood valley; this has all been pruned and preened by settlers. Down past Grand Lake Theater and to the lake, an abundance of music and curious passersby. Geese and church bells dot the sonic landscape, joyous and jumping. The lake acts as a huge satellite dish, reflecting and refracting sound. Special thanks to my Sonic Geography classmates and our professor, Joel Wanek.
Stella Singer does everything but sing: she field records, plays classical piano, is a synth whizz, bird watches, plays keys in an indie band, writes a blog, and goes on long walks. She is a recent UC Berkeley graduate who studied environmental science, journalism, and geography. This amalgamation of interests led her to create and submit a piece to the SF Tape Festival. Her work is part of a larger project started in a Sonic Geographies course, which attempts to capture the geography of a place through sound.
Stunned Night (2007)
9’49” Stereo
It was a sleep that took me far and brought me back fresh and uncaring to a sound that echoed in the still-dark night. It was a cry that seemed to come from the planets themselves. It was ancient and very new. It was a sound I can only describe as red. I shivered. It was a mix of whale song and passenger pigeon cry: the sound of extinction.
- C Pam Zhang, The Land of Milk and Honey
Kristin Miltner is a composer and immersive sound designer based in the Bay Area, CA. She creates music with her custom software, which she has designed to scan sound files and live input, allowing her to instantly restructure a single sound into tessellating multidimensional fabrics of sounds. She applies this method to a wide variety of sonic endeavors, whether interactive and experiential sound design, game sound design, ensemble performance and improvisation, or her solo work. She studied with Maggi Payne, Chris Brown, and Pauline Oliveros at Mills College and released her debut solo album, “Grains”, in 2007 on Praemedia, following it with “Music for Dreaming and Playing” on the Asthmatic Kitty label. She has designed soundscapes for many games, and her endeavors at Spatial Inc (Emeryville, CA) has led to collaborations with artists and sound designers at Meow Wolf, National Geographic, and researchers at the Estuary and Ocean Science Center in Tiburon, CA building elaborate real-world immersive experiences.
- INTERVAL -
Resilience (2025)
10’24” Stereo
The piece Resilience was inspired by an injury I sustained in January 2025, and by the subsequent recovery process. Soon after deciding to use the event as a musical metaphor, and to title the work Resilience, the word “resilience” seemed to appear everywhere, like a meme.
Thom Blum is a San Francisco-based composer who creates almost exclusively electroacoustic music. Recent musical activities include the releases of two Bandcamp albums: “Three Improvisitions” (2022) and “House Music” (2024). At the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, he has been sculpting and annotating the space with sounds weekly, playing a 12-channel, musique concrète installation-instrument (aka “the instrullation”) which he strung across the rows of books and ephemera in the Library. This year he also published three albums in a new series on Bandcamp, “Sounds of the Prelinger Library” (2025). On a monthly basis he performs in the Prelinger Library with the group Resonant Margin (percussion, voice, and electronics), which includes Kenneth and Kattt Atchley.
Sound Design Excerpts From Twin Peaks: The Return, “Episode 8” (2017)
4’07” 6 Channels
As early as Eraserhead, filmmaker David Lynch started making sounds himself when he couldn’t find what he wanted in the studio’s sound libraries, but it wasn’t until Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) that he took official credit of Sound Designer for the first time. Throughout the festival are excerpts of his dreamlike and disturbing sound design from episodes of The Return.
His process was characterized by a meticulous, experimental approach conducted in his private studio, "The Bunker," where he collaborated closely with sound supervisor Dean Hurley and Ron Eng. Most sounds originate from organic sources, such as wind or machinery, which are then pitch-shifted, equalized, or layered. Everyday sounds like room tones are treated with comb filters to create "unsettling disharmony" or melodic undertones. A dominant motif throughout The Return, electricity is used as an "amoral tool" for spirits. Sounds like electrical transformer hums were mapped over keyboards to create musical themes, such as the "Night Electricity Theme".
Lynch frequently employs thuds, whirs, and "malevolent drones" to create a sense of industrial dread, often placing these sounds in domestic settings where they don't logically belong. Contrary to the original series’ heavy use of music, The Return often utilizes long periods of silence or very distant, tension-raising hums to enhance the feeling of unease.
David Keith Lynch (January 20, 1946 – January 16, 2025) was an iconic American filmmaker, painter, and musician known for his surreal, dreamlike, and often disturbing cinematic style, dubbed "Lynchian," blending the mundane with the macabre through meticulous sound design and bizarre narratives.
He is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, with his films often characterized by a distinctive surrealist sensibility that gave rise to the adjective "Lynchian". In a career spanning more than five decades, he received numerous accolades, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival in 2006, an Academy Honorary Award in 2019, and Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement posthumously in 2025.
Lynch studied painting and made short films before making his first feature, the independent body horror film Eraserhead (1977). He earned critical acclaim and nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director for the biographical drama The Elephant Man (1980), the neo-noir mystery films Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001). For his romantic crime drama Wild at Heart (1990), he received the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. He also directed the space opera Dune (1984), the neo-noir horror Lost Highway (1997), the road movie The Straight Story (1999), and the experimental psychological horror film Inland Empire (2006). Lynch and Mark Frost created the ABC surrealist horror-mystery series Twin Peaks (1990–1991; 2017), for which he received nine Primetime Emmy Award nominations.
Under The Surface (2024)
9’56” Ambisonic
I have always been a chameleon
shapeshifting
into acceptable forms
When it isn’t safe to be who you are
look for me
under the surface
Barbara Nerness is an artist and scientist whose work spans music composition, live performance, video, and cognitive science. She currently teaches Composer-Performer 2 and Max/MSP at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She received her PhD and Doctoral Certificate in Composition from Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). She has performed at venues throughout the Bay Area and Los Angeles, as well as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, ZKM, and the Sonic Arts Research Centre.
Night Sky (2022)
8’42” 10 Channels
Night Sky presents a meditative sonic journey in response to James Turrell’s “Twilight Epiphany” Skyspace in Houston, Texas, and was composed for that space. The Skyspace simultaneously reflects the vastness of space and the solidity of the earth, with its ceiling keyhole open to the sky and its pyramid-like structure containing the body of its form. Considering this, I found the poem “Night Sky” by Don Bogen, whose narrative juxtaposing the starry, ever-expanding universe with the author's fixed presence on earth depicts a similar duality. The poem “Night Sky” appears with permission of the poet. Katherine Pracht Phares and Steven Naylor narrated Bogen's Night Sky, recorded by audio engineer Michael Laurello. Night Sky was commissioned through an Arts Initiative Grant from Rice University.
Night Sky
Staring at the stars,
I imagine you
vanished and dispersed
in that unreachable
clarity of light.
They glisten, sharp and cold,
vast distances apart
yet coming to their marks
the same time every night
of their season.
The seasons slowly move,
carrying their forms—
I recognize so few:
Orion with his belt
dominating winter,
a wobbly W,
the dipper’s angled box
and handle, each bright dot
individually
jeweled there.
Nothing there is fixed,
not even that clear star
that seems always to point
just one way as it speeds
farther and farther off.
All of them are whirling
on their separate paths,
circles and ellipses,
poles of radiance
that spread the dark.
What can be made of that?
If you are nothing now
but memory, the stars
seem a proper home.
Long after the sun
swells to disperse the earth,
they’ll change as you have,
light vanishing with time,
light beyond the reach
of light itself.
Staring at the light
an explosion sent
from some place nowhere now, I know it
will outlast
whatever I become.
Imagining its end,
I see it moving still
when nothing can be seen
and we are both nothing everywhere.
Copyright © 2019 Don Bogen. All rights
reserved. Used with permission of the
Author.
Elainie Lillios, acclaimed as one of the “contemporary masters of the medium” by MIT Press’s Computer Music Journal, creates works that reflect her fascination with listening, sound, space, time, immersion, and anecdote. Her compositions include stereo, multi-channel and Ambisonic fixed media works, instrument(s) with live electronics, collaborative experimental audio/visual animations, and installations. She also performs live electronics with ESC Trio collaborators Chris Biggs and Scott Deal, and with Origami Sound Society collaborator Mark Nagy. Elainie retired from Bowling Green State University in May 2025 but continues sharing offbeat and often eccentric ideas about composition and experimentation through part-time teaching at Western Michigan University. She serves as SPLICE Institute Director and teaches there as well. She also fundraises for and builds homes at Project Mexico and explores #vanlife with husband Michael Thompson and dog Dude. Elainie is always up for a road trip; reach out and let’s visit!
Atmo- (2023)
9’28” Stereo
Atmo- is an acousmatic work that explores air-generated sounds as a medium for connecting personal and collective auditory experiences. The piece incorporates sound sources such as air tools, balloons, vocals, and environmental sounds, all unified by their shared origin in air movement. These sounds, deeply intertwined with our physical world and daily routines, evoke distinctive auditory associations and memories. Atmo- was composed in the SARC studio at Queen’s University Belfast in 2020.
Bihe Wen is a composer whose works span instrumental, electroacoustic, and multimedia forms. He has received numerous international awards, including prizes at the Musicacoustica-Beijing Competition (2011, 2017), XXVIII Luigi Russolo Contest, MÉTAMORPHOSES 2016 Acousmatic Competition, XII° Destellos Competition 2019, Shanghai International Electronic Music Competition 2020, and the Denny Awards 2021.
His works have been featured at major festivals and conferences such as the ISCM World New Music Days, Foro Internacional de Música Nueva “Manuel Enríquez” 2019,Forum Wallis – Swiss Contemporary Music Festival (2016, 2023, 2024), Musicacoustica-Hangzhou (2023, 2024, 2025), and the San Francisco Tape Music Festival 2023. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the Central Conservatory of Music in China and a master’s degree from the University of North Texas, where he studied with Panayiotis Kokoras. He completed his PhD at Queen’s University Belfast with support from the British Council and the Chinese Scholarship Council. Following a grant from the Annette Vande Gorne Foundation, he completed a residency at Musiques & Recherches in 2023. In December 2024, he was selected for the fully funded artist-in-Residence program at the Studio for Electroacoustic Music, Akademie der Künste, Berlin. He currently teaches at the Macau University of Science and Technology.