San Francisco Tape Music Festival
Friday January 9, 2026 8:30pm
Last Night At the Gazebo Races (2017 released 2025)
8’43” Stereo
Last Night At the Gazebo Races by Cracking the Surface - David Michalak, Tom Nunn - instruments of skatch / Scott Looney - piano, hyper-piano / Thomas Dimuzio - buchla 200E, processing. Recorded at Fantasy Studios. This was Tom Nunn's last recording.
"There’s real structural depth; no repetition, no settling into a groove, nothing obvious, but everything is in constant motion and there’s never any fat, or waiting for the next idea..."
—Chris Cutler
Filmmaker/Musician David Michalak has made over 50 films since 1971, showcasing his work at The Kitchen (NYC), the landmark Castro Theatre in S.F., The S.F. International Film Festival, Festival de Cannes and in bedrooms, bars and book stores. He formed a soundtrack group called Reel Change as well as T.D. Skatchit, Dr. Bob and Ghost in the House; releasing over 15 CDs. His main instruments are: Statchbox, Lap Steel, Phantom Harp and a Box of Junk. He’s worked with The Club Foot Orchestra, Kate Foley Dance Company, Bruce Ackley, Bob Marsh, inventor Tom Nunn, Tom Waits, J.A. Deane, dancer Kinji Hatashi and many others. Other duties include - recording engineer, and sound mixer, photographer, writer and editor.
Quiet City (2022)
12’12” Ambisonic
Quiet City was written in response to a commission from sonADA (Sonic Arts Days in Aberdeen) to create a piece for the Under the Skin project. I crowdsourced, via social media, a number of locations in Aberdeen, Scotland, where the sound had changed since before the 2020 COVID-19 restrictions were imposed. I received a varied and interesting selection of suggestions, but also some quite perceptive reflections on what those changes meant to people on a personal level, and how these (sometimes) presented challenges for others. A good example was the pedestrianisation of part of Union Street, which, for many brought a welcome place of calm to dwell and enjoy a relatively quiet place; however, the lack of bus access to this part of Union Street meant a longer and more inconvenient journey to the shops for those with mobility issues, as well as the danger of increasingly common fast-moving food delivery cycles through this new environment.
Quiet City is an immersive concert piece. Using recordings from the Aberdeen locations, it moves through recognisable (and some unrecognisable) soundscapes to non-real/world-transformed soundscapes that reflect on a sonically changed city and how we relate to it.
With grateful thanks to the following for the use of their sounds: Heitor Alves, Ian Booth, Christine Cameron, Bea Dawkins, Sheila Gordon, Fraser Lovie, Kathleen McBride, Robert McColl Millar, Lorna Philip, Bruce Scharlau, Anne Shipley, Jenny Shirreffs.
Pete Stollery studied composition with Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham and was one of the first members of BEAST in the early 1980s. Following a number of years as a school teacher in Kent, he moved to Aberdeen to work in teacher education at the former Northern College which later merged with the University of Aberdeen. From 2000, he was part of the team which re-introduced music programmes at the University of Aberdeen, including the introduction of doctoral programmes in Composition and the development of the electroacoustic music studios. He was Head of the Department of Music for many years and he retired as Professor of Composition and Electroacoustic Music in 2022.
In 1996, along with Alistair MacDonald, Robert Dow and Simon Atkinson, he established the group invisiblEARts whose aim is to perform acousmatic music throughout Scotland and to promote Scottish acousmatic music to a wider audience, both within Scotland and abroad.
In 2004 he was part of the setting up of sound, a new music incubator in NE Scotland which runs an annual festival of new music featuring composers and performers from around Europe, as well as year long activity including opportunities for composers and performers of all stages. He is also artistic director of Any Enemy, NE Scotland’s New Music Ensemble.
Stollery composes music for concert hall performance, particularly acousmatic music and more recently has created work for outside the concert hall, including sound installations and internet projects. His main interest is in how humans respond to sounds in their immediate surroundings, in particular sounds that are not necessarily intended for listening purposes, as well as how an engagement with sound relates to the idea of place.
His creative work exists as electroacoustic compositions, sound installations, web-based sound art, as well as instrumental and vocal compositions.
His music is published by the Canadian label empreintes DIGITALes with further information at Électroprésence and tracks available for streaming at Electrothèque.
He spent over thirty years living and working in the northeast of Scotland and in early 2024 he moved to Skipton, North Yorkshire.
Yasunao Tone (1935 - 2025)
ATAK016 MUSICA SIMULACRA (excerpt) Book2-95 (2010)
3’23” Stereo
Tone described the process… as such: “First, the material source of the piece was derived from the poetic text of ancient China and each character of the text was converted into photographic images according to the ancient form of the Chinese characters which are closer to images than the modern form. I scanned the images and digitized them, thus the images were transformed simply into 0’s and 1’s. Then, I obtained histograms from the binary codes and had the computer read the histograms as sound waves; thus I got sound from the images….” A similar method was employed for Musica Simulacra, debuted in 2003, which took the Man’yoshu collection of poems of the 7th and 8th centuries as its source material.
Yasunao Tone was a Japanese multidisciplinary artist born in Tokyo, Japan and working in New York City. He graduated from Chiba University in 1957 with a major in Japanese Literature. An important figure in postwar Japanese art during the 1960s, he was active in many facets of the Tokyo art scene. He was a central member of the early noise music collective Group Ongaku and was associated with a number of other Japanese art groups such as Neo-Dada Organizers, Hi-Red Center, and Team Random (the first computer artgroup organized in Japan).
Tone was also a member of Fluxus (and one of the founding members of its Japanese branch). Many of his works were performed at Fluxus festivals or distributed by George Maciunas’s various Fluxus operations. Relocating to the United States in 1972, he henceforth gained a reputation as a musician, performer and writer working with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Senda Nengudi, Florian Hecker, and many others. Tone is also known as a pioneer of "Glitch” music, due to his groundbreaking modifications of compact discs and CD players.
Tone died on 12 May 2025, at the age of 90.
Sound Design Excerpts From Twin Peaks: The Return, “Episode 2” (2017)
3’28” 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.
Gymel III (2024)
14’44” Stereo
We can think of the active principle of Gymel III by drawing inspiration from Bachelard (Le Nouvel esprit scientifique, 1932):
“The corpuscle has no more reality than the composition which makes it appear”.
And again: “Suffice it to say that the existence of the corpuscle has a root in all space.”
As for the music: This piece is part of a series of Gymel, composed in several residences at the ICST (University of Arts), Zurich, and premiered there in November 2024.
Horacio Vaggione (Argentina, 1943), has lived in Paris since 1978. He studied composition at the National University of Cordoba, Argentina, earning a doctorate in musicology from the University of Paris. Further studies in computer music were at the University of Illinois. Vaggione was the co-founder of the Center for Experimental Music at the University of Cordoba, a member of the Madrid-based electronic music group ALEA and worked in France with IRCAM, INA- GRM, and GMEB. He is currently a professor emeritus at University of Paris.
- INTERVAL -
Protean Septet (2001)
12’00” 14 Channels
Protean Septet, as its title implies, was conceived as a piece of music being played by seven instruments, but it is also a fourteen-channel audio “drama” composed of seven distinct sounds, conceptualized here as “characters.” Each of these characters can be heard undergoing a transformation via a particular audial process as they influence, and are influenced by, the other sounds in the piece as well as the passage of time. These transformations can be thought of as psychological or physiological. For example, one sound gradually morphs into another: a seemingly metallic sound appears to become more liquid as the piece progresses, and yet another sound goes through a process akin to that used in Alvin Lucier’s landmark composition I Am Sitting in a Room, only in reverse – it starts out as completely obscured (due to multiple-generation room resonance), and by the end of the piece emerges pristine, with no generation loss.
James Goode: tapes, electronics, production.
Composed and recorded in 2001 for performance at New Langton Arts, San Francisco.
Berkeley-based composer, sound designer, musician, and songwriter James Goode coaxes extraordinary sounds from everyday objects: Russian nested dolls are transformed into squealing narwhals, bird calls into growling lions; the voice box from a stuffed animal is transformed into a flock of hungry seagulls; brief vocal sounds morph into a soundtrack for a comic and surreal conga line. Defying easy description or pigeonholing, his music takes you to an unfamiliar place filled with luscious atonality and compelling polyrhythm. He navigates a course between austere minimalism on the one hand and pandemonium on the other. Dichotomies abound in his work: natural versus prosthetic, acoustic versus electronic, ancient versus modern, symbolic versus literal.
In the Bay Area, Goode’s work has been presented at 21 Grand, Dresher Ensemble Studio, The Exploratorium, First Church of the Buzzard, The LAB, Mills College, New Langton Arts, Peacock Lounge, Spire the Church, St. George Spirits, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; in New York City, at The Stone; and at venues throughout Australia, Canada and Japan.
He’s performed and/or recorded with musicians and composers Chris Cohen, John Dieterich, Thomas Dimuzio, Christopher Fleeger, Linda Hagood, Bill Horist, Bevin Kelley, Cheryl Leonard, Roger Powell, Jake Rodriguez, Greg Saunier, David Slusser, Trey Spruance, and William Winant; and groups such as The Double U, Faxed Head, Secret Chiefs 3, Sunburned Hand of the Man, and Zip Code Rapists.
Goode has also worked on projects with visual artists, writers, filmmakers, and animators, among them: Hank Grebe (Light Socket, 2017), William F. Nolan (William F. Nolan’s Dark Universe, 2011), Simon Lee (Bus Obscura, 2008), Allison Pebworth (Third Street Phantom Coast, 2008), R.W. Hessler (Notebook Found in a Deserted House, 2007), Michael Wetzel and Phil Ross (Somniloquy, 2007), Christiane Cegavske (Blood Tea and Red String, 2005), and Christine Shields (Protean Septet, 2001).
Synthesism (1969)
4’33’ Stereo
Sythesism is a study in the less-typical aspects of computer-generated sound. Much of its material is either derived from or modified by the totally patternless output of a random-number generator. The structural base of the work is an ordered set of sixteen numbers that comprise a geometric series from 1 to 2. This set is projected onto various domains as a compositional determinant — for example, onto the octave to form an equal-tempered sixteen-note series and into the time domain to determine durations or to control successions of varying attack rates. Sythesism was computed using MUSIC 360, a special-purpose acoustical language designed specifically for synthesizing sound on IBM/360 computers. The language was conceived to enable the composer to code his “instruments” in a clear and concise format which would facilitate extremely high-speed sound simulation on standard machines. Sythesism is an early product of that idea. — BV
Barry Vercoe (1937 – 2025) was an American computer scientist and composer. Born in New Zealand, he is best known as the inventor of Csound, a music synthesis language with wide usage among computer music composers. SAOL, the underlying language for the MPEG-4 Structured Audio standard, is also historically derived from Csound. Vercoe was a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1971 to 2010. In 1973, Vercoe founded MIT’s Experimental Music Studio (EMS)—the Institute’s first dedicated computer music facility and one of the first in the world. EMS became a crucible for innovation in algorithmic composition, digital synthesis, and computer-assisted performance. Vercoe’s leadership not only positioned MIT as a hub for music technology, but also influenced how the Institute approached the intersection of the arts with engineering.
Scherzo (20XX)
6’20” Stereo
A collage of sounds created, recorded, and appropriated from 1990 to the present.
Reviled for his "shapeless sonic tinkering" by the Los Angeles Times, clarinetist, composer, improviser, and computer musician Matt Ingalls is the founder and Artistic Director of sfSound and the San Francisco Tape Music Collective. He received the Deuxième Prix, Lauréats des Puys (Catégorie Humour) in the 1994 Concours International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges and was the first recipient of the ASCAP/SEAMUS Commission and Recording Prize. A professional software engineer, his audio tools Soundflower, MacCsound, and Aardvark Synth have been used widely throughout the world.
Donald Swearingen (1950 - 2025)
Prepared Piano 2/3 & 2/5 (1995)
5’00” Stereo
From the Repercussions+ collection, these two pieces for prepared piano are based on John Cage’s instructions for his piece Mysterious Adventure. The pieces were realized on the Kurzweil K2000 keyboard/sampler with digital editing and mixing.
Donald Eugene Swearingen, a San Francisco Bay Area electronic music composer, sound artist, photographer, and designer of interactive performance systems, died on Thursday, September 11, 2025, in Oakland, California.
Donald grew up in Van Buren, Arkansas and, in his youth, studied classical piano, played woodwinds in high-school band and keyboards in rock bands, and spent many summers helping his father with agricultural work. As a young adult, he moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he worked for a decade in the music industry as a touring and recording rock musician and as a copyist for Stax and Hi Records.
In the mid-1980s, Donald moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he turned his focus to composing and performing contemporary electro-acoustic music and designing and building gesture-controlled musical instruments and performance software. During his 38 years in the Bay Area experimental electronic music community, he designed and built music performance and sound installation systems for area artists including Pamela Z, Dohee Lee, Miya Masaoka, Guillermo Galindo, and Amy X Neuburg. He was a founder and advisory board member of the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, served as a guest lecturer and instructor of sound and multimedia at San Francisco State University and CSU East Bay, and authored papers in electronic music journals including BYTE Magazine, Ylem Journal, and the ACM Journal. He was the software architect and developer of acoustic systems for LucasFilm Ltd and was a prized programmer and software developer at several innovative networking and telecommunications companies.
Donald composed and recorded a body of electronic music works that combined sampled voices and concrete sounds with digital synthesis and sequencing. Over the years, he recorded the voices of many friends, colleagues, and collaborators to create sample banks as source sounds for his composition process. His music was lush and emotive and was often laced with hints of a wry humor. In performance, he used a MIDI keyboard and gesture-controlled instruments of his own design to play sampled sounds with a subtle, pianistic technique.
He had great passion for mathematics and science, and devoted countless hours to the study of physics and reading journals and textbooks by the likes of Richard Feynman and Paul Erdös, who he considered heroes.
He is remembered by the Bay Area new music community as well has his Van Buren community for his admirable modesty, his keen intellect, and for his kindness and generosity of spirit. When asked about a bucket list a few days before his passing, he answered, without hesitation, that he’d been living his bucket list all his life.
— From Chapel of the Chimes, Obituary
Apparent Horizon (1996)
11’51” Stereo
An electroacoustic composition (and film) using manipulated speech from NASA footage, along with other sound sources to create a surrealistic, otherworldly ambience.
Maggi Payne is a composer primarily of electronic and electro-acoustic music, and a video artist. Her works are presented world-wide. She received the SEAMUS Award in 2022 and is a recipient of several awards from the National endowment for the Arts and other organizations. Her works appear on Aguirre, Air Texture, The Lab, Lovely Music, Innova, Starkland, Music and Arts, New World Records (CRI), Root Strata, Ubuibi, Asphodel, and several other labels.