Jessica Ackerley/Frank Meadows/Eli Wallace; Cleek Schrey/Iva Bittova; Annie Dodson/Grace Derksen

MAW is the free improvising trio of pianist Eli Wallace, double bass player Frank Meadows and guitarist Jessica Ackerley, who began working in the thriving experimental and improvised music scene in NYC. Wallace, Meadows and Ackerley are bold sound artists who have collaborated before with like-minded sonic explorers and improvisers such as reeds player Daniel Carter, guitarist Tashi Dorji and sax player Patrick Shiroishi.

A Maneuver Within is the debut album of the trio and was recorded at the Scholes Street Studio in Brooklyn in October 2020, during the heat of the Covid-19 pandemic when collaboration and indoor group improvising had been severely limited. Forthcoming is an album on Notice Recordings documenting two live sets from 2021, at Mise-en-Place in Brooklyn, and Opus 40.

You can feel Iva Bittová’s folk roots in everything she does – in her composing, her violin playing, her singing, her improvising. And yet, everything she does sounds new – the traditional is the foundation that supports her relentless, swirling, joyful innovation. Iva will be performing in a duo with Cleek Schrey, a fiddler, improviser, and composer from Virginia. He plays traditional music from Appalachia and Ireland and makes experimental work using composition, film, and field recordings. His work is preoccupied with the physical phenomena of vibrating strings and the histories and aesthetics of recording technologies. He collaborates with experimental composers such as David Behrman and Alvin Lucier and the downtown improviser Shelley Hirsch.

Annie Dodson is an electroacoustic composer, sound artist, and cellist from Portland, Maine currently based in the Hudson Valley, New York. They make music about ecology and the environment, sensitivity and reception, and queerness and intimacy. Their work is often long with an emphasis on slow processes and gradual progression.