Tamarisk (Christina Carter/Andrew Weathers/David Menestres); Ben Vida/Zach Layton; M Geddes Gengras

TAMARISK

On tour From West Texas:
CHRISTINA CARTER was born in the bayou city of Houston, Texas in November of 1968, and co-founded the group Charalambides there in December of 1991. Ever since then, she has deeply mined her own vein of sound-as-music with voice, guitar (both electric and acoustic), piano, and keys. For the past several years, Christina has utilized extended improvisational guitar passages within and without song-medley structures; re-contextualized certain Charalambides songs within the spare single guitar/voice form that birthed much of the group’s music; and recently, investigated ‘the song’ as a thing unto itself, specifically concentrating on ‘the word’- both in her own lyric writing and her interpretations of the work of other lyricists.

ANDREW WEATHERS is a composer and improviser originally from Chapel Hill, NC and currently based in Littlefield, TX. His work engages with notions of place, tradition, repetition, and spirit. Weathers studied composition at UNC-Greensboro and electronic music at Mills College in Oakland, CA. A consistent presence in the underground music scene over the past decade, Weathers’ work covers a wide spectrum from solo acoustic guitar to electronic noise. He also performs and records regularly with Tethers, Real Life Rock & Roll Band, Tender Crust, Wind Tide, Satin Spar, Llano Estacado Monad Band, and in long-running collaborations with Seth Chrisman and tanner menard, among others. In addition to his busy performing schedule, Weathers operates the Full Spectrum and Other Minds record labels, curates the Longitudes music series at CO-OPt Research + Projects in Lubbock, TX, and works as a freelance mixing and mastering engineer.

DAVID MENESTRES is a bassist, composer, and writer currently living in the Piedmont of North Carolina. David is the founder/leader of the Polyorchard ensemble (“a vital and wonderfully vexing force of the area’s sonic fringes”) and hosts a radio show airing Sunday nights on taintradio.org.

ZACH LAYTON is a guitarist, composer, curator, teacher and visual artist based in New York. He has composed orchestral music for the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and the String Orchestra of Brooklyn and has performed and exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, the Kitchen, MoMa/PS1, ISSUE Project Room, Roulette, EMPAC, Eyebeam, International Computer Music Festival, Experimental Intermedia, Performa, Exit Art, Sculpture Center, Transmediale Berlin, SCOPE Art Foundation, Audio Art Festival Krakow and many other venues in New York and worldwide. He has worked with a diverse range of artists and musicians including Vito Acconci, Bradley Eros, Bobby Previte, Henry Fraser, Ben Vida, Tony Conrad, Victoria Keddie, Tristan Perich, Elliott Sharp, Joshua White, David Grubbs, Loren Connors, Luke Dubois, Peggy Ahwesh, Bradford Reed, Alex Waterman, and many more.

BEN VIDA holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Bard College. As an artist and composer, he has been an active member of the international experimental music community for two decades with a long list of collaborators, projects and releases to his credit. Vida has performed as a musician in several bands since the mid 1990s. He co-founded the minimalist quartet Town & Country and continued to perform as a guitarist and trumpeter for the band. Vida was also a member of Pillow and Terminal 4 and recorded and performed solo as Bird Show and in the Drag City band Singer. In addition to his musical endeavors, Vida has exhibited his work as a contemporary artist in recent years. His work has been performed and presented in New York at the Guggenheim, Audio Visual Arts, and The Artist’s Institute; in London at The Institute of Contemporary Art and The Royal Festival Hall as part of the Meltdown Festival; in Chicago at The Museum of Contemporary Art; and other locations such as the Sydney Opera House, Leap Gallery, Berlin, and Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna.

M GEDDES GENGRAS has been involved with numerous projects ranging from psych-folk and noise rock to dub reggae and cosmic ambient drone. He became an in-demand collaborator during the second half of the 2000s, participating in experimental groups such as Robedoor and Pocahaunted, before he began releasing solo cassettes and CD-Rs of his modular synthesizer improvisations in 2009. Along with close associate Sun Araw (Cameron Stallones), Gengras worked with influential reggae group the Congos on the acclaimed 2012 release Icon Give Thank. He has issued several ambitious long-form drone works, including 2018’s double-CD Light Pipe, as well as noisy experimental techno as Personable and under his own name (2020’s Time Makes Nothing Happen). 2022’s Expressed, I Noticed Silence featured his brother Cyrus Gengras, his former collaborator in the duo Antique Brothers. Along with his brother Cyrus, he formed the ethereal folk duo Antique Brothers around this time, issuing several tapes and CD-Rs on labels such as House of Alchemy and Foxglove. He also produced solo recordings under the name Fantastic Ego on Phantom Limb Recordings. In 2007, his group Thousands (with Grant Capes and Tim Goodwillie of [VxPxC]) released several limited recordings, including one on Not Not Fun. This began a long association between Gengras and the label. He ended up participating in many of Not Not Fun’s flagship acts, such as stoner-noise group Robedoor, tribal psych collective Pocahaunted, and abstract dance project LA Vampires. Increasingly obsessed with modular synthesizers, Gengras started releasing numerous recordings of his own electronic experiments on labels such as Stunned Records, Digitalis, and Tape Drift.