Nautical Almanac is an experimental band that was founded in Michigan in 1994 by Carly Ptak and Twig Harper. They emerged from a Midwestern scene of noise outfits that transformed junk-from alarm clocks to toys-into homemade instruments. Ominous and intense, their music is made of driving rhythms that seem to move in several directions at once. This live set was accompanied by a light and video show driven by a biofeedback machine that captured and interpreted the performers’ brain waves. Ptak and Harper live in Baltimore, where they founded Tarantula Hill, a home, performance space, and recording studio, which is also the headquarters of their label Heresee.

Stefan Tcherepnin is a New York-based composer and performer whose work incorporates elements of noise, indeterminacy, and improvisation, as well as aspects of traditional composition. Tcherepnin writes that he “thought of how (avant-garde composer) David Tudor would leave the radios and televisions on in his apartment while he was practicing piano,” while he was composing Sweeping Noise, a piece that joins classical piano composition with the sound of static. A layered work produced by an old Steinway piano whose amplified sound is modulated with high- and low-pass filtered noise, Sweeping Noise, interlaces disparate frequencies into an elegant composition. A version of the piece was performed originally at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York.