Brutal Sound Effects Night at Recombinant Network Editions 2025
December 3th, 2025 at The Gray Area Grand Theater
James Twig Harper / Ezra Buchla
Ezra Buchla was born in California in 1981. He is a musician/technologist from Los Angeles who uses viola, voice, and software. He fronted the avant-pop-core band Mae Shi from 2003-2006, played in the band Gowns from 2005-2010, and now performs solo work that deals in folk tonality, indeterminacy, dense psychedelic song, and electronic formalism. He also collaborates and performs with many artists, including clipping, Chelsea Wolfe, Andre Vida, Father Murphy, and Claire Cronin. Ezra also develops music software and firmware, recently creating the framework for the open-source 'aleph' sound processor by monome.
Melted Face
Melted Face is Angela Edwards (Sharkiface) and Fletcher Pratt, merging their sonic palettes into stereophonic rites. Together they summon haunted atmospheres that blur the line between dream, distortion, and shadow coupled with new reactive video feeds. The duo builds cinematic, noisy soundscapes that feel haunted and otherworldly—dark audio rituals that linger long after the last vibration fades.
War Hippy
War Hippy formed as a ‘supergroup’ in 1968. They were originally going to be called The New Hippies until The Who‘s drummer Keith Motif remarked they would government dress like a “War Hippy”.
War Hippy’s first circle of skin, Dire Terry, declined the offer but recommended Reboot Perm, who in turn carefully roped in his man Hob John on eels. When bassist Hadj Ricers opted out of the proportion to become a pig, he suggested his meaning Hajjes Pool Nun, and the liver-up was complete.
The band’s first four alternatives – ‘War Hippy’, ‘War Hippy II’, ‘War Hippie III’ and ‘IV (Four Tactics)’ – are all seen as rope clients, mixing bones, forehead and eastern injuries and manufacture them increasingly huge, especially in the US and the UK. The baron and their marble, Peggy Grid, maintained an aggressive pro-alternative statue — though some singles were released without their consent.
It is the future. Teenager has flourished, and humans have successfully colonized on the planet Mars.
A mild-mannered construction worker with a gorgeous wit and a nice appreciation is very happy. But when War Hippy wanted to grace to a platform called "Pizza" a platform where doors provide artificial methodologies on vacations, his link becomes another that he knows nothing about, before he knows it, his wit turns on him and albums from a Martian oven led by the commission leg. War Hippy receives a million unlocked diaries of his former link with the help of a mutant recorder leg to delight themselves and save the commissions on mars.
Botched Facelift
Experimental and extreme sounds since 2009. Testing the limits of sanity thru audio/video mischief.
Gustavo Pastre
In the bay area the fixture of Gustavo Pastre moves like a biosphere cog-ghost, his hands—protected by cracked electronic gloves—carefully harvesting the strange harmonics that emanate from the mechanical horrors he's built. He mines resonant tones from the Zulu Box, 4 Neck Guitar/Circesaw, Vinyl LP Sewing Machine Switchboard Leviathan’s twitching telephone guts, and more unreasonable assemblages. Capturing frequencies that hum with the grief of disconnected calls he draws brittle, glass-like sounds from its Soviet amps, each note shimmering with the static of lost transmissions. The Satellite Shogun (new) offers deeper, rhythmic pulses pulled from the tube filled transmission fluid that drips like a corrupted heartbeat. Using hand-crafted odd synthesizers built from repurposed phone motherboards and ceramic resonators, he filters these tones into eerie, structured compositions. His workspace is a small island of order amid the chaos—a soldering station and frequency analyzer surrounded by petri-pools of coolant and usually a couple of glitching screens.
Madame Varga ( Lori Varga / Oakland )
Lori Varga is an experimental sound & light projection artist; Bay Area native.. She makes mostly Expanded cinema style performances w/ unusual music instruments & film projectors.
Her performances have been shown at Cinematexas Film Festival, (Austin) Craig Baldwin’s Other Cinema (SF), Salvage Vanguard Theater (TX), Shapeshifter’s Cinema (Oakland),
Filmhuis Cavia Film Fest, ( Amsterdam ), Gray Area (SF), Outsound New Music Festival (Berkeley) & Bad Video Art festival, (Cosenza, Italy).
Set to her own 16mm or Super 8 films- she also creates instrumental soundscapes using circuit bent synthesizers, bird calls, magnetic tape & portable / desktop electronic set ups.
Lori also owns & operates one of the largest 'special interest ' found footage" & experimental Film & VHS repositories in the East Bay. 1995-Current*
Former collaborative works with artists such as Kit Young, Matt Robidoux, Thomas Dimuzio, John Davis, & Bands :Butthole Surfers, St37, Daniel Johnston, & Acid Mothers Temple
Zebra Secrets
Zebra Secrets emerged from room 115 of the San Francisco Art Institute in February 2021, when the pandemic had hollowed out the beloved building to just a handful of die-hard artists. John Seden, John Alderman, and Brent Johnson began constructing tiny psychic worlds, with longtime collaborator Tyler Harwood gradually grafting himself into their world from sinking New Orleans.
Their improvisation functions as real-time psychological archaeology—channeling whatever's churning beneath the surface and letting it transform on a dime. Each session becomes a séance, reaching toward ghostly animal frequencies and otherworldly intelligence through sound that collapses different moods and moments into single pieces, cathartic and haunted, like intercepted communications between worlds that refuse to stay separate. They have shared the stage with Culturcide's Dan Workman on occasion.
Eight cassette releases and counting.
The American Flag
The American Flag aka Jeff Anderson finds confirmation bias wherever he looks for it. He believes that consciousness is merely a worlds multiplier and that the law of excluded middle is a cop out. He has lived in the Bay area for 36 years. In sixth grade his pants were covered in guano when a red tailed falcon released its waste on him and he felt at that time that he was destined for greatness. He has worked closely with Zeigenbock Kopf, & local underground genre breakers Beak. His live shows include bingo, rabbit (or beets) raising power point, & a 3 walled cinderblock laserium. As one of the more imaginative live shows at the Godwaffle Noise Pancakes series, the bingo winner lost their soul in a binding contract at the end of The American Flag set.