RML Night at Recombinant Network Editions 2025
December 4th, 2025 at The Gray Area Grand Theater
6:57pm to 7:37pm L'Astra Cosmo presents Lightphorms (6.57pm start)
7:40pm to 8:20pm Nacht - Franck Vigroux
8.25 pm - 9:25 pm DAIMATSU - Carl Stone
9:30 pm - 10:15pm Mix Master Mike / EVICSHEN (AKA Victoria Shen)
10.15 - 11:10pm Videopolis - Franck Vigroux
11:15 pm - Midnight Xanopticon
L'Astra Cosmo presents "Lightphorms"
For 20 years, Jahnavi Stenflo and Nathan Jantz have been working together creatively in different capacities, from performing live, to curating and production. First appearing at 2016’s clandestine annual outdoor event Lunar Lodge, their live performance of “Frequencies Unseen” was staged at the Lafayette Electronic Arts Festival later that year. While continuing to evolve their AV live performances, they were invited in 2023 to participate in a residency at Signal Culture, resulting in a piece currently in the group exhibit, “The Experimental Frontier” at the Loveland Museum, in Colorado.
L’Astra Cosmo’s work is rooted in rarely explored future-retro aesthetics: seeking a hybrid visual language between science and mysticism, technology and organic matter. Utilizing oscilloscopic displays, they approach obsolete video technologies and the flow of electricity not as museum relics, but as re-activated mediums and interlocutors. Treating these elements as catalysts in an explorative dialogue, their work directly addresses perception, entropy, and the aesthetics of signal decay. This methodology allows for a critical reclaiming and renewal, moving the axis of experimental video forward by reaffirming its utility as a current process for discovery and examination in signal aesthetics and committed technical practice.
Franck Vigroux - Nacht II
Fresh from their global China bookings plus this autumn's Raster Electric Campfire European label weekend arrives Franck Vigroux’s VIDEOPOLIS Bay Area premiere. Slated for a Raster- Media February album release, this full-fledged AV sneak preview of 2026’s international concert circuit is an advance live screening like no other! Included in the double program will be the return of Vigroux’s NACHT project that debuted at Recombinant in early summertime 2023 along with ATOTAL as a three-piece but now has evolved all new content from virtual and real time audio sources under the rigorous conduction of Franck himself. This bold escalation of the eminent sublime raises the stakes on where Vigroux’s invigorated detonations have currently landed him.
Nacht II hints at an expansive coloratura in a qualitative vein of an offspring Blixa Bargeld / or Galas, Diamanda zenith of articulations. This is a spectra where multiple consonant voicings converse, overlap and spatter - from the lyrical to the guttural with a live counter tenor singer extending his utterance range through sonorous oscillator storms amidst a thunderous sensorial undercurrent of caustic atmospherics and nocturnal eddies of fleeting quietudes. Projected fragments of minimal and monochromatic visualistics conjure up a generated, yet contemplative front screen synesthetic.
Carl Stone - DAIMATSU
Carl Stone will present the world premiere of DAIMATSU, an hour-long work spun from field recordings recorded in both the US and Japan, with elements including shomyo chant recorded during the Goma Fire Ceremony at the Koyasan Temple, Tingsha cymbals from Tibet, instruments from the ancient court orchestra of Japan, as well as secular sound elements recorded in Tokyo and Gifu. Carl Stone mixes these elements in performance in order to create a unique sound space with the special sonic capabilities of the Recombinant audio system at the Gray Area Grand Theater in mind.
“Avant-garde computer music pioneer Carl Stone’s newest is a Max/MSP powered deep dive into unsettled dreamworld sampledelica, warping pitch-fuct pop garbles into hiccuping noise spirals and quasi-techno ethno-pop bumpers. Properly off the dial material that sounds like a plunderphonic take on the Sublime Frequencies catalog, or ABBA reworked by Oval.”– BoomKat 2022
“Stone is still ahead of the game when it comes to his knack for discovering a world of music in a grain of sound.” – Julian Cowley, The Wire 2019
“Veteran US electronic experimentalist Carl Stone is making some of the most purely fun music of his career…. His is a masterful study in the recombinant and plastic nature of popular music. – Ben Beaumont-Thomas, The Guardian 2020
“(Carl Stone’s Baroo is) like a dance party in a room made of funhouse mirrors.” – Pitchfork “Best Experimental Albums of 2019”
…. Stone reconnects your soul with the stuff of sound itself as you ruminate on an epic journey, both exhilarating and affecting.” – Philip Clark, The Wire 2019
“{Stone’s music is} a powerful stimulant, with lingering euphoric effects.” – Steve Smith, New York Times 2010
“He just opens up time in this marvelous way that I’ve never heard another composer do.” – Jonathan Gold, Vogue Magazine 2016
“A trailblazing electronic composer and improviser whose works mix eloquence, economy and wit” – Time Out New York 2012
“Can an album be un-turnoffable? If so, this one is!” – Emily Blick, The Wire 2018
“So beautiful and accomplished, that words can only fail….unquestionably one of the most important releases of 2018. Absolutely essential. Stunning on every count. I can’t recommend it enough.” – Bradford Bailey, The Hum 2018
“Once again the California master makes use of his ability to transform the rhythm into the atmosphere, the beat song, the pop music into art….A world of suffused beauty: a rarefied and dreamy soundscape, rippled by a persuasive, melancholic, ecstatic song.” – Kathodik E-Zine 2019
“Criminally neglected” – someone on Instagram 2019
“A negligent criminal” – Stone’s parole officer
Carl Stone is one of the original pathfinders in live computer music, and has used laptop in live performance since 1986. He has been hailed by the Village Voice as “the king of sampling.” and “one of the best electronic composers living in (the USA) today.”. RELIX has written that “Stone makes music that can hit your ear holes like a DMT flash.” He was born in California and now divides his time between LA and Japan. He studied extensively at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. His works have been performed almost everywhere across most all worldwide continents and used by numerous renowned theater directors and choreographers .Additionally, he is the emeritus professor in the Department of Media Engineering at Chukyo University in Japan.
Carl is the recipient of prominent awards and festival commissions including the Freeman Award for the work Hop Ken and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Foundation for Performance Arts. His 3-LP release “Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties” on the Unseen Worlds label placed #1 in The Wire Magazine’s “Best of 100” 2016 Archival category. The follow up release the next year ranked #3.
Carl Stone served as President of the American Music Center from 1992-95. He was the Director of Meet the Composer/California from 1981-1997, and Music Director of KPFK-fm in Los Angeles from 1978-1981. In 2019, DUBLAB.com reissued a series of radio conversations Stone had on KPFK-fm with Brian Eno, Frank Zappa, Terry Riley, Harold Budd and others. Further activities have included serving as Guest Artistic Director for the Other Minds Festival, and for the official web site of the John Cage Trust.
Mix Master Mike / EVICSHEN (aka Victoria Shen)
Mix Master Mike & Evicshen (aka Victoria Shen) will be taking their two wildly different live approaches on the future of extreme experiential turntable performance for the very first time on December 4th as a historical, head-scrambling, uncompromising team-up. This Avant Jarred group mesh shards of musique concrète, jagged improvisation, noise, sub-techno aberrations and hip-hop inversions with customized vinyl record instrument building and modification.. Their duo deployment to detonate their recombinant sets include de-constructed and subversive references to scratching. & beat-juggling elements, sampling and looping, while hand-crafted technologies include double-needle-head shells and acrylic needle nails on the human fingers. The de-compositional aesthetics combine sound sculpture, maximalism/minimalism and crazy inversions of sonic destruction. Together, they show that a re-radicalized kind of analog / electronic Turntablism can press beyond technique, genre or compositional theory into the nouveau unknown.
DJ Mix Master Mike, born Michael Schwartz, transitioned from an underground Bay Area competitor to a turntablist milestone, mastering three distinct and vital phases of cultural influence. First, his competitive dominance (1992–1994) forced the professionalization of the art, culminating in his forced retirement from the DMC circuit, which catalyzed the formation of organized turntablism. Second, through the Invisibl Skratch Piklz turntable unit with Q-bert, Short Cut, Apollo and D-Styles, he established the technical and philosophical boundaries of the craft, pioneering techniques like the Tweak Scratch and validating the turntable as a universal, expressive instrument through strategic self-customized modifications. Third, his eventual integration into top stream global awareness, primarily as an ongoing resident DJ for the Beastie Boys and more recently Cypress Hill, showcased his virtuosity on the world stage, defining a personal specific turntable character of multiple prominent albums and culminating in his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for those who regard such a profile.
In the current era (2022–2025), Mike remains profoundly influential, defining his dual identity as the aggressively technical and notorious "Serial Wax Killer” while additionally achieving peak institutional acceptance. His permanent placement in the Oscars/Emmy Awards Orchestra signifies cultural validation of the turntable as a classical-level instrument. Simultaneously, his pioneering adoption of decentralized media formats like VR and holographic NFT experiences for projects like Ready Slayer One and Magma Chamber ensures that his legacy remains tied to artistic autonomy and the continuous pursuit of the future of music delivery. He remains a critical figure today- dedicated to pushing the record performance art form past its 1990s "pinnacle" and into new, uncharted territories in the 2020’s
He has frequently collaborated and appeared with artists in the rock / metal sphere, including solo stadium opener for 2017’s American Metallica tour and others like Ozzy Osbourne, Tommy Lee, and Rob Zombie (including covers of Rob Zombie tracks in his live sets). VR/AR show projects: (Magma Chamber VR).
In 2019, Mix Master Mike initiated "Megaton 10," a monumental benchmark record collaboration for scratch-craft and a significant curatorial statement of generational and charitable leadership for homeless children plus the people of Haiti.
The project gathered 10 legendary DJs:, DJ Premier (who was the first to commit), DJ Jazzy Jeff, A-Trak, Qbert, DJ Babu, DJ Craze, Melo-D, D-Styles, and Shortkut. The linkup was executed remotely using FaceTime and file sharing during the pandemic, with Mike composing and finalizing the track in a Paris studio.
In movie world Mike was featured prominently in the indie film SCRATCH (2001) that covered the whole turntablist scene of the day.
Evicshen is a cross-disciplinary sound performance alias by Victoria Shen who manipulates records and outside materials of all kinds. Her sounds oscillate between moments of restraint and swells of frenzied and confrontational maneuvers.
Instrument maker Shen’s audio practice is concerned with the materiality of sonic spatial physicalizations via self built electronics and how these extended custom built sculpture appendages specific to her body restructure a listeners relationship to the emergent room frequencies through a lens of disruption and experimentation.
Eschewing conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of extreme textures and gestural tones, Shen uses what she calls "chaotic sound" to oppose signal and information, eluding traditionally embedded meaning toward tendencies that erode boundaries between performer, tool and audience. These noise trope activations whose melodic voids cross-examine the ways we perceive value within radicalized aural experiences emphasize a tension created by opposition - control and chaos, the unique and the mass, the practical and the absurd.
Her adventurous abstractified music can also feature analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/ records that are cut up in cast resin embedded with found materials functioning not only as playable music media but as unique art objects. Victoria also pioneered the use of Needle Nails, acrylic nails with embedded turntable styluses, which allow her to play up to 5 tracks of a record at once. These phono needle permutations, Levitating speaker, and her Noise hair Combs are some of the objects created by her as part of an extensive repertoire of innovations in the design of audio augmentations
Her work resists passive consumption. Instead, the body as both subject and instrument, using jagged motion and tactility to provoke visceral, often confrontational encounters with sound. Her appearances are directly physical, unpredictable, and ephemeral—rejecting polish in favor of raw immediacy.
Through her DIY discursive practice spanning, installations and non-traditional means of distribution, themes of spectacle, violence, control, and gender are interrogated. The primary intention is not necessarily to comfort or entertain, but to destabilize: to push systems, tools, and traditions until they reveal something less anticipated or unexpected , recontextualizing the formats of readymade assemblage practices. These poly-sculptural elements invite the experiential viewer to unpack one’s relationship with the material possibilities for magnifying unusual and provocative audio phenomena.
Franck Vigroux - Videopolis
Finally, as the yet unseen Videopolis work takes the main stage the distinctive sensation of acceleration through pummeled power, a raw yet sophisticated sub-orthodox musical force will seize upon a launched trajectory. A massing together of aggregated clamoring rhythmatics stack and splinter signifying a swaying sense of a colossal surging of hundreds of atomized smithereen sound specimens. In Vigroux’s hands extremes of volume and tumbled beat-based timbre blocks are utilized to spawn particle-gashed membranes of spatial dislocations. Sudden strident punch cuts hocket the listener between a pulse-patterned cacophony and nearly the rare dead silence.
Vidéopolis emerges from the turbulence of discharged architectures overflooded by urban mythologies corrupted by dark forces. These depictions saturate both the visual and cognitive fields to better manipulate the masses, rendered tractile. Serpentine algorithms metastasize all artifice; blur spreads across perception, and contrarian viewpoints cancel one another out. This raises a fundamental question: how can the physical and hypnotic metropolitan mysteries impregnated in Vidéopolis be countered?
Xanopticon
One of the few electronic musicians who truly defy comparison, Xanopticon has been steadily and thoroughly annihilating dancefloors since around 2000AD. This fiendish bastard doesn't hesitate to carve new and horrifying neurological pathways into his victim's brains with razor-thin sonic shards of unknown alien origin. Will you dance? Or will you peel your obsolete flesh from your fragile, useless body? Reactions are as confounding and troubling as the catalyst.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Ryan Friedrich is one of breakcore's most prominent producers. He has toured internationally and released music with several labels including Hymen Records, Peaceoff, Mutant Sniper, Zhark, Mirex, Cock Rock Disco, Entity, and Tigerbeat6. His live shows are often noted for their intensity and his sound for its attention to detail, having been described by one journalist as "waves of breaks". Xanopticon's output features dramatic dynamics that alternate between frantic IDM/"post-drill & bass" and more subtle, melodic ambient music.
https://soundcloud.com/xanopticon