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Latitudes focuses on a contingent of composers, improvisers, and musicians working in underground forms of contemporary music. It was started in response to the dwindling number of Bay Area venues presenting artists operating in the space between serious avant-garde music and popular forms. 

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Sult / Matt Robidoux / Foreign/Domestic

Acoustic improv trio Sult embraces an other-worldly matrix of scrapes, thrums, and throbs. The charismatic Matt Robidoux invites listeners into a lysergic world oscillating wildly between hysteria and self-possession. Zachary James Watkins (guitar) and John Diaz (drums) join forces to form Foreign/Domestic.

Black and white collage of artist headshots.

Austin Larkin / Gerald Cleaver & Jean Carla Rodea

Avast! Latitudes has prepared a fresh mélange of acoustic and electronic experimentation for its 20th installment. New Haven’s Austin Larkin will transmogrify the violin into a tool to amplify the poetics of space while musical polymorphs Gerald Cleaver and Jean Carla Rodea jettison genre to careen through a dizzying array of sounds and influences in search of the ecstatic.

This concert took place on August 17, 2023 at St John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in San Francisco.

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Joel St. Julien / CGRSM / Seasons

Latitudes continues featuring a triple bill spanning the spectrum of experimental ambient music. Drones ebb and flow while girded by rumbling floor toms in Christopher Robin Duncan‘s SEASONS, Joel St. Julien summons and subdues chaos on modular synth, while CGRSM (Christopher Reid Martin and Gabie Strong) erect monoliths of feedback from electric guitars.

This concert took place on July 22, 2023 at St John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in San Francisco.

Ghost Ensemble black and white group photo.

Ghost Ensemble

New York’s Ghost Ensemble fosters groundbreaking music that blurs borders of genre, style, and scene, expanding perceptual horizons through shared immersive experience. Ghost Ensemble’s May 18 performance at St John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in San Francisco, California presents new works commissioned for the 2022-23 season by composers Sky Macklay, Ben Richter, and Catherine Lamb.

This concert took place on May 18, 2023 at St John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in San Francisco.

Cheryl Leonard performing with organic objects outdoors

Cheryl Leonard

As the COVID-19 pandemic took shape, the Latitudes series was recast as a video series featuring site-specific performances and long-form interviews with the artists. In January 2021, as the weather oscillated wildly between seaborne squalls and dazzling rainbows, composer/instrument-builder/performer Cheryl Leonard led Latitudes curator and OM Associate Director, Blaine Todd, deep into the Marin Headlands with OM’s production crew to discuss a range of topics and perform two works written for the unique topography and psycho-social history of this distinctive region.

This video was recorded in January 2021 in the Marin Headlands.

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Charles Hutchins / James Fei and John Bischoff

Charles Hutchins makes a triumphant return to the Bay Area for an algorithmic performance on computer and serpent, the low-pitched Renaissance-era brass instrument. Saxophonist and live electronics performer James Fei and computer music pioneer John Bischoff round out the night with a duo performance for our return to San Francisco’s Center for New Music.

This concert took place on August 28, 2022 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

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Henry Birdsey / Angel Archer

On this installment of Latitudes, Angel Archer indulged us in extended rituals from a dimly lit corner of kosmische psychedelia and ambient soundscape. Henry Birdsey visited from the East Coast to perform microtonal drone hymns for lap steel guitar.

This concert took place on February 19, 2020 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

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Joseph Hammer / Kaori Suzuki

Armed with a battery of consumer-grade electronics and an unwholesome passion for sci-fi and AM radio, audio plunderer Joseph Hammer assembles found sound detritus into a palace of labyrinthine referents. Kaori Suzuki rewards endurance with transcendence in a set featuring modified melodica and oscillators.

This concert took place on November 8, 2019 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

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Samara Lubelski & Marcia Bassett | John Krausbauer & Kaori Suzuki

On this installment of Latitudes, the duo of Marcia Bassett and Samara Lubelski combined violin and e-bowed guitar in a thick tranquilizing compound. Like a viscous syrup, the slow-moving drones ooze chromatically across their instruments. John Krausbauer and Kaori Suzuki’s existential and ecstatic free drone music emanates an intense ritualistic vibe—the kind of music that would make a suitably ominous soundtrack to one of Hermann Nitsch’s notorious aktions.

This concert took place on August 16, 2019 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

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Rob Lowe – IMA –
Chris Duncan

On this installment of Latitudes, Other Minds teams up with the San Francisco Art Book Fair to present vocalist/composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, sound artist Chris Duncan, and the electronics and percussion duo IMA at Center for New Music.

This concert took place on July 20, 2019 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

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Andrew Weathers & AMMA ATERIA

Utopic folk dreamer Andrew Weathers visits the Bay Area from his hideaway in rural West Texas with a set of guitar-driven ambient folk works that drift seamlessly between rigor and flexibility to deliver a message that’s at turns weary and optimistic. AMMA ATERIA presents a dense sonic menagerie of distant and closely mic’d subjects forming an unsteady equilibrium hovering above a bed of luxuriant drones.

This concert took place on July 10, 2019 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

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Receptacles & DEGRADIENT

What if Captain Beefheart had cut his teeth listening to The Fall instead of Howlin’ Wolf and Bo Diddley? The result might have sounded like Receptacles—a joyfully shambolic deconstructionist collision of rhythms and riffs. Kyle Bruckmann’s DEGRADIENT gleefully collides elements of skronk, fried analog noise and dark prog, adding significant heaviness to his signature polyrhythmic clatter, formal complexity, and black humor.

This concert took place on June 13, 2019 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

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Danny Paul Grody &
Alan Licht

On this installment of Latitudes, Guitarist, polymuse, and serial collaborator Alan Licht joined Latitudes to perform his solo electric guitar meanderings at Center for New Music while Bay Area local Danny Paul Grody opened with a set of gauzy 12 string guitar and synthesizer soundscapes.

This concert took place on May 10, 2019 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

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Sonnet Matsumoto Duo & Tongue Depressor

The New Haven, CT duo Tongue Depressor perform trance-inducing fiddle music that seethes with beating overtones and a high lonesome sound. The unlikely pairing of lap steel dobro and koto makes up the L.A.-based duo of Caspar Sonnet and Kozue Matsumoto. Together they scrape, bow and pluck their way through an investigation of the versatile sound palette and extended possibilities of their instruments.

This concert took place on May 2, 2019 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

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Paul Metzger, John Saint Pelvyn & Voicehandler

Other Minds’ Latitudes series continued with The Master and Enigma: Paul Metzger, a bonafide American folk outsider, performs his entrancing hymnprovisations for modified 23 string banjo. Minneapolis’ mercurial mystery man John Saint Pelvyn makes an ultra-rare Bay Area appearance performing on solo electric guitar—barely harnessed feedback, f-hole howling, mid-jam retunings, and whammy bar abuse all-included.

This concert took place on April 24, 2019 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

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Gabriel Mindel Saloman & Ashley Bellouin with Ben Bracken

Gabriel Mindel Saloman, known widely for his work in seminal noise band Yellow Swans, joins Latitudes to present his ongoing investigations into music of the liberated body. Composer and instrument-builder Ashley Bellouin is joined by guitarist Ben Bracken to conjure a sound equal parts spiritual, mental, and physical—minimal by design, maximal in spirit.

This concert took place on March 8, 2019 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

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William Fowler Collins & Geneva Skeen

William Fowler Collins gave a voice to a spectacular chroma of dread with a performance of works from his most recent full-length record Field Music. “Geneva Skeen evokes Californian vistas and the corruption festering behind them with the same uneasiness as Lana Del Rey’s West Coast or Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.” Wire Magazine

This concert took place on February 12, 2019 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

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Arrington de Dionyso &
DunkelpeK

Arrington de Dionyso conjured utopic zones through ritual trance and the high spirits of electrified rock and roll. The iconoclastic duo DunkelpeK transmited an amalgamated soundworld through percussion and electric guitar, chopping their many influences to bits and reassembling them in a quest for new musical possibilities.

This concert took place on January 25, 2019 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

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Chuck Johnson & Leila Abdul-Rauf

Pedal steel guitar player Chuck Johnson’s western-tinged ambient works drawl out slow and stately, like disappearing shadows on the desert floor while the sun rises overhead. Again the light changes with trumpet player and vocalist Leila Abdul-Rauf whose blurred melancholic songs obscure the day’s memories in a mesmeric haze.

This concert took place on December 20, 2018 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

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Bill Orcutt & Zachary James Watkins


On the second installment of Latitudes, Bill Orcutt performed his convulsive blues on four-string electric, while composer and former Black Spirituals guitarist, Zachary James Watkins sketched an aural map of the C4NM through walls of feedback.

This concert took place on November 15, 2018 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

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Tetuzi Akiyama & John Krausbauer

From Tokyo, Japan, guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama brought his motorik “infinite boogie” and graveside blues minimalism to the Center for New Music. Ecstatic music aesthete John Krausbauer opened with a trance-inducing exploration of amplified violin and stroboscopic lighting.

This concert took place on October 10, 2018 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

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