For 25 years, Other Minds has brought the Bay Area revolutionary new music with our annual Other Minds Festival and our environmental concert series The Nature of Music. We also produce Special Events focusing on a variety of unique musical presentations, including Latitudes, focusing on indie rock & other experimental forms. On this page you’ll find a chronological list of our upcoming extravaganzas, along with ticket links plus audio and video links so you can preview our artists.
Join us as to discover more about fine innovative composers spanning the globe.
For Other Minds 24, Other Minds has commissioned California-based composer and instrument builder Brian Baumbusch to write a new evening-length work for instruments and tunings of his own devising. The work, entitled The Pressure, features more than 24 players including the composer’s own Lightbulb Ensemble, along with the San Francisco-based Friction String Quartet, a keyboardist, and four singers/narrators. The music will explore the sound-palates of Baumbusch’s mixed ensemble, ranging from the shimmering tones of his homemade metallophone instruments to the rich chroma of the strings.
The Pressure will be a 90-minute multimedia work based on themes of early German expressionist film centered on the occult/uncanny as explored through an original storyline written by the composer’s brother Paul Baumbusch, and feature an onstage performance set to projected illustrations created by Federico Yankelevich from Madrid, Spain.
OM Festival 24: Concert 3 – Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Music for four pianos in quartertones
Sunday, June 16, 2019 @ YBCA Theater
Sunday, June 16, 2019 @ YBCA Theater
The late composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893-1979) was a tireless explorer in the realm of quarter-tone, eighths-of-tone, 16ths-of-tone, and other microtonal [composition] circa 1935-1975. Other Minds presents the first-ever American retrospective of works by this Russian-born acquaintance of Alexander Scriabin’s who lived most of his life in Paris after 1920. Charles Amirkhanian, who met with the composer three times between 1972-1978, is curating a program that will include Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra, a four-movement 30-minute work for four grand pianos, two of them tuned down a quarter-tone, and other works for piano ensemble.
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.
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 venues in San Francisco presenting artists operating in the liminal space between serious avant-garde music and rock and roll. Precious few venues regularly present music that falls in between these cracks. That in mind, the hope for this series is to help fill a gap that’s glaringly obvious in San Francisco music scene—and do so with the input of the community of music makers and enthusiasts living in the Bay Area.