Valerie Kuehne & the Wasps Nests // Vicki Brown // Algae&Tentacles

Valerie Kuehne and the Wasps Nests is a band based in New York and Pittsburgh. Valerie leads the group on vocals and cello, Jeffrey Young plays violin, and Alex Cohen plays drums. In performance, they mix grindcore, cabaret, performance art, punk, and neoclassical art song, with a dash of free improvisation. Lucid Culture said that Valerie Kuehne is “part punk classical cellist, part performance artist, but her performance art isn’t the foofy, mannered kind – it’s oldschool 80s style and it has fangs. And it’s hilarious.” Shakefist Magazine called her “a fearless cello master with a relentlessly creative soul.” Her work in this project and others operates under principles of surprise and investigates obsession, comedy, decay, forensic pathology, sex, hypnogogia, viscera, spirituality, and death. She is an advocate for mental illness and addiction, incessantly seeking new ways to break down stigmas and misconceptions about both.

Violinist Vicki Brown explores the intimate liminal spaces between the light and dark, the seen and unseen, the known and unknown. She often describes her music as ‘elemental psychosonic landscapes,’ drawing on her curiosity of what it means to see 63 shades of green through the eyes of an orangutan, what the underside of a bird’s wing sounds like in flight, the drag and push of water as an iceberg makes its passage. Relying on her multiple loop pedals and improvisational approach, she capitalizes on repetition and unbeknownst moments that become integral to the music-making experience. She has toured the US and Europe and collaborates with dancers, film makers, painters, poets and bands.

Algae & Tentacles is a sound project based in Tucson, AZ. John Melillo and different collaborators construct sound-noises through singing, guitar-ing, keyboarding, looping, and other bodily and electronic means.