west oakland sound series
SUNDAY OCTOBER 19 2025 7:15PM
MELTYKISS is a Brooklyn-based duo project of drummer Max Goldstein and vocalist Ariel Vera. Meltykiss focuses on guided improvisation based off a conceptual form created collaboratively. The sound of Meltykiss is influenced by the likes of Sun Ra, Chris Corsano, Marcela Lucatelli, Zach Hill, and more blending stylistic ideas based on free jazz and heavy idioms to create charged, scribbly, loop-based noise.
PHIL STONE presents Another Day at the Entropy Mine for solo improviser in a one-node network. Using software processes and instruments (mostly) of his own design*, Stone initiates and nudges cascades of probabilistic responses to the notes he plays on electric bass. In his work with the network band “The Hub”, Stone often employed self-connected network processes during development and testing, to simulate the group dynamic. He found interesting results from this ‘one-node network’ and began to think of it as a musical instrument in its own right, worthy of its own body of technique and practice. (*) In addition to his own software voicing, Stone employs the Free Open Source “Surge XT” software synthesizer, to which he has contributed an OSC interface.
EUDIMORPHODON, is an early pterosaur AND a new duo with Dan Plonsey (saxophones) and Matthew Welch (bagpipes). Featuring compositions and improvisations by both for this unique combination of reeds, Plonsey and Welch dig deep into their love for odd creatures and characters to summon forth wild sonic beasts of imagination. The duo will also be performing Anthony Braxton’s Composition #242.
The EUDIMORPHODON “studies” are pieces that bring compositional form to a system of dimorphic harmony, a term I use that bridges bitonality and hexachordal harmony, designed to mold pitch structure that facilitates the old, modal bagpipes (principal line) into a new, chromatic instrumental world. Their titles pull from early pterosaurs (and their skeletal musical ideas). Think of them as extinct fossils to reanimate. Performing with Dan, one of my creative music heroes, has been a dream come true! Sharing two mentors, Martin Bresnick and Anthony Braxton, no wonder our music came together so well! - Matthew Welch
The pterosaurs were not, in fact, ancestors of modern birds -- dinosaurs were: in particular, the T. Rex and velociraptor. But that is neither here nor there. The role of birds and birdsong in the development of modern music cannot be overstated. Obviously the song: the irregular, jagged rhythms; the microtonal variations in pitch; the composite melodies of flocks e.g., of blackbirds at sunset. The music that Matt and I make is -- out of the four elements -- of the air. In "Naturally, the Egg" we play a modal melody twice, first in canon, and later, after improvisation, in a loose heterophonic unison, like a flock of two. The song of the soaring, swooping Eudimorphodon could not have been more eery and thrilling than that of bagpipes and saxophone together. - Dan Plonsey
as thrillingly primordial as the extinct pterosaur that gives the project its name — The Wire
Eudimorphodon is pretty magical…It’s spiritual, scientific, metaphorical, old, and new, and it cleans out your pipes. Five stars — The Free Jazz Collective
