Indexical, 1050 River Street #119, Santa Cruz, CA (2025)

12/30/2024

A couple of our favorite moments from 2024...

Slide 1: Zekarias Musele Thompson ( ) - Spatial Facilitation #10 at the MAH ( ) (November 9, 2024)

Slide 2: Stephanie Cheng Smith (.world ) - Life Cycles (March 23, 2024)

Slide 3: Michelle Moeller ( ) (January 12, 2024)

Slide 4: Foodman ( ) (December 13, 2024)

Thanks + love to all who make our work possible ✌️🕊️💘

See you in 2025

12/30/2024

A look back on the last 12 months in Indexical programming.
https://mailchi.mp/indexical.org/2024-rewind?e=473131e972

Includes top picks and essays from Indexical’s personnel and reflections from Indexical artists. As a bonus, we’re sharing a couple videos from our favorite events of the year!

12/24/2024

Just Announced!

Friday, Jan. 17, Indexical’s ongoing film series TILT-SHIFT welcomes Em Butler, a Social Documentation MFA student in the Film & Digital Media department at UC Santa Cruz.

Sunday, Feb. 2, filmmaker Roger Beebee () presents “FILMS for ONE to EIGHT PROJECTORS.”

Thursday, Feb 6, Australian noise musician Lucas ‘Granpa’ Abela () joins Mayuko Hino and Thomas Dimuzio for a stacked bill of noise!

Tickets and more info at indexical.org/events

12/17/2024

DAMN! What a banger to close out the year!! 🔥🔥🔥

Thank you to all who showed up to our last concert of 2024 with Foodman ( ) , Nathan Ho (.w.ho ) and kinch ( ).

Much love and we'll see ya in 2025! 🙏☮✌💝

12/08/2024

🎉 Indexical is thrilled to close 2024 with Nagoya's one and only FOODMAN (Hyperdub / Orange Milk / Palto Flats)!!! SF-based experimental electronic musician NATHAN HO and KINCH open the night.

Foodman + Nathan Ho + kinch (dj set)
Fri., Dec. 13, 2024
Doors at 8pm | Show at 8:30pm

Takahide Higuchi a.k.a Foodman, creates music that defies categorisations –and is one of the few artists that actually fit this overused description. There are traces of almost every electronic music genre, from juke, footwork,ambient, house, techno, to noise, but those elements are dissected and morphed together then driven to extreme without giving you a second to come up with a definitive genre. The noisy technicolour of these borderline versatile or schizophrenic collages is borne out of his experiments (or accidents) and has titillated, confused, and enchanted music obsessives far and wide. After releasing his debut album from NY/OH experimental label Orange Milk, his music has been released from international labels including Diplo's Mad Decent and its offshoot Good Enuff. His ever-evolving and mutating musical vocabulary draws from every kind of music he stumbles across, from Chicago footwork to Okinawan folk music of his roots, ambient to J-pop, Talvin Singh's Indian classical music/drum 'n' bass fusion to classic video game soundtracks, then twists them all with his playful psychedelia.

12/03/2024

Double ✌️Your Impact on Giving Tuesday

Thanks to generous support from the Moore Family Giving Fund and an anonymous donor, every dollar you give will be matched up to $15,000!

From Giving Tuesday till the end of the year, consider making a tax-deductible donation to double your impact and help Indexical sustain operations, support artists, and keep programming affordable. Direct support from individuals like yourself allow us to continue to preserve, nurture, and present radical, risk-taking artistic work into the new year.

A heartfelt thank you to all who make our work possible. ✨

12/03/2024

❄️ WINTER 2025 ❄️

Jan 24. Gregg Kowalsky + RISA

Feb 6. Mayuko Hino + Thomas Dimuzio

Feb 8. Gneiss + Jeff Kolar

Feb 15. John McCowen & Madison Greenstone

Feb 19. Lia Kohl

Tickets, updates, and more info: indexical.org

11/29/2024

Indexical is pleased to present NYC musician Dominic Coles and vocalist and producer Cruel Diagonals. For this performance, Coles will share a new piece using a type of listening he calls "alphabetic listening," attempting to establish an alphabet through the association of a word and an abstract, synthetic sound. Cruel Diagonals presents new voice-centered electronic music compositions.

Dominic Coles + Cruel Diagonals
Fri., Dec. 6, 2024
Doors at 8pm | Show at 8:30pm
$16 General / FREE or discounted for Members

Dominic Coles is a musician based in Queens, NYC. Through composition and improvisation he investigates the interactions of place, personhood, and power as they are articulated in sound and speech. Documents of this practice have been presented by Edition Wandelweiser, Tripticks Tapes, Spricht Editions, and performed at Café OTO (London), KM28 (Berlin), Les Ateliers Claus (Brussels), Shift: FourOneOne (NYC), Alyssa Davis Gallery (NYC), Casa Del Popolo (Montreal), Indexical (Santa Cruz), and in DIY spaces throughout the US and Europe. Dominic has been a resident artist at Baldwin for the Arts and a Qubit Innovator Lab Fellow. He also runs the record label Party Perfect! with collaborator Hunter Brown.

Since 2016, Los Angeles-based multimedia artist, Cruel Diagonals (aka Megan Mitchell), has been creating critically acclaimed experimental electronic music and intriguing visuals. Though classically trained as a vocalist and well-versed in jazz standards as a youth, Cruel Diagonals applies her brilliant voice to compositions and improvisations that are the antithesis of staid tradition or arid academic exercises. Rather, she optimizes her minimal gear setup with an instinctual adventurousness and an acute sense of the most chilling and moving atmospheres and timbres, favoring fluidity of tones over the grid-like modes of much electronic music. Cruel Diagonals augments these elements with exquisite vocalizations, informed by ancient folk musical traditions, as well as contemporary classical ones, thereby forging a unique sonic palette.

11/20/2024

Dear friends,

Since our beginnings in 2011, we’ve strived to present radical and unfamiliar work that both challenges and inspires. We built Indexical to celebrate, preserve, and nurture a cultural ecology that is often marginalized, subversive, and outside the status quo. It’s both a community hub and an incubator for new ideas and creative practices.

In 2024 alone, we have hosted nearly 60 events including: a packed-house concert in Claire Rousay’s traveling bedroom, a serpentine solo violin performance by Sarah Saviet, a sensory overloading performance from Dreamcrusher (Indexical’s first crowdsurf!), two sold out performances by our Summer 2024 Artists-in-Residence Sarah Cruse and Thomas Pederson, the West Coast premiere of Olivia Block’s electroacoustic masterpiece “The Mountains Pass,” and a site-specific performance at the Santa Cruz MAH exhibition “Young, Gifted, and Black” with Zekarias Musele Thompson.

And that’s just our performances! This year also saw a new exhibition by Ann Altstatt, film screenings, hands-on workshops, machine-strength techno nights, and continuing collaborations with Speak for Change and Dirty Looks.

Our aim is to build a stable and lasting artist-centered organization in Santa Cruz County and we need your support. We ask that you consider making a 100% tax-deductible end of year contribution to Indexical. We’re aiming to raise $30,000 by December 31. Contributions of all scales get us closer to our goal.

Donations can be made through our online donation platform, or contact us to learn more about major gifts, sponsorships, and recurring giving.

In thanks, we are offering some great gifts: a year-long membership with discounted tickets, a new Indexical t-shirt, a selection of Indexical publications and recordings, and season passes for two to an entire year’s worth of events.

Thank you so much for your support of Indexical. Your investment in our work is essential to ensure that boundary-pushing artistic expression and dynamic cultural spaces thrive into 2025 and beyond.

Sincerely,

Michael Masaru Flora
Executive Director, Indexical

Donate at Indexical.org/donate or through the link in our bio!

11/14/2024

✨🌲 December at Indexical 🌲✨

Dec 6: Dominic Coles + Cruel Diagonals
New compositions exploring language and voice

Dec 10: Mississippi Records presents: A People’s History of North American Music
Mississippi Record label and store founder Eric Isaacson will guide you through this whirlwind presentation of archival film, sound clips and images.

Dec 13: Foodman + Nathan Ho + kinch (dj set)
Indexical is thrilled to close 2024 with Japanese electronic producer Foodman, and SF-based experimental electronic musician Nathan Ho. kinch opens the night with an eclectic DJ set.

11/12/2024

Natacha Diels' presents "Somewhere Beautiful," a performance of music, video, and choreography exploring ideas of life and death through storytelling and play! Avant-jazz trumpeter Steph Richards opens.

Natacha Diels + Steph Richards
Sat., Nov. 16, 2024
Doors at 8pm | Show at 8:30pm
Tickets 🎟 via the link in bio or at indexical.org

Natacha Diels’ work combines choreographed movement, video animation, instrumental practice, and cynical play to create worlds of curiosity and unease. Recent work includes Papillon and the Dancing Cranes, for construction cranes and giant butterfly (2018/2021), a solo project entitled Somewhere Beautiful (2022), and Beautiful Trouble, an ongoing ‘opera’ for string quartet with the JACK quartet. Forthcoming is a solo album (Carrier Records 2024), a new ‘opera’ for Festival Nueva Opera Buenos Aires (2024), and a work for headphoned audience with La Muse en Circuit for Ensemble Contrechamps (2025). With a focus on collage, collaboration, and the ritual of life as art, Natacha’s compositions have been described as “a tour de force of reckless imagination and confident craft” (Musical America), “a fairy tale for a fractured world” (Music We Care About), and “the liveliest music of the evening” (LA Review of Books). Natacha is a founding member of the composer/performer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse (est. 2003).

"Emerging Maestro" (New York Times) trumpeter Steph Richards is a rising force in the creative music scene, having worked with pioneering artists ranging from Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton and John Zorn to St. Vincent, David Byrne and Yoko Ono and her sonic explorations have led to collaborations with performance artists Mike Kelly, Laurie Anderson/Lou Reed. Richards has also worked with creative jazz masters Jason Moran, Ravi Coltrane, Sylvie Courvoisier and others. Driven by a curiosity how listeners interact with music and what sensory variables are open to experimentation, her own compositions have featured across North and South America and Europe. premiering on iconic stages at Carnegie Hall, the Blue-note, Bimhuis and Lincoln Center.

11/12/2024

📣Announcing TILT-SHIFT, a new film series at Indexical!

TILT-SHIFT, referring to a pair of interactions between a camera lens and the image plane, is a new film series about moving images and politics. TILT-SHIFT invites guest filmmakers to screen their work alongside a film that helped inspire it, and discuss with audiences how their work connects to longer lineages of radical cinema and anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle.

This monthly series, curated by UCSC Film and Digital Media PhD. student alex cruse, intends to connect conversations about aesthetics and form to work being done on the ground.

For its inaugural program, Indexical welcomes Mary Jirmanus Saba, a critical geographer and filmmaker whose work uncovers and explores histories of the Arab world and beyond. Saba's work will precede a screening of Christian Ghazi's 1972 experimental documentary Hundred Faces for a Single Day: "Rejecting all propagandistic or narrative convention, Ghazi combined documentary and abstract sequences with a series of discontinuous plot lines to organize an attack on the bourgeois decadence of Beirut’s political milieu." (Palestine Film Index)

TILT-SHIFT: Mary Jirmanus Saba
Sun., Nov. 17, 2024
4-6 pm
Tickets 🎟 via the link in bio or at indexical.org

Mary Jirmanus Saba is a geographer and filmmaker. Her work has shown widely at venues ranging from Anthology Film Archives, the Berlinale and the London ICA to rural discussion screenings in South Lebanon and Palestine campus encampments across the US. She is a member of UAW Labor for Palestine, and the People's CDC and engaged in an ongoing collaborative artistic practice with Nada Ziane (b. 2019) and Seri Kamil (b. 2021).

video still credit: "A labor theory of artistic value, On Mothering and Artistic Genius (2024)"

11/05/2024

Join us on Saturday, Nov. 9 for spatial facilitation #10, a site-specific performance by Zekarias Musele Thompson.

spatial facilitation, a term of art in physiology, refers to stimuli that contribute to the accurate processing of visual information. That is to say, there are certain things that we see, that help us see more precisely. “spatial facilitation” is an ongoing project of mapping clearer vision through walking, noticing, the breath, and the saxophone. ANALOG SOLUTIONS FOR ANALOG PROBLEMS.

for spatial facilitation #10 we will visit the exhibition Young, Gifted, and Black at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. We will look for the tethers that bind, and release.

MAH x Indexical: Zekarias Musele Thompson - spatial facilitation #10
Sat., Nov. 9, 2024
7:30pm
$20 General / $15 MAH Members

Zekarias Musele Thompson (b. 1983, they/them/their) is an artist based in Oakland, CA, and Reykjavik, IS often working in sonic composition, mark-making, photography, collaborative group practice & performance, and writing. Their practice is concerned with humanity’s conceptual and emotional organizational structures—and how we bring them into material form. Zekarias has presented solo exhibitions and projects at the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Lab, and the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies. They have performed at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Gray Area in the Bay area — as well as Associate Gallery, Ásmundasalur, and Open in Reykjavík, Iceland.

Zekarias is an instigator of the Musele Project, a sound, image, performance, and facilitation practice that encourages deep, empathic listening, and a co-founder of Working Name Studios, a collectively owned and organized arts institution with the mission of building institutional stability and equity for underrepresented creative practices, ideas, and people. They are part of the Emerging Artist Program at the MoAD for 2024, and are currently an MFA candidate in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley.

11/04/2024

Enigmatic producer pent seizes the alien as an impetus to generate bold new sound worlds. Utilizing semi-aleatoric digital synthesis methods, her work repurposes the tools of technology to question the very nature of the "synthetic." On Friday, November 8, New York-based artist pent makes a rare West Coast appearance at Indexical with an opening set by Oakland improvisational duo Dovetail (Raub Roy / Dianne Lynn).

pent + Dovetail
Fri., Nov. 8, 2024
Doors at 8pm | Show at 8:30pm
more info + 🎟 at indexical.org

pent is an electronic music composer & sound synthesist based in new york city. Her work examines the phenomena of synthetic sound, dissecting and reconstructing how the concept of the “unnatural” replicates the organic world and vice versa. pent’s cultural framework pulls from computer music, noise, dance music tropes, and 20th century classical to create fluxing immersive sound sculptures that defy realities & transverse stream of consciousness narratives. Her exercises as a sound synthesist are largely in the area of additive synthesis & pulsar synthesis, blending each fields techniques into a model of acoustical simulation that draws environmental sounds into physically impossible territories. Through these techniques she creates a sonic world that floats between stasis, burst, confusion, distraction, and cohesiveness.

Dovetail are Raub Roy and Dianne Lynn. The duo cultivate improvisational soundscapes through a process of compromise, negotiation, and deep listening. The music draws from a shared love of quasi-repetitive, iterative, and drifting lines/phrases. Raub is best known for his electroacoustic performances as horaflora, surrounding audiences in a cornucopia of aleatoric and semi-autonomous sound producing objects. He also records as Scy1e, attempting to transmute rhythmic electronic music to fringe variants of perceivable patterns and phrases. Dianne performs as Nurse Betty. This project takes inspiration from the interrelated systems of the body, interpreting them through capacitive electronics, voice, and field recordings. She also is part of Foot SOS, a trio dedicated to improvisational noise performance.

10/31/2024

Join us on Saturday, November 2nd for a special event to mark the closing of "Why is There Something Instead of Nothing?," a site-specific installation by ANN ALTSTATT. We will feature a conversation with the artist and special live performance by KITE HANDS GLOWING. Free to attend. Light refreshments will be provided.

Ann Altstatt - Why is There Something Instead of Nothing? (Closing Reception)
Sat., Nov. 2, 2024
Doors at 6:30pm | Programming at 7pm
FREE

Ann Altstatt is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores temporality, the intersections of scientific inquiry and mysticism, and the hidden stories of the material world. Their other research interests include paleontology, cosmology, discard studies, human relationships with the non-human, and multi-species survival in the face of global climate chaos. Ann graduated from the Digital Arts and New Media MFA at University of California, Santa Cruz in 2018. As a founding collective member at The Fábrica textile workshop since 2010, their arts practice remains informed by community engagement, collaborative processes, and material reuse. They are honored to have been recognized by the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County as a 2020/2021 Rydell Visual Arts Fellow. Ann lives on the historic floodplain of the San Lorenzo River, with their partner and kiddo, a cat, two dogs, five chickens and innumerable termites.

Kite Hands Glowing is the musical project of Nadia Lucia. Nadia started playing music with friends in 2008 in Santa Cruz, and has been inspired deeply by the house shows and creativity of her friends from years of world-building around Awaswas-speaking Yupi territory, a magical land and watershed that is a part of the wider Ohlone territories, also called Santa Cruz, California. Their combined sound takes contemplative lullabye-esque folk bedroom piano and guitar songs into a more full dimension of themselves; offering to the audience the opportunity to move their bodies if they wish, or sway like a tall grass in the old wind.

10/30/2024

Join us for a special performance by multi-instrumentalist and prolific technologist Jaron Lanier with electronic guitarist Shango B'Kongo-Rayo.

Jaron Lanier + Shango B'Kongo-Rayo
Fri., Nov. 1, 2024
Doors at 8pm | Show at 8:30pm

Jaron Lanier plays a pathological number of rare acoustic musical instruments, a malady you can read about in one of his pieces for the New Yorker Magazine. Since the pandemic, he has played with Les Claypool, John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, T Bone Burnett, Sara Bareilles, Sean Lennon, Stanley Jordan, Will Calhoun, Harper Simon, Bill Frisell, String Cheese Incident, and many others. Before the pandemic he wrote orchestra music and played with tons of other people like Philip Glass and Ornette Coleman. He’s also a writer, scientist and technologist, known for his work initiating the field of Virtual Reality among other things.

Shango B'Kongo-Rayo is a New York City based electronic guitarist who continuously pushes musical boundaries, merging ancient cultures with contemporary technologies. He is a bandleader/guitarist/vocalist with Cuban Trance, Heritage, J. Walter Negro & The Loose Jointz, and N.A.T.O.

10/30/2024

November at Indexical

Nov 1: Jaron Lanier + Shango B'Kongo-Rayo
Prolific technologist and multi-instrumentalist Jaron Lanier with guitarist Shango B'Kongo-Rayo

Nov 2: Closing Reception: "Why is There Something Instead of Nothing?"
Featuring a conversation with the artist and special live musical performance by Kite Hands Glowing

Nov 8: pent + Dovetail
Sculptural digital synthesis from NYC's pent. Oakland improvisational duo Dovetail (Raub Roy/Dianne Lynn) open.

Nov 9: MAH x Indexical - Zekarias Musele Thompson - spatial facilitation #10
A ritual practice of situating ourselves in space together through walking, noticing, the breath, and sound.

Nov 16: Natacha Diels + Steph Richards
Natacha Diels’ presents "Somwhere Beautiful," a work for choreographed movement, video animation, instrumental practice, and cynical play. Trumpeter and "emerging maestro of extended technique" (New York Times) Steph Richards opens.

more details at: indexical.org

10/26/2024

Will Guthrie closing out our October 2024 programming with a trance inducing set of gamelan-inspired polyrhythms. Sheesh! 🔥🔥🔥

Indexical

12/30/2024

12/30/2024

12/24/2024

12/17/2024

12/08/2024

12/03/2024

12/03/2024

11/29/2024

11/20/2024

11/14/2024

11/12/2024

11/12/2024

11/05/2024

11/04/2024

10/31/2024

10/30/2024

10/30/2024

10/26/2024

Address

Opening Hours

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Videos

Shortcuts

Share

Category