Seventh Stanine Festival

Fri., 6/12/26
doors at 6:30, music at 7
Marisa Anderson / Shane Parish

Sat., 6/13/26
doors at 12:30, music at 1pm
Ian Williams (BATTLES) / Lea Bertucci / Dorothy Carlos / Paleography (Hugh McElroy of Black Eyes) / Day for Night / Daniel Wyche / The Caribbean

Tickets:
Day One: $25-30 (sliding scale)
Day Two: $40-50 (sliding scale)
Both: $60-70 (sliding scale)
Available at www.seventhstanine.com and www.rhizomedc.org

Sponsors:
Essential Tremors
Art Sound Language

Hailed by The Wire as “A grand menagerie of creative music,” Seventh Stanine is a gathering of artists who, against all promise of financial gain, notoriety, or any of the usual tropes associated with playing music, continue to make art because they have to; they can't imagine their lives without it. Originating in 2016 with an idea by DC band The Caribbean to bring together friends, accomplices, and acquaintances, the first installation of the festival was held at the The Dew Drop Inn DC in NE DC on Saturday June 3, 2017. Quoted in the Washington City Paper at the time, founder Matthew Byars said, “'I had long thought about having a festival in the smallest venue possible—literally like a tiny room,'” says Byars of The Caribbean, a quietly beloved D.C. experimental-pop band. His daydream is now an actual thing, and is now co-sponsored along with NPR-distributed music podcast Essential Tremors, which Byars co-produces. However, the festival has now grown beyond its modest beginnings, bringing internationally-known, yet still underground, musicians to the 2026 edition, including Shane Parish, Marisa Anderson, Lea Bertucci, Ian Williams, Dorothy Carlos, as well as The Caribbean itself, described as "minimalist/drone/Philip Jeck by way of Carole King,” and expanding to two days. Previous participants have included Water Damage, Geologist (Animal Collective), Susan Alcorn, Wendy Eisenberg, Tyondai Braxton, Ben Vida, Lucy Liyou, and Deakin (Animal Collective), Luke Stewart Trio, Bill Nace, and Id M Theft Able. As described in the Washington Post in 2025 by pop music critic Chris Richards, “The mere idea of a “music festival” implies a certain bigness, but what if instead of inviting audiences into a treasure vault, organizers offered a glimpse into a jewel box?”

Marisa Anderson channels the history of the guitar and stretches the boundaries of tradition. Her playing is fluid, emotional, and masterful, featuring compositions and improvisations that re-imagine the landscape of American music. The New Yorker calls Anderson ‘one of the most distinctive guitar players of her generation’, and NPR refers to her as among ‘this era’s most powerful players’. Her music has been featured in Rolling Stone, NPR, The New York Times, Pitchfork, the BBC and The Wire. Festival appearances include Big Ears, Pitchfork Midwinter, Le Guess Who and the Copenhagen Jazz Festival. Anderson is the recipient of the 2025 Spark Award for Oregon Artists presented by the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation. Her most recent release, The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music, is a collection of nearly one thousand songs culled from the private record collection of the late Harry Smith. Assembled by Anderson after a chance encounter led to an opportunity to study and explore this treasure trove of music, the Anthology focuses on music from places that the United States has been in conflict with since 1970: Southeast Asia, the USSR and the Arabic and Islamic regions of the world. In Volume 1 (Thrill Jockey), Anderson presents her own deeply personal iterations of nine songs from the Anthology. Composed, transcribed and arranged through a process of trial and error, deep listening and research, Anderson charts a musical course from Afghanistan to Vietnam via Yemen, Cambodia and Turkmenistan. Interpretations of compositions ranging from Pakistani qawwali to Syrian taqsim are played with Anderson’s deft and practiced hands. Each piece on the album stands as a dialogue between Anderson and the original source recording, refracted through the prism of her own unique musical lens. Anderson’s contribution to this dialogue ultimately invites the listener to join her in asking: “Who are the people we’ve been told in our lifetimes are “unamerican?” What have we lost or been denied access to in the fallout from that label?”

Shane Parish is a guitarist, composer, improviser, and interpreter whose work focuses on the translation of music across traditions, canons, and technologies. Known for his precise and expressive fingerstyle technique and his nuanced approach to transcription, Parish treats interpretation as a compositional practice, using existing works as material for structural and sonic transformation.
His recent solo recordings center on recontextualizing music not originally written for guitar. Autechre Guitar (2026, Palilalia Records) presents acoustic fingerstyle arrangements of music by the English electronic duo Autechre. REPERTOIRE (2024) applies the same methodology to works by composers and artists including Alice Coltrane, John Cage, Aphex Twin, Kraftwerk, Ornette Coleman, and Charles Mingus. Solo at Café OTO (2025, Red Eft Records) documents a live electric guitar performance of English and American folk ballads.
Parish first gained wider attention with Undertaker Please Drive Slow (2016, Tzadik Records), produced by John Zorn. The album established his approach to transforming traditional folk material through abstraction and reduction, drawing on both American vernacular music and 20th-century experimental composition.
In ensemble contexts, Parish is the founder of the avant-rock group Ahleuchatistas (est. 2002) and a member of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, alongside Bill Orcutt, Wendy Eisenberg, and Ava Mendoza.

Ian Williams is an American guitarist, keyboardist, and singer-songwriter renowned for his innovative finger-tapping guitar technique and contributions to experimental rock. Best known as a founding member of the bands Don Caballero, Storm & Stress, and Battles, Williams has shaped the math rock and post-rock genres through his self-taught approach to rhythmically complex, instrumental music that blends organic guitar sounds with electronic manipulation. His work emphasizes collective sound design, looping, and sampling, often defying traditional guitar roles in favor of a broader sonic palette influenced by punk, minimalism, and global rhythms. Williams began his musical career in the early 1990s in Pittsburgh, initially playing guitar with Don Caballero in 1991. With Don Caballero, he helped pioneer math rock's intricate, drum-and-guitar-driven sound on albums like What Burns Never Returns (1998), recorded with producer Al Sutton, establishing the band as a cornerstone of instrumental rock. Concurrently, he co-founded Storm & Stress in 1994 with drummer Kevin Shea, releasing two albums—Storm & Stress (1997) and Under Thunder and Fluorescent Lights (2000)—that introduced vocal elements and a more emotive, abstract style to his repertoire, drawing from minimalist composers like Steve Reich. In 2002, Williams formed Battles in New York City alongside drummer John Stanier, guitarist/vocalist Tyondai Braxton, and guitarist Dave Konopka, creating a supergroup that fused math rock precision with electronic experimentation. The band's debut album Mirrored (2007) showcased Williams' multi-instrumental prowess on tracks like "Atlas," earning critical acclaim for its propulsive, technology-infused soundscapes. Following lineup changes—including Braxton's departure in 2010 and Konopka's in 2018—Williams and Stanier continued as a duo, releasing albums such as La Di Da Di (2015) and Juice B Crypts (2019), where Williams' philosophy of evolving the guitar's role through effects like pitch-shifting and modular synthesis remains central.

Lea Bertucci is an experimental musician whose works revolve around electronic and spatial extensions of instrument and voice. In addition to her longstanding practice performing with woodwinds, she has created compositions for strings, brass, percussion and other instruments, often incorporating electronics and multichannel sound. With an ear toward site-responsiveness and acoustics, her work has expanded toward installation and non-linear presentations of her music, often staged in hyper-resonant spaces.
Her discography spans over a decade, with eight full-length solo albums and a number of collaborative projects. She has released on a number of labels including Astral Spirits, Room40, American Dreams and Dinzu Artefacts. In 2018 and 2019, she released solo albums Metal Aether and Resonant Field on NNA Tapes, and has since founded her own label, Cibachrome Editions, with 2021’s A Visible Length of Light as the inaugural release. Recent collaborations include duos with Lawrence English, Olivia Block, Carlos Giffoni and Ben Vida, among others.
Lea has performed both within the US and internationally with presenters such as The Whitney Museum, The Museum of Modern Art New York, The Metropolitan Museum, Blank Forms, Gagosian Gallery, Pioneer Works, The Kitchen, The Walker Museum, The Art Gallery of New South Wales Sydney, Tempo Reale in Florence, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, ReWire Festival, Borderline Festival, and Unsound Festival Krakow. In 2018, she was awarded a Jfund for New Music grant from the American Composers’ Forum and a commission for a brass octet from the Levy Gorvy Gallery in New York. Lea has attended artist residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, The MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts and ISSUE Project Room. She has received commissions from the INA GRM in Paris, Quartetto Maurice in Turin, and ARS Nova Workshop in Philadelphia. She is a 2024 recipient of the Gigahertz Production Prize from the ZKM in Karlsruhe.

Dorothy Carlos is an experimental cellist working in performance and spatial audio. Her work utilizes amplification and digital manipulation to reorient the way sounds operate socially. She is interested in electronics as an opportunity to construct alternate realities.
Recent performances have been presented internationally by Bemis Center, Fridman Gallery, e-flux, Center for New Music and Associated Technologies at UC Berkeley, default (The Hague), FELT (Copenhagen), Sustain-Release, Chicago Jazz String Summit, and Big Ears Festival. Dorothy has been featured as a collaborator on projects presented at Swiss Institute, Night Gallery, Artists Space, Issue Project Room, Performance Space, Pioneer Works, Untitled Art Fair, Gaudeamus Festival (Utrecht), Emerging Change Festival (Berlin), Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt), and the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art. Her research has been published by the American Anthropology Association and presented at Resynesizing the Traditional Lab at CTM Festival (Berlin). Her recorded music has been featured in The Wire, New York Times, Artforum, Bandcamp, and The Quietus, and released with 29 Speedway, Random Man Editions, and D.O.T. Audio Arts.
Dorothy holds a Bachelor’s degree from NYU where she studied classical cello and anthropology on full scholarship and an MFA in sound from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Paleography (Hugh McElroy of Black Eyes) - Hugh McElroy is a founding member of Black Eyes, an American post-punk band from Washington, D.C., United States, that initially existed from August 2001 to March 2004, disbanding two months prior to the release of their second album, Cough. The band reunited to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their self-titled full-length debut, Black Eyes, announcing a 2023 reissue and their first live performances in 19 years.

Day for Night is David Menestres, Danny Finney, and David Dominique.

Daniel Wyche is a Chicago-based guitarist, composer, and improviser. Working with a wide range of physical preparations, extended techniques, and pedal instruments, his solo recordings and live performances are characterized by long-form structured improvisations and multichannel guitar. He has been a curator with the Elastic Arts Foundation in Chicago since 2013, where is work has been described as “crucial” by Dusted and “vital” by the Chicago Reader. In March of 2020, Daniel co-founded The Quarantine Concerts in collaboration with Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio. The series has been widely praised as a model for online/streaming live music. Along with his solo guitar work, Daniel is involved in several ongoing collaborations, most notably the trio of Wyche, Mark Shippy (US Maple), and Ben Baker Billington, as well as new work with longtime collaborators like Patrick Shiroishi, Lake Mary, and many others.. His most recent solo record, “Earthwork,” was released on American Dreams Records in 2021.

DJ’s
-Devin Ocampo (Beauty Pill, Faraquet)
-Archie Moore (Velocity Girl)
-PJ Brownlee (Art Sound Language)
-Lee Gardner (co-host of Essential Tremors)