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John Butcher lives in London and has played the saxophone for over 20 years. His work ranges through free improvisation, multitracked  pieces, work with pre-recorded tape, and also with live electronics. He appears on over 40 recordings.  Solo concerts have long been a particular enthusiasm, as was featured in an episode of the BBC TV series Date with an Artist. A selection of groups he has played with include Derek Bailey’s Company Weeks, News from the Shed with Radu Malfatti and Paul Lovens, Chris Burn’s Ensemble, the Butcher/Durrant/Russell trio, the Phil Minton Quartet, Fred van Hove’s t’nonet, and Butch Morris’ London Skyscraper.
 

Gino Robair is an American composer, improvisor, drummer, and percussionist. In his own work (as a soloist and in improvisation ensembles), he plays prepared/modified percussion, analog synthesizer, ebow and prepared piano, theremin, and bowed objects (polystyrene, customized/broken cymbals, faux daxophone, metal). Although Gino is often referred to as a jazz musician, he grew up playing both rock and concert music. Gino Robair is currently the editor of Electronic Musician magazine, and he runs Rastascan Records.

Bill Hsu plays piano and work with electronics. He is interested in real-time performance systems that have some of the live, tactile qualities of good human musicians playing acoustic instruments. His work mostly involves using gestural interfaces to control synthesis, and building systems that interact with human performers. In particular, he is inspired by improvisers who have developed rich palettes of extended techniques.

He has performed in the San Francisco Bay area, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Karlsruhe (Germany), Berlin, London, and Porto (Portugal), and he is a founding member of the Beanbender’s collective, which organized over 150 concerts of new music in the San Francisco Bay area.

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Working from different aesthetic and conceptual backgrounds, the films of these three artists share an ethos of handmade, personal cinema. Angelina Krahn utilizes a wide palette of alternative techniques in her films, perhaps most poignantly in *Stigmata Sampler,* in which she sewed into the surface of the film to cover up and obscure images of her own body. Karen Johannesen’s masterful editing and single-framing techniques serve to embody studies into quantum mechanics, bringing to vision in delicate landscapes a world “teeming with billions of unrealized possibilities”. Rick Bahto’s in-camera edited works use the people and places of his everyday life as the basis of studies in movement, rhythm and duration, creating a tension between pre-determined structures and a freedom of improvisation. Rick Bahto in person.

A heartfelt documentation of the nightlife in one of San Francisco’s most beloved dive bars: Expansion Bar.  With footage collected over the last ten years of the bar’s existence and including interviews with Dick Wood, John Anderson and Gary Milliman film maker Martin Reade gives viewers the chance to be a part of this singular establishment.