Recombinant Network Editions 2025: Surface Tension Night

Curated by BRUTAL SOUND FX James Twig Harper / Ezra Buchla, Melted Face, Kwisp, War Hippy, Botched Facelift, Gustavo Pastre, Madame Varga (Lori Varga / Oakland), Zebra Secrets, and The American Flag Curated by Recombinant Media Labs Lightphorms by L'Astra Cosmo, NACHT II by Franck Vigroux, DAIMATSU by Carl Stone, Mix Master Mike / EVICSHEN (AKA Victoria Shen), Videopolis by Franck Vigroux, and Midnight by Xanopticon Curated by Surface Tension HESAITIX (PAN), LARA SARKISSIAN (btwn Earth + Sky) with Mher Mnatsakanyan (Clarinet, Duduk), NIHAR (Surface Tension + Left Hand Path) DJ Sets by: JASON P. (Surface Tension + TVOD) and DJ CZ (Surface Tension + stratus) Curated by KATABATIK Rude 66 (Bordello A Parigi), Exillon (Katabatik), Mistress Mix & The Amber Portal (aka Alaura/Psychic TV), Spacetime Continuum & Its Own Infinite Flower (Reflective Records), Nommo Ogo (Katabatik), Lunaxix (Katabatik), DJ Pink.Noizzze (Katabatik) Projections by: StevePi and Fabric of Little Wings Poetry by: A Female Faust Doors: 7:30PM Performance: 8PM All ages Please be advised: This event will feature extremely high-volume audio and flashing lights Standing performances Doors: 6:30PM Performance: 7:00PM – 12:00AM All ages Please be advised: This event will feature extremely high-volume audio and flashing lights Standing and seated performances L’Astra Cosmo’s work is rooted in rarely explored future retro aesthetics. They seek a hybrid visual language between science and mysticism, technology and organic matter. Utilizing oscilloscopic displays, they approach obsolete video technologies and the flow of electricity not as museum relics, but as re activated mediums and interlocutors. Treating these elements as catalysts in an explorative dialogue, their work directly addresses perception, entropy, and the aesthetics of signal decay. This methodology allows for a critical reclaiming and renewal, moving the axis of experimental video forward by reaffirming its utility as a current process for discovery and examination in signal aesthetics and committed technical practice. Fresh from their global China bookings plus this autumn's Raster Electric Campfire European label weekend arrives Franck Vigroux’s Videopolis Bay Area premiere. Slated for a Raster Media February album release, this full fledged AV sneak preview of 2026’s international concert circuit is an advance live screening like no other. Included in the double program will be the return of Vigroux’s NACHT II project that debuted at Recombinant in early summertime 2023 along with ATOTAL as a three piece but now has evolved all new content from virtual and real time audio sources under the rigorous conduction of Franck himself. This bold escalation of the eminent sublime raises the stakes on where Vigroux’s invigorated detonations have currently landed him. Carl Stone will present the world premiere of Daimatsu, an hour long work spun from field recordings captured in the US and Japan. Elements include shomyo chant recorded during the Goma Fire Ceremony at the Koyasan Temple, Tingsha cymbals from Tibet, instruments from the ancient court orchestra of Japan, as well as secular sound elements gathered in Tokyo and Gifu. Stone mixes these sources in performance to create a unique sound space shaped for the special sonic capabilities of the Recombinant audio system at the Gray Area Grand Theater. Mix Master Mike and Evicshen (aka Victoria Shen) will take their two wildly different live approaches on the future of extreme experiential turntable performance for the first time on December 4 as a historical, head scrambling, uncompromising team up. This Avant Jarred group meshes shards of musique concrète, jagged improvisation, noise, sub techno aberrations and hip hop inversions with customized vinyl record instrument building and modification. Their duo deployment to detonate their recombinant sets includes de constructed and subversive references to scratching and beat juggling elements, sampling and looping. Hand crafted technologies include double needle head shells and acrylic needle nails on the human fingers. The de compositional aesthetics combine sound sculpture, maximalism and minimalism, and wild inversions of sonic destruction. Together, they show that a re radicalized form of analog and electronic turntablism can push past technique, genre, or compositional theory into the nouveau unknown. One of the few electronic musicians who truly defy comparison, Xanopticon has been steadily and thoroughly annihilating dancefloors since around 2000 AD. This fiendish figure does not hesitate to carve new and horrifying neurological pathways into the listener’s brain with razor thin sonic shards of unknown alien origin. Will you dance, or will you peel your obsolete flesh from your fragile, useless body. Reactions are as confounding and troubling as the catalyst. Once and future experimental club night Surface Tension reawakens, following a period of dormancy, to curate an eve