TICKET LINK Luke Leavitt is a musician, composer, sound geographer and educator. His artistic and scholarly research explores the onto-epistemological breaks and continuities between music, sound, frequency and vibration; discourses and practices of musical and sound healing; and the affective construction of race, particularly whiteness. An emerging researcher, Luke completed his doctorate in geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2025. His dissertation maps the geopolitical, musical and material spatialities of New Age healing music, broadly conceived, through the work of Steven Halpern, Yusef Lateef, Deep Forest and others. In 2021, his album Bildungsroman for Cricket, was released on Abstract Without Abstraction, which is also slated to release a Concert In the Shell on Halloween, 2025. His music and writing have been published in Alienocence, the Journal of Visual Culture/Harun Farocki Institut, and the University of Minnesota Press (forthcoming). Ari Smith is a bassist, improviser, and composer spanning genres of jazz, experimental, and contemporary classical music, currently based in Madison, Wisconsin, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering at UW Madison. In the Wisconsin area, Ari has been a particularly active member of the free jazz and free improvisation scenes, having shared the stage with artists such as Hanah Jon Taylor, Vincent Davis, Jim Baker, Isaiah Collier, Justin Dillard, Emma Dayhuff, and Tatsuya Nakatani. In his through-composed work, Ari strives to explore scores as boundary objects/“power tools” that redistribute agencies across humans and nonhumans, and the potentialities of academic citation styles as a demonstration of dedication to others as well as a creative-expressive practice, within pieces that are underpinned by deeply interdisciplinary conceptual webs. Tim Russell lives at the confluence of the aural and the visual. He has been called “The premier composer for Modern Dance in Milwaukee” (Shepherd Express), and a “thrilling show within the show” (DanceTabs). Tim has created over eighty works specifically for choreography, most of which exist live, in collaboration with movement. His commitment to the nowness in performance led him to co-create/curate, along with choreographer Maria Gillespie, Hyperlocal MKE, a Music and Dance improvisation series that exists to this day in Milwaukee. Along with Tim’s long time collaboration with the Gerald Casel Dance Company, his audio shares the stage with choreographic artists such as: Kate Corby, Abby Crain, Danceworks Maria Gillespie, Holly Johnston, Stephan Sara Shelton Mann, Li Chiao Ping, Liz Sexe, Marlene Skog, Wildspace Dance and Jin Wen Yu, bringing Tim and his music across the world from Dock 11 in Berlin to YBCA in San Francisco. He holds an MFA in Music Improvisation from Mills College in Oakland, California, where he studied electronic music, composition and improvisation with the likes of Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell an...
