Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums–from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting. McCarthy earned a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969, and an MFA in multimedia, film and art from USC in 1973. For 18 years, he taught performance, video, installation, and art history in the New Genres Department at UCLA, where he influenced future generations of West Coast artists.
Alex Stevens is a gimmick based conceptual artist and musician currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. He holds a BFA in painting and drawing from the University of Utah and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University, Stevens is an alumni of The Mountain School of the Arts and is a frequent collaborator and facilitator with a wide variety of contemporary artists, performers, and musicians, including several projects with The Los Angeles Free Music Society. He also performs in such acts as Extended Organ, The Bum Cheeky Bum Bums, Alexander and or the Xanders, No Hope, Carpet Thrower, P.C.D.C and SOAKERS.
Rick Potts is an improviser and instrument maker who has been on the musical fringe of Los Angeles for decades. He's a homemade sound explorer and founding member of the Los Angeles Free Music Society (L.A.F.M.S.). Rick produces sounds which are unique and compelling with his custom hinge-neck guitar, musical saw, samplers and synthesizers. He has recorded and performed with Dinosaurs with Horns, Solid Eye, Airway, Le Forte Four and Extended Organ. Solo performances and collaborations with other experimental musicians have taken him around Japan, Europe and the U.S. Besides playing with his LAFMS associates Joseph Hammer, Joe Potts, Tom Recchion, John Duncan, Mike Kelley, and Paul McCarthy, Smegma and the rest of the crew Potts has performed with Chris Cutler, Don Preston, Keiji Haino, David Toop, Thomas Dimuzzio, Charles Hayward, Otomo Yoshihide and many others.
John Wiese is an artist, composer, and publisher whose practice revolves around sound as material, process, and form. Working across recordings, live performance, video, installation, and graphic design, Wiese transforms materials into intricate compositions. His work draws on the traditions of musique concrète and collage with an emphasis on manipulation, juxtaposition, and abstraction. He is a founding member of the group Sissy Spacek and has collaborated with a wide range of artists internationally. Through Hesse Press, Wiese also extends his artistic practice into print and artist publications, reflecting a sustained interest in documentation, material culture, and circulating ideas.
Lara Allen’s alter ego Sailor Beware combines spoken word, experimental music and vaudeville in a kaleidoscopic portrayal of social discipline, born out of the fountainhead of musical Americana along both sides of the Mason Dixon Line. For over twenty years, Sailor Beware has also written and performed a cappella adaptations of early American popular songs in galleries, museums, and on top of bars, often in collaboration with artist Duke Riley. She was a bassist and vocalist in Caroliner for several years and fronted Heavenly Ten Stems, who specialized in covers of Asian pop and rock tunes, has appeared on an album by Secret Chiefs 3, and was the off-the-hook screeching front-person of Ohio psycho-rock juggernaut Manwich. She currently paints and teaches literary criticism at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Tom Thayer is a New Jersey-based artist and educator who is Professor of Painting and Diverse Media at The City College of New York. His surreal works have a crude, naive spirit, drawing on Art Brut, children's art, and experimental education. Thayer activates his paintings and sculptures with animation and music in performances he calls Scenographic Plays. His work has been exhibited at Bureau, New York (2026); Greater New York, MoMA PS1 (2026); Blank Forms, New York (2025); Le Contre-Ciel, Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (2024); Loong Mah, New York (2021); Tetsuo's Garage, Nikko, Japan (2019); Stations, Berlin, Germany (2019); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); and in the 2012 Whitney Biennial.
Untitled Noise Night is the performance project of musician Emerson Borakove and sound artist Shiloh Blue. Founded in 2021 and continuing perpetually, UNN’s work and personnel has morphed and evolved over the years, always centering frenetic and communicative improvisations between Borakove and Blue. Performances have been described as hypnotic, animalistic, and evocative of the ritualistic sublime. Their self-released 2025 album LOVES ALWAYS FINDS YOU captures the raw intensity of their core sound; Borakove’s quick-witted percussion and Blue’s explosive electronics. The duo has performed countless times across the northeast alongside artists like Ryosuke Kiyasu, Lex Walton, Devi McCallion, and KFC Murder Chicks. At the core of all they do is love.
The Vampÿrates are the swashbuckling visual DJ duo of Bradley Eros and Richard Sylvarnes. Under cover of perpetual dusk, the Vampÿrates, are as much actors as twisted plotters, equal-opportunity impersonators, as much art as artifice, criminals of piratical lore, as they masquerade as shred guitarists, savvy roommates, lyric poets, trouvé filmmakers, or plunderphonic soundbenders, when all they really want is jewels, bloody stolen booty, swished & swindled precious gems, pirated treasures of image and sound, from undead cultures that refuse to die, the so-called 'subversive blood languages' brought back to life through their trickery & deceit, mischief & sleight-of-hand, re-animation & thievery, and particularly, their re-contextualized excavation of exquisite samples, displaying their biting wit & unquenchable thirst for perversity & scandal. They cannot be killed, only ghosted, yet know, as always, that these nocturnal phantoms will return in other forms, deformed. New York Necro City.
