Over 18 years, seven solo albums and numerous sound installations and commissioned performance works, Montréal musician and sound artist Tim Hecker has turned “ambient noise” on its head, crafting his own recognizable style of abstract electronic music with profound emotional resonance – from the bleak yet all-encompassing soundscapes of his 2004 Mirages (on Alien8) and 2006’s Harmony in Ultraviolet (on Kranky) to more recent explorations of acoustic sound gone digitally wild on his 2011 album Ravedeath 1972 and his latest, Virgins. Resistant to genre, his compositions layer synthesized glitch and static over sustained piano chords, and put dissonance and orchestral harmony on equal footing. Live, Hecker plays his compositions loud and preferably with the lights out; never sacrificing clarity, his sonic narratives building to transcendent crescendos or rumbling into wave after wave of body-shaking bass. For EM15, Hecker introduces a new level of intensity to his live performance, turning a concert hall into a darkened, fog-filled, disorienting space where sound completely overwhelms the senses.

Woulg creates dark sonic landscapes disrupted by glitches that are equally likely to break into hypnotic pounding techno as they are to expand into ambient bubbles of texture ready to burst; reminding us that nothing lasts, that we should always expect the unexpected. His mind bending live sets explore these ideas while taking the crowd on an unpredictable journey.

Gleefully muddying the waters between motion design, 3D and audio reactive visuals, Push 1 stop’s output has been incredibly varied. While each of her performances is poles apart from the next. Her live sets are invariably characterized by the build up of elegantly precise and complex narrative environments.

Over just a handful of releases, San Diego, California native Austin Cesear has established a palette that is both unique and highly redolent of his home state. He's spent much of his brief adult life around the Bay Area, living in San Francisco and Oakland. From tracks like "Yep," with its winding, wavy G-funk repetition, to the dubby, foggy expanse of his Deep Breakfast mixtape and the field recordings of his West Oakland neighborhood on "7HF9B.383348H.382753J," it's clear that Cesear has been influenced by his environment.

MUTEK Foundation is a nonprofit organization whose goal is to foster culture, community, mutual appreciation, and understanding among stratified sectors of society, specifically by bridging art, music, and technology communities. As organizers of MUTEK.SF, the company is part of a worldwide network of conferences, festivals, and events headquartered in Montreal, Canada. The flagship MUTEK Festival currently has 7 global annual editions in Montréal, Mexico City, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Dubai, and San Francisco.