Carl Stone is one of the original pathfinders in live computer music, and has used laptop in live performance since 1986. He has been hailed by the Village Voice as “the king of sampling.” and “one of the best electronic composers living in (the USA) today.”. RELIX has written that “Stone makes music that can hit your ear holes like a DMT flash.” He was born in California and now divides his time between LA and Japan. He studied extensively at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. His works have been performed almost everywhere across most all worldwide continents and used by numerous renowned theater directors and choreographers .Additionally, he is the emeritus professor in the Department of Media Engineering at Chukyo University in Japan.

Carl is the recipient of prominent awards and festival commissions including the Freeman Award for the work Hop Ken and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Foundation for Performance Arts. His 3-LP release “Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties” on the Unseen Worlds label placed #1 in The Wire Magazine’s “Best of 100” 2016 Archival category. The follow up release the next year ranked #3.

Carl Stone served as President of the American Music Center from 1992-95. He was the Director of Meet the Composer/California from 1981-1997, and Music Director of KPFK-fm in Los Angeles from 1978-1981. In 2019, DUBLAB.com reissued a series of radio conversations Stone had on KPFK-fm with Brian Eno, Frank Zappa, Terry Riley, Harold Budd and others. Further activities have included serving as Guest Artistic Director for the Other Minds Festival, and for the official web site of the John Cage Trust.

Only Now is the alias of Indo-Californian producer Kush Arora. Fusing deconstructed Punjabi music with industrial, dancehall, and noise, Only Now is an unbridled expression of Arora’s eclectic influences, his Indian heritage, and his long-standing activity within the Bay Area underground since the ‘90s. As Only Now and under his own name, Kush Arora has released a string of acclaimed self-released projects alongside output on Bokeh Versions, Infinite Machine, Discrepant, Polaar, Dutty Artz and Tash LC’s Club Yeke label. Arora’s work has been featured on The BBC, The Wire, Quietus, Guardian, Fact, Resident Advisor, and Bandcamp.

Luciano Chessa is a composer, perfomance artist, pianist, and musical saw/Vietnamese dan bau soloist. Recent compositions include the experimental opera Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago produced for the TRANSART Festival  in Bolzano, Italy: a work lasting 60+ hours (including  55 hours of fasting) and accessible in its entirety via a 24hrs/day live streaming; they also include Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze!, a large-scale work on Melville’s Moby Dick; and A Heavenly Act, an opera with original video by Kalup Linzy commissioned by SFMOMA.

Jon Leidecker has been producing music under the name Wobbly since 1990, exploring the many ways in which society’s relationships with music were changed at the moment we gained the ability to capture, manipulate and reamplify sounds at will.  Technology promises us the ability to permanently document any sound as if it were an object; musicians react by using it to redefine the act of improvisation, creating a music which inherently resists the act of being recorded. Recent performances deploy a battery of mobile devices driven by their built-in microphones, reacting instantly with error-prone variations on the notes and sounds they believe they are hearing:  a tightly-knit orchestra with inhuman reflexes, resulting in structures which the human performer influences more than controls.  Wobbly’s live and studio collaborations with Negativland, Dieter Moebius & Tim Story, Matmos, Fred Frith, John Oswald, Thomas Dimuzio, Huun-Huur-Tu, Sagan and the Freddy McGuire Show compliment live mix media collages executed twice a month on Negativland’s Over The Edge radio program on KPFA FM.

DJ Ida B (known as Sly Ida on the air) is an underground radio broadcaster turned accidental Instagram influencer slinging an eclectic, left-field, and improvised selection of tracks with a radio ethos in mind. Ida B’s adventurous sets blur boundaries between experimental sound, underground dance music, ambient electronics and industrial textures, approaching DJing as both storytelling and sonic exploration.

The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival is an artist-run organization founded in 1999 by a committee of eight Bay Area electro-acoustic music and sound art practitioners. Its mission is to provide a highly visible public forum for the diverse community of composers and sound artists working with electronic-based technologies in the Bay Area and beyond. Designed as an annual multi-day event consisting of concerts, installations and discussions, the primary focus is on independent artists whose innovative aesthetics challenge academic and commercial standards. The Committee’s goals are long-term: to establish the festival as an annual presence in the Bay Area; to foster a greater sense of community among the diverse group of Bay Area sound artists; to stimulate the creation of new electronic sound works; to increase public awareness of new sound-based technologies and their creative applications; to raise the level of discourse surrounding music and sound-art; and to raise the national and international profile of the Bay Area as a center for electronic music and sound art. Since the first festival in 2000, SFEMF has presented works that span the sonic spectra from ambient to rhythmic and atonal to melodic by participants ranging from new and emerging young artists to respected pioneers of the electronic music field. Each festival features artists working in a variety of modes including: laptop generated sound, processed live acoustic instruments, amplified found objects, projected video, improvisation, and performance art.